Friday, September 20, 2013

tomorrow, they collect time.

She carries secrets deep in her chest, braids maps into her hair. Her sleep yells.
Something about a kitchen. When the sun rises, he finds
her dresses flapping on branches, stitched with carrots. He smokes
the air, inhales questions through his teeth.

There is a wilting face, a snow falling voice.
He breaks earth to plant years, washes confusion from his fingers.
Still she weeps. Her heart shakes all summer, cradling
small seeds and spraining weeds.

Now the back of her dresses shed dirt, her palms home for
petals. Rain cuts the ground to streamers and
the sky coughs up gray as they hang pebbles out to dry. The
sun, clattering. The strings she plucks like a harp.

In the backyard they tack maps onto the fence, chart their
dreams with blue ink. Bleeding, snaking rivers through rows of seeds.
Two weeks later, the tips of the carrots are blue and he runs laps between
the shoots. The hanging maps rain white ash and she forgets forests.

Sunday, she gives him white stones for a cup of
moon. The stars, smooth and gray. The sky,
rumpled into the trees. Across the galaxy, they
flicker and she paints Orion onto Russia with watercolors,
what does it mean? His question a pit.

Like a nymph, she slips into trees holding the earth down
with all their might. Her friends are wolves. Her feet
are bare. In the yellow kitchen, he watches the light shatter on, off.
She twists the diamond on her finger and chokes on stones. In the
morning, her smile petrifies.

Sun crumbles on her pillow, burning the
edges where she used to sleep. On his back is a tattoo
saying, I love you in Greek. He cranes his neck
to read what's written in green and his shoulders are
leaves, bending. The bathroom smells sour from dye.

She leaves a ball of yarn by his shoes,
unraveling, and a photograph. I just remembered,
I hate carrots.
Her hair is blue. Someday she will learn to tie.

A lightning storm slices the air black. Hail, he thinks.
Later, he watches the pebbles slip out of their string
wings. When she comes in the morning to gather her
dresses, the ground is taped shut.

Saturday, September 14, 2013


“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke
photo by alex anne

Tuesday, September 10, 2013

weekending.


woke early friday,
to gather bags
finish packing
prepare

only to
stumble into
the car, head
to a drivethrough
for breakfast,
sleep

until stopping
halfway to stretch
and eat a gooey
margherita pizza
we

arrived in
sturgeon bay,
drove the winding road
20 miles per
hour

said hello
proceeded to unpack
ate croissants for
dinner and

waking,
found ourselves
ushered into
a cottage
a family
a love story

for the weekend,
we shot a wedding
left tired but
rested.


(imagine
that)

Wednesday, September 4, 2013

eyes full of moon.

Sorrow, I think is not
an old man with gnarled fingers.
Rather, she is a young woman
with a beautiful face,
and eyes full of moon,
and hands burned red.
She wears white gloves and
bracelets that jangle to say,
look at me,
look at my loneliness full
in the face.
You need be gentle, when
gentleness is not called for.
Take her aside and bandage her hands when
they bleed.
Wash each and every finger with water
from the white basin sink,
in the bathroom with the
milk green tiles.
Do not fear your reflection.
Sorrow has many names, but always
the same eyes.