poemfull

Dear high school marching band drum line cadencing through the summer evening from a mile away, please hold me here. Let your sound so gold and bright be a tether. Keep me from drifting again into that space where I don’t know anything but the earthquake magnitude of my love for my loves and the spidersilk thin web by which I’m knotted into my life. Dear UPS delivery knock, remind me of where I live— this sturdy house with a red door, an aging roof. Dear student stopping by with a citation question we’ve covered twice in class, thank you for pulling me back from the antigravity. Who can sustain in that vast floating, so full of stars but endless? Dear public radio segue music, hook and hold me. Dear hashtag, dear late night sketch, dear photo of a friend’s new pitbull pup, truss me right to this earth. Dear caterwauling fire truck in my rearview. Dear tailless calico peering in my window. Dear child needing milk or Goldfish or to know how eardrums work, let me sit on the kitchen floor with you. Let’s notice how we’re both right here. Dear automatic car lock, as I’m walking away, I’ll press the button. Honk once to remind me I haven’t disappeared.

Between bark and wood, the secret cambium layers keep growing. Each dark ring adding a new layer of wood to the older wood. (As if what grows new will never have to suffer.) But it's the darker interior portion, the heartwood that deceives the most. Even the hollow trees, leafy impostors, go on living year after year. How do such things continue? It's because, like all great survivors, the living is done on the outside, in the tenuous outer few inches of trunks until they are found out, until some storm breaks them. But for now, they are everywhere, dusting the hills with their lush green tresses, so tall and woman-thick, fruit-heavy with plum and peach. Their hearts tucked in dark spidery knolls. In each of the seasons, trees are the only thing worth looking to. Listen to the trees. They are never wrong.

you have sadness

living in places

sadness shouldn’t live

That afternoon, sexual health advocates on campus slipped us a goodie bag of condoms, marveled at our fingers interlaced, as if carrying all the love we’d made.

Back home, she laughed, threw the still-wrapped bag into the garbage as she undressed me down to my sterile body, the best parts plastic.

She said, It’s lucky we don’t have to worry— I almost don’t believe you’re real.

Miles Walser

1.

I told you that I was a roadway of potholes, not safe to cross. You said nothing, showed up in my driveway wearing roller-skates.

2.

The first time I asked you on a date, after you hung up, I held the air between our phones against my ear and whispered, “You will fall in love with me. Then, just months later, you will fall out. I will pretend the entire time that I don’t know it’s coming.”

3.

Once, I got naked and danced around your bedroom, awkward and safe. You did the same. We held each other without hesitation and flailed lovely. This was vulnerability foreplay.

4.

The last eight times I told you I loved you, they sounded like apologies.

5.

You recorded me a CD of you repeating, “You are beautiful.” I listened to it until I no longer thought in my own voice.

6.

Into the half-empty phone line, I whispered, “We will wake up believing the worst in each other. We will spit shrapnel at each other’s hearts. The bruises will lodge somewhere we don’t know how to look for and I will still pretend I don’t know its coming.”

7.

You photographed my eyebrow shapes and turned them into flashcards: mood on one side, correct response on the other. You studied them until you knew when to stay silent.

8.

I bought you an entire bakery so that we could eat nothing but breakfast for a week. Breakfast, untainted by the day ahead, was when we still smiled at each other as if we meant it.

9.

I whispered, “I will latch on like a deadbolt to a door and tell you it is only because I want to protect you. Really, I’m afraid that without you I mean nothing.”

10.

I gave you a bouquet of plane tickets so I could practice the feeling of watching you leave.

11.

I picked you up from the airport limping. In your absence, I’d forgotten how to walk. When I collapsed at your feet, you refused to look at me until I learned to stand up without your help.

12.

Too scared to move, I stared while you set fire to your apartment – its walls decaying beyond repair, roaches invading the corpse of your bedroom. You tossed all the faulty appliances through the smoke out your window, screaming that you couldn’t handle choking on one more thing that wouldn’t just fix himself.

13.

I whispered, “We will each weed through the last year and try to spot the moment we began breaking. We will repel sprint away from each other. Your voice will take months to drain out from my ears. You will throw away your notebook of tally marks from each time you wondered if I was worth the work. The invisible bruises will finally surface and I will still pretend that I didn’t know it was coming.”

