Plain Poet

The pads of her feet are worn

homologous to nearly all of my shoes.

Everywhere we’ve been,

every dune we’ve climbed,

every lake we’ve swum,

every trail we’ve hiked,

He couldn’t stop laughing at the bar

because he took too many hits,

so I locked eyes with his friend across the table

and didn’t smile once.

He kept laughing and laughing and

I knew I should laugh with him.

Instead I stared out the window

at the fire firefighters

lugging bags of metacaulk into a brick building.

Chemical fire.

It’s not advisable to put out a chemical fire

with water or even a fire extinguisher because

it exacerbates the flame

and only makes it grow.

I felt like maybe laughing

would make me worse-off.

His laugh the water,

I’m the chemical fire.

Lazy, lazy, lazy days stuck within one drunken haze.

Swells inside and severed tides, expose strangely rooted lies.

I feel

like shell.

Akin to what sea does

when it takes shell from shore

and pulls shell out.

Shell tries to make home

and is used by crustacean,

who crawls into shell,

transports shell from seabed to seabed.

All the while, shell aches for this burglar to be siphoned

by the horizontal mouth of ray.

When that day comes,

a short-lived freedom.

Shell falls victim again to tide,

is brought to shore

and waits

until the next swell

renews the cycle of shell

and crustacean

and predator

Outcasted at home on a line, on a turf once familiar, unsullied, saccharine.

Foreign as the city once was, here only the seasons change; the flowers bloom, decay, and sometimes swell.

A void creeps in, swells, ebbs, flows.

“We all seek a haven, and when we finally find it, it rots before our eyes.”

There’s a silence that precedes every child’s first wail.

Aging keeps us forever suspended in the silence that precedes.

Suppress, suppress,

suppress everything.

A rush of adrenaline seeping through untethered veins, climbing through arms covered in faintly tanned skin.

Cloaked in the darkness I meet your eyes and your face changes with the shadows-- my stomach lurches with uncertainty.

I am caught, if not for a fleeting moment, between what makes you whole and what makes me whole.

Creeping up on me like a snake to its prey, I feel you moving from my heart to my body to my mind.

The nagging, the chewing, the spitting me back out and, the recesses of my mind I wish never to travel.

Far off I see a light shine though you, I see you raise your wrinkled arm in the depths of slumber, searching for something no one can see.

I grab your hand and, in the instant I do, you open your tired eyes, smile, and return to sleep.

Your time is so near, I feel the urge to cry but you are so beautiful.

Your nervousness surrounding an attempt to find your mother, drifting back to a time when you were not eighty-five, punctures my heart like an arrow from a nearby bow.

The hospice nurse says through a phone in my ear, you are “waxing and waning,” and I repeat in my head, “waxing and waning” until your tired eyes, “waxing and waning” reach mine.