the heart can be repossessed

[removed for 'sent to poetry contest' reasons]

05.04.12 (Chrysalis)

The seeds exile sowed inside your belly, have
they bloomed yet? I had a
dream a willow laced its
arms between your ribs.
It had its roots at the river of your throat.
You spoke and it trembled, and
when the sun rose the colors leeched
out of it. When I was a child I
lay my head against your chest and
listened to the hush of your body.
One day¸ you said, you will burst into
flowers, and I have yet to figure
if you meant you or me.

[.]

ahhhakdsjfawnsd your poetry is so lovely.

08.04.2012 - Locusta migratoria

Look, I am learning the shape of my wrists. In the second
grade my friend broke hers and they trapped her bones
in plaster rather than letting them drift apart,
the way they wanted to.

It would have been beautiful, I wanted to say, but
she refused to look my way.

Do you know crickets have wings that open at ninety degrees
from their body? Under the chitin the muscles are a sheet I
had to cut through to get to the heart.

I discarded it, too.

Under the lamps, under the afternoon heat—there
was a crackle of rice-paper wings cut away and laid
onto paper. I
wished I could lay the scissors down and
break every little bone of my hand.
For a second, for a second.
Then I returned to sectioning tracheas (not
thoroughly enough, for a good mark), and told
my hands to still around the forceps, and watched
the glare of the lens on the water; how it
trembled, and how it wanted, very badly, to apologize.

08.04.2012 - Requiescat

Darling it’s been a long
long year already, though far from
being done. I think
we should build ourselves a
mausoleum and stack it full
of mattresses and soft pillows,
scatter hay before the entrance and
leave seeds to draw birds in, to
tell them to make their nests among the
cypresses and the graves. I think
we should lie between the roots
that rise under the stones.
It is spring, and the mornings are
misty and clear, and we could be
the ghosts, walking with our heads
bowed and our hair outlined with
the very last breaths of frost.

guys how do words work


13.04.2012
He looks like an angel in certain lights;
that is to say he seems inhuman, and terrible,
and far away. But more than once he has laid
his golden head on my shoulder, draped
an indolent arm over the back of my seat,
leaned in and sighed like some patient
hound come to lie at his master’s feet.

Tell me, how do you know closeness
from love?

I have seen in the morning
the sun scatter across his hair. I have
wanted to trap him inside stained glass.
Is this how you do idolatry—by finding
someone, or something, who surely
must be best kept close, yet very far
away?

18.04.2012
The blackbird that perches before the bus stop every
morning knows what it is that waiting really is for,
has paid the price for it. Look. Here
are the fallen flowers and here is the body
of a pigeon fallen from the roof and haloed
in feathers, here is the irony of it.
It rains and it rains and it rains,
and the bird stretches a wing under dark
windows, watches me hesitate.
Not far away a tramway rumbles ever forward
and somewhere in the city a bus is thrown
off the street to careen into shop windows,
to make tomorrow’s second-page big
line, five people killed and three
injured, for the sake of a four-paragraph
story and a beautiful picture of a child’s
head on the pavement, hair golden and
like feathers sticking redly to his wet
face. Here I am, going nowhere at all.
I have a telephone opened
and ringing into nothing, again
and again and again. I would like
to put a proper shape to your name;
I would like for the waiting to end.