#maps for teeth

you have loved her like a crisis for as long as you remember held hands with Poseidon felt her mind quake loving a steel moving thing hard empty vessel a life vest type of tenderness leaving you alone at sea

I define me This is why we dance, Because even my poetry isn’t free. Now can you please just tell me: Why is anger –even anger– a luxury                                  to me?

It turns out nineteen is a year of liminal space– all airport lobbies and strips of highway lit like matches against the dark. Change sits more easily with me than it used to. When you say: You didn’t used to be like this. I think, yes, but so what? I can set up camp in the wild in-between and live there comfortably.

My neighbor Maria waters her potted plants at five in the morning she grows flowers so big their egos look up at the trees across the street and calmly say you aint shit they die cocky every fall Maria wears a pink mumu and a sun hat every day except Sundays when she passes me by in black and silver velvet a plump smile and a kind word Va com Deus Go with God   as if to say Thou shalt too be like a watered garden my child I have found Jeremiah In these Dahlias And we talk about you Wont you join me at church?     But every Sunday I sit on my stoop hungover and blow smoke through the words Va com Deus and in that moment I fucking hate Maria Maria who throws French Fries in our backyard dumps out our ashtrays into the alley tips over our garbage cans with the push of a cane who grows flowers so big only to watch them die   just like a new god to tease something lovingly into life and watch it wilt

My favorite poems are the ones that make me feel alive. I latch onto them like a dead battery does to a charged one, waiting for the jolt, you know?

Too easily, my obsessions shift from what I’m writing about to what I’ve written. I’ll cling to a draft and need weeks away from it before I’m ready to revise.

Daily, I jot down random lines, images, sounds, bits of conversations or even words that catch my attention until my 'bank' is full. Then, I sit down to write. Dr. Frankenstein and what not. Take a bunch of dead and make something hideous or lovely. Bring the poem to life.