Bits of burnt paper wheeling in a blown sky

All.  I'm leaving this blog. I guess this is an organic thing.  I had wanted a safe space to put super rough drafts, but I no longer feel like I have to hide them.  You're all welcome to migrate over to my main blog if you'd like to continue reading my poems.  Thanks for reading!

He eats evergreen tips for dinner, keeps the television on & noise. His couch sighs foglights.  Before bed, he rises from prayer-knees to wipe clean these windows, draping away Vienna with wettening palm creases, unraveling unstretched canvas across his chest as blanket, he tries to sleep but hears all. en route to Münschen, seatbelt light ping and clear skies he says, "Es regnet.  Tut mir Leid." repeat

for the music-box winder sunrise Siren composer-- you press windstrom roulette silence into me. I greet your dawn symphony with truck-collision bruises stitched across my cheekbones, your blueberry ripe, quick-ice pirouette bound toes & methane braids, good morning. I wear summit-dawn mist sweepingly this morning. Will you let me grace a new ring about your waist? she replies: well what's marriage and what's windstrom-roulette pressure, aren't we all perpetually gravitating towards us all? They found my love for Uranus before they found me.

sleeper flesh scar colonies, dusted & hung by the belly Satellite Warrior, tell me how you resist the urge to fishhook-jerk your scabs. she says, Dear my skin flakes into thirsty rockteeth. I could not suffocate the sea even if I didn't twice daily try to kiss her.

Papercut stings on your birthday. Vinegar on open flesh wounds for every letter beginning with "I'm sorry," before you gather the courage to paint Van Gogh’s Starry Night from floating lanterns sewn with your veins. Prairie wildfires stitched in your skin for Love in an open casket, not razed or ashen until you can say "bless" or "peace" or perhaps nothing at all.

Your every kiss births honey bees. I didn’t expect so much raw catacombed tongue at first.  You said, it should taste sweet, so I licked my butter-numbed lips, devotedly questioning plum blossoms, bath bombs, my sister’s still, butterfly-landing-pad shoulders. Your small warriors build Carthage from flesh, plaster-cast honeycomb wax outlining my anatomy & their beloved larvae cells; I am stiff-throated desiccated hive, involuntary nesting-place to your urgent, intimate oblivion, your deafness to wing-beat tarantellas and fugues— an incubator is no place for a kingdom. There are so many bees now, it takes twelve extra muscles to pull a breath; I wish you had listened more closely to your honey bees, to my lips. They would say, sweet comes from sweat, and Love, dear, Love does not mean colonizing me with noise. There is too much here. The honey bees have to go. All that remains is a stinger in my bellybutton & the matching carcass of your last, dropped kiss.

However many wrist-snap, finger-slaps, fortress-crosshair red-eye glares, chimney smoke scolds quick malice ballooning in her throat, however many lostlorn downcasts, all love, all love braided in her sugar-and-molasses ashtray roots. Hair dye lines the marble counter, but that globed grin, those river-gorge wrinkles, a muted shimmer-- she grows gray worrying about you, all love.

from top to bottom: Engine Empire, Cathy Park Hong Talking into the Ear of a Donkey, Robert Bly School Among the Ruins, Adrienne Rich Jersey Rain, Robert Pinsky The Sea and the Bells, Pablo Neruda You and Yours, Naomi Shihab Nye The Door, Margaret Atwood The Chameleon Couch, Yusef Komunyakaa Scourged the county library today, overcompensating for the fact that I stored all my poetry books in Chicago. Last night, I was reading through Scholastic Writing Awards winners and came upon my own.  A few days earlier, I received an e-mail that reconnected me with the writing community at Polyphony HS, which has perhaps the loveliest editor feedback system ever.  My roots are tugging at me. I'd like to get back in the swing of writing at least one poem a day.  Especially since I have two hours worth of commuting each day for ten weeks, and I'll have even more time when I'm not working.  I hope I can keep writing this way even after summer.

for S. praise your cheekbones, Mohave melted sandglass forlorn, field of salt mirrors photosynthesizing iris light. praise your boat shoes,                                     capsized feet arching midwife to Lake Michigan’s pulse, spouting mudpowder and fish scales; praise your pulse. Darjeeling-leafed filter, your lungs a sponged Kashmir rising against a Himalaya spine— praise bootdust, Wind River glaciers holding hymnal sunsets in your hummingbird chest cavity, compass collarbones like vista cartographers,                                     holy. praise the Indian elephant pause between your topography and mine; it knows I could never hold you the way muscatel does,                   kindly organic. praise near-dawn and chair-creak, eager bellies, we reach not for each other but shared almonds and ginger candy. praise crunched saltsting.

Loving me means unsharp'ning my elephantine anxiety's tusks.