Haley Walsh

Eyelids too jeweled and laden to be ever fully closed.

Do you want to put money on it?

The field, the same damn field you were in before,

just overgrown,

just in disrepair,

will need you to comb the grass;

will need you to maybe do something a little different with your makeup;

will need you to consider growing roses instead of lavender this year.

Have you considered neglect?

Do you rememeber when you used to laugh?

Genuis, that was.

Blunt red and black streaks

like tarot cards.

Fluttering eyelashes and kissing lips

and tarot cards.

Scorched earth tactic

looked far better

Stories about memories

that I wasn’t ready

to call memories yet.

Those times are gone,

but I’m still here

and they’re here with me.

So where am I?

Thinking nostalgically of letters not even sent yet,

Built him up, combed his hair, cradled him sweetly

sent him to war without another word.

Watch the seconds tick away on a watch still too big for his wrist

Lacing up his boots

with a picture in his wool socks

of a face he doesn’t remember

why he remembers it so tenderly.

The omniscient lover

who sent you away without telling you

she loved you.

Silently tracing his route with a finger on a map,

while he cries in the snow

but he is still loved

whether he deserves it or not

because a woman whose touch he barely remembers

handed him words like trumpet blasts;

handed him a place to ash out his cigarettes;

handed him the place he found he could speak;

handed him kindling for the embers of his passion;

handed him kindling she took from herself for him to burn;

handed him a hand he never held;

handed him love

he never knew how to return or to feel

in a warm kitchen, so well known 

once

just getting cold now, it’s last breaths

breathing

a sigh

he touches the flaws

indelicately

and states the problem clearly;

falls out of love with me accordingly.

These things don’t happen like pages

or church bells.

They don’t hurt like plot twists

or bayonets.

It’s a slow ache,

a building fire;

Joan of Arc burned over many years.

He couldn’t open a lock

his fingers did not craft.

And I couldn’t look at the sun long enough

to realize good things were not supposed to last.

His was not a good thing,

The constant running of a print calculator

spewing numbers at rates that, frankly,

even I’m not quite following.

I just push the buttons.

My toes push through rolls of used receipt paper.

Just follow the comma,

to the next line.

Don’t forget the night service.

Three lines lighting up on the phone,

my calloused hands feel clumsy

in this typist hand’s work.

A large memo placed on my desk:

“Please make sure to turn on night service.”

The voicemail box for those too late.

This is how we spend our days now,

no longer startled into a frenzied passion by moonlit ringing.

I’m not your night service anymore.

Your line’s lighting up at 3 in the morning, but it’s too late.

And I fall asleep to the sound of your constant  running, spewing numbers

wrapping you in receipts because, frankly,

You are my favorite place

slipping my body down narrow alleys

and holding you with the promise of interruption.

I can smell old thoughts and rain in your streets.

I feel your stare in rooms dimmed as low as they can be, without putting the chandelier out.

You promised me a long summer this year,

better lighting for the back doors, and to repave the cobble stones that hurt my feet.

I grab my coat and slip on the person I am in your presence.

It’s not that every seat is taken, it’s just that there’s no where to sit.

It snowed mid spring so I went as close to the center of the city as I could

and lit all the street lamps.

It feels better everyday.

My bones are shifting into place

and the bouquet I picked is blossoming.

It was raining this morning

and I loved it.

Mid-morning I went out of focus

and cried for you.

I couldn't understand the selfish tears,

but they wouldn't stop.

I’m starting to understand them now.

Your last breath came out of a rib cage still crooked

Bouquets of buds littered the hallways.

I am sorry, oh god I am so sorry

You would have been a garden.

I am scared most of the time. So lonely I ache.

I want to lock myself away with my flowers and my thunderstorms,

but I will go for a walk and remember you.

I don’t know how to explain it to you. 

I can’t find the link between our worlds to even find a metaphor for it.

Where in your world is the carnage of living?

I want to infect you with life:

a grove of blossoms;

citrus trickles down my chin and onto my chest

a bed of fertile petals.

But eat too much and the burns will strip you

and wilt the petals. 

Don’t pay it enough attention and

it’s a grove of slow rot.

You’re a bowl of plastic fruit.

You’re trying to immortalize yourself

With flashbulbs glaring on stolen statements.

But you don’t need to, darling

you’ll live forever.

You have to earn the peace of death.

Sometimes I mistake the snow laden rooftops

for mountain summits.

I mistake my aimless wandering

for climbing.

.

And sometimes I convince myself that the paths I walk everyday

are deep foot trails by now

soft grass to welcome me

but it's just smooth concrete

no different than yesterday.

.

Sometimes I pretend this city cares about me.

.

I'm forgiving myself these days.

I'm letting go of the people

who tell me that if the Gods exist

they wouldn't bother bending nature for me.

.

And as I walk away,

I listen for the choirs.

There is nothing.

But your screams sounds like violins,

A family of gut feeling worshippers, Generations of superstition advocates. Instinctual to the point of enlightenment: Ears pressed to the walls of our own primitivity

for the guiding guttural call.

So when his hollowed cheeks turned from me

where my limbs have been stretched

by the constant

poking,

proding,

perfecting.

But it was actually just from my reaching,

grasping situational ice

that I froze in the shape of my personal doubts and insecurities.

So quickly melted 

by the heat of others.

.

I think of the manic peasant poet.

So enraged by the fencing of the countryside,

so unable to bear it

that he stretched his limbs clear around himself

and was sent away.

.

Yet to think

my stretched limbs being

fenced,

drawn,

quartered:

divided by desires

and disposables.

That even those that lend me the kindest eye

buy only the most fertile land

and complain to the neighbors

about the rocky soil west of the wall.

.

Maybe I'll put them up myself.

Stitched together with words,

thrown like skipping rocks.

Not sure if they hit their mark.

Not sure if there was a target.

Bouncing off my stretched limb forests.

I open wide so you can hear their echoes.

Now sigh into me

and hear me melt.

.

A bunch of micks bare knuckle fighting

the boys of the back of the yards

don't worry about them

you don't have to worry about them

hands so calloused they can only grip

not embrace

no one worries about them.

.

Chicago breeds sturdy people.

the air freezes the skin

strips it of feeling

and yet you can hear the laughter 

numbed but not barren.

.

What are you doing here at this time of night, sweetheart?

hard faced, long stride

walk at my pace

and we'll be down lower wacker in 30 minutes.

.

She’s older now, he says

you can give it to her

and she can’t say no.

But officer, I say.

But officer, and leave it

the potential that cracked my crimson nails

dies somewhere under my workshirt

and my endless boundries sleep

at the intersection of the ghetto,

the bad neighborhood, and the hood.

I am numb but you cannot make me barren.

.

"Oh look, the southsider"

my hands so calloused I wouldn't even feel the punch

but I don't mind. I don't want to be like you

or your baseball team.

Inner city schools shoving through the system

A graduating class of the dead and dying,

but don't mind us.

.

This is what I was bred, raised, and trained for.

Oakstreet beach with chemicals in the water

but we're laughing.

3 am waiting in the rain for the L

but we're still laughing.

The toughest people you know who still aren't ashamed to be kind

and to keep laughing.

Don't worry about us.