April Madness 2024

Is this reality or just merely a dream
Everything is perfect here
Not a sigh not a tear
Finally Escape
No more heartbreak
But it’s all fake
It’s just a dream
Why Don’t dreams come true
Will anyone ever love you?
Be brave be strong
Hang on a little longer
Fight a little stronger
But you’re weak
You have no energy left in you
But you can’t let your fright blind your sight
You can’t back down you have to fight

there is a part of me that is still clean snow,
flushed face with cold hands

she lays on her stomach
& watches tv, scrapes dirt from
under her fingernails

with a thumb in her mouth,
she prays over the felt necklace
she beaded on a sunday morning
last spring

she is a girl with outstretched arms
& love like a fountain pouring over

whether i collect my wounds or heal them,
there will always be space for
one of us to forgive

if hands are connection,
I am always grasping
at an emptiness I cannot feel; you see
my thumbprints in the context of
eternally numb & cold & dead,
etched into the possibility of nothing I can see.

I say ‘nice to meet you’ &
show you empty jars smeared with
my fingerprints & no one else’s. I hope
you can understand that I am
trying to hold on to you & trying to say
stay with me. I am trying to say hold my hand.

I search your knuckles for stars, but I only find
dried kiss marks that aren’t mine & will never be mine.
I show you my hands, then—the ones that haven’t
been touched. you wonder where the grooves
have gone & I tell you that I washed them away
when the rest of me died.

my fingers are nothing when you look at me
& you know that my hands are not meant
to be held. I am limbless when I
watch you walk away with the lines of my palms
& I die again, possibly for the thousandth time,
as if I had never brushed your knuckles with my fingertips.

For Cormac.


I first saw you between the pages of Ulysses one fall,
the words "The Irishman's house is his coffin," spilling out of your mouth,
that line I forgot amidst dead mothers, midwives and jingling steps.

Years here and we’d never met.

Between the golden leaves and sunlit campus cafes, we could always
meet eyes and instantly ask how was "Circe”? The Holy Joycean
Relics held us captive halfway between
laughter and awe.

A class competition spurred us to study every word, but
of the seven students, it was only ever
us.

When you won whiskey honey and I, the pirated Pomes Penyeach,
we should have switched places, for you had the passion:
for literature, for language, for hard things, for Joyce.

But I took first place.

Ulysses was the only thread connecting us,
if we passed shoulder-to-shoulder in the brick halls,
if we lingered after our spring semester course;
enough for a smile.

But once, we found each other in a theatre, by chance,
and talked of religion as if we had always shown such naked honesty
and I never felt so similar to someone.

And I learned that maybe we had lost each other
somewhere between Germany and France,
and the languages that kept our paths from crossing
were what made our souls even more alike.

I never did see you again.

Though we met just a pocketful of times,
you return to haunt the philosophical halls of my academic mind.

You keep telling me the meaning of 
Joycean tragedy,

but I can never remember if there's a happy ending.

Tuesday night

tonight has been a sweaty rehearsal that ran past 10:00 pm,
a dinner of unheated pizza crusts at 11:13 on a Tuesday,
a pair of eyes squinting at a laptop screen—glasses lay unused on the desk,
and a shower postponed to tomorrow morning
in the squeezed time between extracting myself from my sheets
and being seven minutes late to my calculus tutorial—
because tonight is dedicated to sticky feelings:
heat, heavy limbs, oily hair, acne on shoulders,
and fatigue that runs as deep as the heels of my feet

I don’t want to ever
turn into plastic.

Rigorously, desperately
setting myself right
like my own self isn’t enough.

A composition of different materials
never original, always artificial.

Impressionable, easily influenced
when faced with a little heat.

No
I want to be iron.

holding close, for safe-keeping

my mother's voice is saved in the pocket of my warmest coat
for me to clutch when my hands get hold -
i keep it like a recipe-card for a dish i know well;
out of habit i will recite each step as if it were a song -
and i know i don't need it, but i love the little stain at the edge, and
i love each bent corner of a memory;

when we laughed at the river, and she told me not to go out too far -
when she patted my sea-weed hair with a sand-covered towel
and told me next week would be warmer -
i am still looking for her on every shore i swim
and listening, and listening, and in the listening, remembering
the familiar way we have of tending to each other
that reminds us we are loved

i called her seven times this week, and it's only tuesday -
not because i am lonely, not because i have anything in particular to say,
but because my hand always instinctively curls around the objects in my pocket
and i am always humming her songs,
and i am always cooking her recipes,
and i am always longing to hear her voice say everything i know all over again
and i want to let her know
in all these little ways, i love her too.

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