Clam

In the palm of his hand,

For his convenience,

Lay a clam.

Fissures and fault lines

Made up the map of her shell.

A smile was barely visible

As he crushed the shell inside his fist

Revealing the naked pink

Innards. He could almost see

Her shivering.

With a smirk

He tossed the mess to the ground. 

The Salt

The salt-sea

Breeze and the

Sea-salt spice

Make up most of the summer.

I watched a little red buoy hoist himself up up and up

Into the waves.

Tumble, tumble, head over toes,

Only to start the climb again.

His little journey

Is never-ever-ending.

I think I hear him calling

Over the rumble of the ride.

Nothing smells quite like

The sea-salted breeze

Or the faint, far off

Linger of a

Long-dead crab.

And how can I do anything

But lay like a stone,

While my skin starts to

Darken and my lips

Start to sting,

Until I can feel them crackling under my tongue.

Until I dissolve into the sea-salt waves.

Until I am the sea salt too.

Clouds

I had to write and revise ten poems for a class last semester, so I'll be posting them in the order I submitted them for class over the next couple of weeks. I posted this one before, but it was before revision. This is the new version. Enjoy!

Clouds

Sometimes all I can see

Are rabbits in the clouds,

Or mermaids.

Or even mammoth creatures.

But usually, just clouds.

Sometimes the sky

Turns purple. And we all have

To wait awhile

Before climbing trees.

Even oftener still,

The sky lets loose

A bright and lusty barrage

Of water,

That everyone ignores.

I will always marvel at you,

Even when the rest of the world forgets.

Birds

I was only eight

Years old

When I watched the birds fall from the sky.

I still concerned myself with

Dolls & passing notes.

But now I was scared to let

My daddy

Go to work.

No eight year old

Knows what

Patriotism

Means. But we did.

The attack of 1941

Never felt like

Ours.

Neither did the gunshots

That took down leaders.

But this day will always

Feel like

Ours.

I still remember waking up to a TV screen

And a silent house.

To a mother & father

With fear in their eyes

But normalcy in their actions.

Years later I read about

Pink mist

Filling the air

And it didn’t feel

Far removed. I understood

What he was talking about.  

The leaping. I

Remembered.

I still remember being eight years old

And watching

The birds fall from the sky. 

(Link to old blog post about 9/11 here)

Above

I don’t know if you have ever looked at the sky—

Sometimes, when I do

All I can see are rabbits in the clouds,

Or mermaids.

Or even mammoth creatures.

But usually, just clouds.

Every once in a while the sky

Turns purple. And we all have

To wait awhile

Before climbing trees.

Even oftener still,

The sky lets loose

A magnificent barrage

Of water.

And we should all stand in amazement.

But,

We don’t.

All of this,

To say that I will always love you. 

