Poem Spot - [ on the spot ]

I trail gently behind my friends,
the innocent one, they call me.
Everyone around me walks hand in hand—
everyone except for me.

They don’t worry about me.
I’m the “innocent” one, after all,
the one who doesn’t know
the things they joke about.
So they talk and talk,
careful with their words,
careful not to go too far.

And when I thought there was one,
they were pulled from beneath my feet—
from the place I used to stand,
from the place I used to be.
Distance did the choosing for me.
I guess it’s the innocent life for me.

I look to my right, I look to my left.
For a moment, I think I’ve found
someone like me,
standing in the same position,
outside the circle of hands.

I thought we could have just friendship,
two people wanting what was already taken,
nothing romantic between us—

But under certain circumstances,
the taken becomes yours.
Timing shifts, distance closes,
and suddenly you are chosen
in a way I never am.

So it’s only the innocent life for me—
walking just behind,
loving quietly,
holding what I am
without apology,
even when the world
moves on without me.

bird flies outside the
window, blue dusted sky here
early morning soft

we, she and I, glided up Johnson Street toward anywhere packed with reason and meaning, travel-wrung after hours of work and play like characters in a Greek tragicomedy. I sat behind the barricade between the street, the bar, and the park overlooking that glistening pause-asterisk of water. we were alone with the city, and the city was alone with us.

trailing behind, I could’ve sworn I saw you signaling for the rest of your entourage to approach more slowly, as if the city were to be won from the Mongol horde at Baghdad’s eastern gate in A.D. 1258. somewhere between the little eyelid movies drizzling through my mind, she would shiver to the beat of our escapist sentiments, and exclaim, "this is the only version of us that’s actually real!"

there is skin beneath my fingernails,
a healthy glowing salmon pink
shining beneath ridged keratin,
surrounded by the jagged edges
of my cuticles, which have become
discolored over time and currently
have the hue of dirty white sneakers.

there are ripples that sully the keratin
and the cuticles are ripped to ribbons
but beneath the imperfections is
the exact, perfect shade of well-cooked
fish flesh - slightly mottled with creams
and those half-moon monstrosities,
but the color is there and it is healthy
and I suppose I have convinced myself
that I want to - have to - taste it.

It's already someday,
it's been someday a hundred times
and she still hasn't found her people.

She hovers between plastic tables
at a crowded garden party
all of her friends here but also
no one.

She distracts herself doing the dishes
and spilling soap suds on her jeans,
the houseflies buzzing around her head
in the summer heat.

lost in living room stares
watching patterns on the ceiling
visualizing failed attempts to socialize
melting through the mind, sticking to it
legs left to twirl in air
eyes left to watch the boxed-in sky

the words always tangle
on my ears and my mouth
and they ooze down through
my bones to my lungs.
i know your blue veins.
i know your eyes are green
and i have never seen them,
not ever, but i saw your hand twitch,
just once, next to you:
myoclonic jerk,
like you're falling asleep.

I am tired of pearl-clutching.
I will take your necklace,
break it
and throw every pearl
back into the sea.
Now you will stop
shaking the chain
in my face.

The worn out backseat of your car is where I end up
when vomit piles up at the back of my throat, my head
scratched as the hooves of a dead cow. The worn out backseat
is the best place to lie still, but you say, only when it’s dark out.
At night, when it’s too dark for us to even remember
the faces of our parents, the streetlamps
are all that remind us that we’re still in a suburban town
(anywhere else, the streetlamps wouldn’t flicker).

When I’m with you, it’s as though my head is bald again
and I’m crowning my way out from my mother’s womb for a second time.
The first time I was born, I clawed my way out like a violent rat. With you,
it’s always summer in the worst of ways: heat flashes across my palms,
my throat bitter with my teeth, your voice echoing,
"if you like arguing so much,
you should be a lawyer!" You have hair

that is too short for your lanky body. I see you
driving across bridges built for rivers. The last night of May, I dreamt about
all of us from the line of painted white houses, everybody seventeen years old,
running crookedly into an ocean. Our bodies shook with saltwater.
In the dream I cried, something like saltwater,
because nobody drowned.

I’ll never get over the age twenty-six; on your tongue,
it sounds too much like a curse, like “lawyer," or even "poet."

you are the sunrise after
the longest night - and
my eyes are still adjusting,
sleep-dust and voice-cracking,
it takes me longer to wake up
these autumn mornings; i'm tired.
please, be patient with me;
air feels unnatural to breathe
when you're used to drowning,
and hope is still a little heavy.

i miss your poetry, like i miss waking up as a child to watch cartoons / bowl of cereal in my lap, nestled into the couch and care-free / when time didn't exist / i miss how you wrote to me / even when you were writing to everyone / i miss how we used to have our own language / and how we thought words meant something / how it actually meant everything / i miss thinking "everything" was that simple / i miss the days slipping by so quickly that i didn't have time to worry about growing up / i miss the feeling of gravity pulling you back around on a swing-set / and the feeling of sheer-joy as you realize on the other-side that you are weightless / i miss looking at the sky and finding shapes instead of weather-reports / i miss imagining flying was simple / and words were wings / i miss how we were naive-enough to jump off cliffs / and become birds / and become ocean-song / and autumn-breeze / and love-stories / and i miss thinking that these thin threads of verse were veins and ropes to keep you near / i wish the ground wasn't so firm a place to land / i wish we still wrote like we believed in ourselves / i wish the sky would swallow us up for a day / and remind us what it's like to fly.

Those yellow counter daisies started wilting
Long before I stepped off the closed-off stage
It was a slow progression; quiet as leaves
Crackling as they rubbed together in gusts
Like cropped shirts I wore to look like you
Bought too big & boxy, a premonition
Of this pattern that would follow me outside the lights
Tagging my heels with dreamt-up grass stains
& once I get past them & finally stop spinning
With you on the grass, I'll sit on the hydrant
Back before we had dreams too big for the sky
& before every crowd cheered your name
& I was the exception, the one you shared with
As we doodled on sticky notes stuck to your desk
& danced on your couch instead of the stage

city drain flows into river
drains into thirsty soil
feeds the tomatoes becoming
part of hungry bodies
are sewage and concrete