I Grind These Words into Hot Pavement with my Heel

14/30
Without Sun: Day One

On the first day without sun, everything spring
had to offer us stood in bright contrast
against a grey backdrop. Greener
earth and ripening strawberries

slick spatters from our bare feet left
our legs cool, our arms dewy,
droplets shining from your eyes as I watched
you watch the storm tenderly

this is beautiful, this life
murmured in tune to
the pattering rain

15/30
Without Sun: Day Two

There is more brown than green, more grey
than deepened blue. My sister has storms too,
because even though her blackberries
are full and rich, the strawberries
are already beginning to molder away
into the muck of earth
trying to stay afloat beneath them

16/30
Without Sun: Day Three

Have you ever seen a softball field half-
way under
water? The orange, not so vivid but
puddling.
Girls in golden jerseys a sad replacement for
sunshine

and they know, so they run their fingers
through the mud and leave
sandy trails beneath their eyes with
wet clay, war-painted to go to battle
to win back the sun.

At the end of their game, though
all they had
were wet cleats and dirty faces

17/30
without Sun: Day Four

It's gone so long, I tell you a story of why the sun
is scorning us (to try
to bring back the light in your eyes)
and when you stay cold, I beg you
do not do the same to me, but stay
my sunshine

you just seem so-
washed out
my hands are clammy without yours; no,
everything is clammy. There are
so many clouds that they rest among us and beneath our skin
and in our mouths.

I have not been dry in days, and I
have given up.
I stand in the yard where the sod beneath my feet seems
to be trying to float away, swaying beneath me
like some trapped and dirty sea

18/30
Without Sun: Day Five

There is wreckage........there is peace
lights flicker too white classrooms into darkness, faux
light, dark again.
Against the shadowy window, trees lash out,
want in from the battery
and assault of kniving sharp raindrops.

The temperature fell, my car
ran over fallen branches until they got too big to pass.
Parking in the road (because the shoulder of
the pass is now just a river) and hauling
scraps of trees away so we could pass.
We want to go home, but home
is powerless with all the cords felled
and electricity only in the brief shocks
of glaring lightning.

19/30
Contrast

I can no longer take the heat
so I, bared, sprawl upon the tile
like a cat,
or a comma of skin looking
to lose myself in these stony sentances

this act
remends me briefly
of your hands which were
always cool, or more so
like the whisper
of the granite counter where
said cool hands left me
to wait for you, clothed only
in anticipation

your hands
were always cool except
when they clamored
with nervous excitement against
my own too-hot ones.
You said I melted you,
but I'm not sure how I felt
(after you melted enough
to slip away
I could have frozen)

20/30
So Dull

Hey freckles, hey curls,
you aren't nearly as cute when your
spotty nose is
always shoved in textbooks and not
all the novels you used to read me.

It isn't fair the way this goes—
two years and I'm left with silence,
no reason, no closeness or closure.

From a book I always could
crack open easily
and read until I fell asleep with it still tucked
(cool skin bound, hard spine) close, you turned
to one I couldn't reach
and written
in another language

and I honestly don't have care enough for the
translation

21/30
In Sunshine, I Walk Into Darkness

six drawn out telephone wires cast
....six shadows like pathways against the road
each narrower than the last and
....each veering further away

against all odds, I catch myself
drawn further to the center

why, lately, I always want the most
dangerous path, I'm not sure
...............but I have a hunch:
..............I think I'm sure that
..........you will stand, waiting,
...........................at the end

22/30
it's a wonder I ever sleep anymore

For weeks, when your absence was still fresh, Sleep
was the only lover I took. He had
dark eyes that reminded me of yours yet
I would still long for your touch, even more
when he left than before; short reprieve
stung bittersweet behind my eyelids when
I tried to keep sleep selfishly, knowing
that, devoid of you both, I would be left
with the thought that you have probably near
a hundred possibilities that don't
have my face, or my mistakes. I would have
your absence; surprisingly biting like
grasping the edge of a knife when you could've
sworn that you only reached to grab the spoon

23/30
My Refusal of the Ultimate Deification of Man in Love

We set off from this moment and
started again.
I breathe you out
from between my lips, from
your nesting ground in that
spindly bronchiole tree, where you
were too heavy and feeding off my heart.
From where you landed, you were angry, glaring
upwards, desperate: Why would you displace me?
but it is not your heart to compromise,
you never pay the rent, can't even
keep the place clean (it's all gone to
shit, see?) and I'm tired of making repairs.

but it is my
home, I love it, I love you; maybe,
but not anymore. I won't
allow for it. You are no tenant for me. I am
ready for moving day, ready for someone new.

24/30

It's amazing
just the sort of proof you can find when
you know what to look for;

I run my tongue against
the inside of my top teeth, feel
the curve, the ledge at the end,
taste my heritage

then,
in my cheekbones, that
tall poise and sharpness. (They sit so high
that the edges of glasses are always
smudged. The price is worth it)

a twist of me
in the crooked comma of a bent phalange,
that pinky at the end of my hand's sentence,
is just as open in telling

the story of my tan back, dark hair that
always falls in a dark straight pathway,
the face that won't
take freckles but
in quiet, fickle smudges. Cherokee fingers,
jawline indignance, fight- Cherokee
blood.

25/30
Asphyxiation

it would be cliched to say you take my breath away
but today i had to see you had to
acknowledge your existence and feel your gaze one on one
for the first time in, damn, months.

i counted out 33 seconds before i could breathe in more than a hiccup again, 13
minutes before my heart stopped racing see
my hands were even shaking against the steering wheel, all i did
was exchange a glance through the windshield as you crossed, wearing that stupid hat
i hate it and you are a similar story.

and so many people think it's about missing you or wanting you back or even
hating you, but it is instead something that i still
have not put my finger on or digested entirely,
something that is halfway between remorse that we are lost and anxiety
that you might remember just the way i could possibly have oneday loved

but that is past. there is an itching sort of worry that maybe
i will never feel as beautiful as i do under that gaze that gaze
is on me again even for a moment and oh
god don't let me slip

26/30
To Beckett
I guess I was lost somewhere
along the way, before

two girls (theatre of the absurd) in costume bowler hats
wait for God(ot)......speak out the same words and say
little to nothing
a tree growing from linoleum of the classroom.....a bench
one tears her boots from her feet, one tips
her hat from her head and the whole class dozes as
we recite lines of filling our lives

with nothings to pretend that we are that,
living. funny, eh? enter small

boy. no sir no
sir. Maybe we will meet him tomorrow or
the next and
then he could tell me just where I lost myself

27/30
Unloading Day
I mean, when you spend a summer and a year,
countless late nights, weekends, hours
researching studying (stalking?) to fill a yearbook with
everyone else's memories

and a whole two
more hours unloading 45 pound boxes
(two and 1/2 pallets, exactly) of books,
corners digging chafing bruising

the least you can do is sit in silence
for a moment or two, arms aching,
breath slowly returning as you breathe in
the smell of fresh books lingering
with brewed coffee

28/30
Blackout

Concentrating more now than sometimes, sometimes more less
others I
let my thoughts wander- today; fantasies, memories that are
pleasurable. Sometimes

you meet someone who leads you straight into
yourself. You halt in the middle of doing something
in the past you remember
that only you can control you