What I Saw From the Bed

It was a crack on the ceiling above me that stole my attention. O what a strange shift in the sky, this oddly shaped crack. I couldn’t decide if it was a rabbit, hopping along through the grass, or a seagull, flying along the horizon. But whatever it was, I felt a familiarity with its character. I looked with perfect concentration, hoping to discern the spirit of it, although the quaking underneath me was disconcertingly distracting. I felt the earth move and shake beneath but I was determined to ignore it. A light danced about the room, bouncing across my face and into my eyes from its perch on the desk—too far to be knocked over by an errant hand. It blinded me momentarily with a bright flash of energy and I blinked with the eyes of a reborn woman. I lifted myself slightly, hoping to catch another glimpse of the glorious light, but alas it evaded me, forcing me to settle back into my skin. But instead I stared at the break in the sky again, wondering again, only in my head, what sort of secret mischief it was hiding. I almost began to giggle, hoping I could tell the crack that I too had secrets, that I too was holding a secret in my corner in the corner of my mouth in the corner of my innermost corners where even I dare not venture. And O sweet mark on the ceiling, here to distract and to occupy, and to comfort. I look at it now and see a horse, bucking and bucking and bucking until the rider is motionless beside him! I want to ask why, but the horse whimpers away with his tail between his legs while I’m bucked away as well. I think we share a story, the rider and I. The shaking continues. The walls are bumped and thumped and O I want to shake them with my fists but they won’t let me be no matter how many times I thrash and wriggle and push them away. My eyes follow the shaking walls up to the meeting place and O there is my mark, that glorious eyesore on the ceiling, which has transformed in front of my very eyes into a wave, crashing against the shore. The waves draw me away from the shaking and the breaking and I can’t help but stare in wonder at the beauty that it becomes. How did it get there? How did the waves make their way onto the ceiling to rest in an ever unresting fury of change and motion? They motion to me with old lady fingers bending at the knuckle beckoning me closer and closer with only their fingers and the small whispers. The waves look dangerous as though any moment the boat floating innocently on them will be dashed to pieces on the rocks nearby. But who are the waves and who is the boat and why do they want me so near? Are they here to cause me harm? Suddenly, the crack does not look so welcoming. I almost shout to it, asking if it has malicious intent, but instead I am overtaken by the shaking and the rocking and the bed underneath me that will not simply lie still! I almost have seasickness staring up at the waves and feeling the waves underneath. I glare in fury at the waves which are no longer waves but are dancers, making their way aggressively across the ceiling, dancing and leaping and curtsying and moving their wanton bodies swifter and swifter and faster and faster until I want to shout in fury and in fear at them until they stop. But I open my mouth to scream out my terrifying yelp but fall back before the sound comes out. There is straining above me and straining inside me and the dancers mock me with their elegant hands and their elegant feet and their elegant, elongated, evasive faces. There is jeering from them, forcing its way into my heart while they force themselves upon me. I am forced, I am broken, I am no longer here. The weight on my body cannot stop pushing me further and further away from myself. No! I want to wrap my hands in the quilts and yell no, O no, O no, O no! The dancers are a stampede, a stampede of elephants screaming no in mocking mirth, laughing at my crying face with all of the no and O let me be. But they will not let me be! They will not leave, and he will not leave, and my heart is all the way up into my throat, in my cold straining throat that whispers out prayers into the night of O let me be. No I will not he growls with his body, and no the elephants laugh at me. No I sob for mercy and receive none and no I do not want to be here, staring at the elephants with their eyes staring back, cold and unfeeling. O that the no I cry were heard by anyone, anyone but the elephants who care not at all for my plight. My keening has reached the ears of none. The elephants are no longer what they were—they have transformed, one more time, into a cage. Deep in the jungle and the mountains they are a cage made of ten thousand elephants and just one simple woman with her eyes screwed shut tight and her hands banging against the tall the tall lines that keep her inside and she cannot help but scream no as she tries to force them away and away and off and nothing is stopping them no! She is wild and amazing and I can feel her reaching towards me as I cry no against the rising tides, the untidy ride, the dark black light that pushes me further and no, and no, I cannot be here no.  Lines run up and down and up and down and push together, pinning and crushing and hiding me between the bars of my prison no and I do not know how to stop from suffocating no. And no again and a no as I rise up up up against the sky in one final no!

I float down like a paper doll burnt up by the sun, my wax wings melting. No is no, I am on the bed again, waiting to occupy myself once more. 

Rewrite

We are both aware of how

The story ends—

The prince leaves the fox,

And that’s all there is.

We’ve read it,

And loved it,

And held it in esteem—

Despite knowing the fact

That all things come to an end.

Through all of the late nights,

Both in transit and here,

We kept trying to define

What drew us so near.

Dancing to January,

And prancing through graveyards,

Lifting our voices

And drinking Hopelandic.

You asked how to tame me

And I didn’t answer—

But you made it happen,

Which both scared me and thrilled me.

There’s so much that’s happened

And so much held suspended,

I need all your fear as I

Navigate this ending.

I want this, I want you,

But not the way it has been.

We need something more

To remain more than friends.

I’ve loved you,

I’ve loved you,

And I’ve loved you

Some more.

But where did that get us?

To this impasse on the floor.

Wake yourself up

And be ready to fight me.

We’re not coming back to this

Place where we’re swaying.

We’ve both been good at

Sweating the small stuff,

But let’s not forget

What got us here in the first place.

You saw a wild fox,

And you wanted to tame her.

She resisted at first,

But then the changes were subtle.

You used to shout from your

Windows to the wind.

At the thought that this

Fox could be falling for you.

The fox loves the prince,

And the story unfolds,

But let’s look for a minute at the

Less often told.

The prince leaves the fox

After finally taming.

The fox is quite brave,

But can’t keep from wailing.

I have a question,

For my little prince.

Are we telling a story?

Or writing our own?

Do we let someone else

Write the end of this tale?

We must decide now

Whether to stay or to bail.