14.

The entire time, I was only pretending that I knew it was coming.

Miles Walser

Sometimes we try to pull our ears off and  sometimes we pull off our clothes instead  and I can’t say which I prefer though I have  an idea you have an idea that we have the same  idea and sometimes there is nothing better than  knowing that what ends doesn’t really end  if you remember hard enough     and I remember  everything so hard it hurts it hurts my head  and it hurts my beating heart but I love how  hurt feels because I can remember much more  how good naked feels. 

Nate Slawson

I looked at that face, dumbfounded. The lights of métro stations flew by; I didn't notice them. What can be done, if our sight lacks absolute power to devour objects ecstatically, in an instant, leaving nothing more than the void of an ideal form, a sign like a hieroglyph simplified from the drawing of an animal or bird? A slightly snub nose, a high brow with sleekly brushed-back hair, the line of the chin - but why isn't the power of sight absolute? - and in a whiteness tinged with pink two sculpted holes, containing a dark, lustrous lava. To absorb that face but to have it simultaneously against the background of all spring boughs, walls, waves, in its weeping, its laughter, moving it back fifteen years, or ahead thirty. To have. It is not even a desire. Like a butterfly, a fish, the stem of a plant, only more mysterious. And so it befell me that after so many attempts at naming the world, I am able only to repeat, harping on one string, the highest, the unique avowal beyond which no power can attain: I am, she is. Shout, blow the trumpets, make thousands-strong marches, leap, rend your clothing, repeating only: is!

She got out at Raspail. I was left behind with the immensity of existing things. A sponge, suffering because it cannot saturate itself; a river, suffering because reflections of clouds and trees are not clouds and trees.

Czeslaw Milosz

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there. And the Drano won't work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up waiting for the plumber I still haven't called. This is the everyday we spoke of. It's winter again: the sky's a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through the open living-room windows because the heat's on too high in here and I can't turn it off. For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking, I've been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve, I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it. Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning. What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it. But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass, say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless: I am living. I remember you.

Marie Howe

  How can I keep my soul in me, so that

it doesn't touch your soul? How can I raise

it high enough, past you, to other things?

I would like to shelter it, among remote

lost objects, in some dark and silent place

that doesn't resonate when your depths resound.

Yet everything that touches us, me and you,

takes us together like a violin's bow,

which draws one voice out of two separate strings.

Upon what instrument are we two spanned?

And what musician holds us in his hand?

Oh sweetest song. 

  so I had this dream we  were a map of the midwest. you were ohio & I was  michigan & I was all over  you & it was so fucking hot  your spine was on fire all the way down to cincinnati,  & god damn if that ain’t  the most depressing thing because I knew I’d wake  up wishing I was kentucky  & your ankles were a river  wrapped around my throat,  but it don’t matter either way  because motherfuck if you aren’t  always telling me the same thing— it’s not happening, uh-uh,  not in this time zone, brother,  or any other place.

Nate Slawson

However carved up or pared down we get, we keep on making the best of it as though it doesn’t matter that our acre’s down to a square foot. As though our garden could be one bean and we’d rejoice if it flourishes, as though one bean could nourish us.

Kay Ryan

  I know I promised you I wouldn't make a scene in front of all your friends  but is it so wrong if I write your name across my shoes & sit by you at lunch is it so wrong if I want to stand next to you in gym class O your legs remind me  of a river bed I would do a hundred sit-ups for  you & whisper your name & kiss my knees pretend- ing they were you

Nate Slawson

What’s the use of something as unstable and diffuse as hope— the almost-twin of making do, the isotope of going on: what isn’t in the envelope just before it isn’t: the always tabled righting of the present.

Kay Ryan

you are a new  kind of monster you sure do look awful  good when you’re naked  I dare you to hide  underneath my bed  I dare you to follow me  home from the bus stop  late at night  until we get to my front door  & you reach your monster hand  into my chest  rip out my heart & replace it with a hummingbird  I think that’s the most romantic thing  a monster could do

Nate Slawson