a blessing.

I sing the body imperfect:

Bless you, funny smile.

Bless you, protuberant, awkward tuber of a nose.

Bless you, toes (I like you the most).

Bless my too-long mid-face, keen eyes,

focused and soft with green gravity and easily collapsible:

Two cups to an eager pitcher.

Bless these piano hands, long thumbs, narrow reach.

Bless the surgical scar across my right-hand knuckle.

Bless the coltish buckle of my knees.

Bless you, spindly-speckled arms, 

pin-hole dusted with dark gold

like a lightly toasted slice of white bread.

Bless my freckled breasts, small buttons of a little jacket.

Bless this hippy pelvis, vast and hairy and

altogether a woman's.

Bless the collarbones of my broad shoulders,

jutting out, my mom says,

like budding angel wings.

Bless these ribs like ladder rungs.

Bless the limitless wind of my lungs.

Bless the muscles that shift like restless actors

behind the milk-colored curtain of my back.

Bless you, divoted stomach, bless your holy hunger.

Bless the warm curve of the back of my neck,

kitten-cushioned by baby hairs.

Bless the goofy, insistent outward poke of my front teeth.

Bless this swollen pout of lip, round

chunky cheeks, stolen from

the museum giftshop of my girlhood.

Bless the offset of their softness by 

too-high,

too-dark,

too-arched eyebrows and

my mother's cheekbones.

Bless my forehead, smooth rectangle.

Bless my two temples and bless 

the worshiper between them,

laboring behind a veil of bone.

Bless this serious face and bless the continuous breaking of it,

like a wave on a California coastline,

into laughter.

a prayer.

I want to catch myself in a moment of humility and immobilize,
Pin my entire body in that position like a captured butterfly
And press it into your palm, a flower between your pages.

There, in the files of signifiers and signifieds,
I will be as silent and slow as the bow of a rose:
her private obeisance to the weight of the rainfall.

Like the boughs in the winter worship the snow,
Bending their bodies at the dragging hem of its robe
Because they know the piety of
What collects sound without addition or distortion
And refracts light without absorption.

We all know.

Dear Lord, make me one of those mute mirrors
Cupped in the palms of the firs, face upward.
Make me a single flake in that congregation.
I will soak in every sound:
A listening so pure it consumes the spoken whole
And makes no reply or observation.

Bend me like snow bends both light and bough
Like a knee at the altar, the prism,
Unprison my receptivity.
Vanish me into reflectivity.

I want to hug the entire mountainside
Like one of those great white blankets,
Cradle the cold land in my arms
And coax it to sleep beneath my quietude.

And when I am done, and my white powdered bones
Finally melt and drip from their limbs,
I will soak, swim back into the soil, and disperse
With all this bundled in my arms
And release it, to rinse the earth.

(the sack-cloth torn, white ash is scattered, the child is born)

It will not yield

despite my pleading and fist-to-chest-beating
It will not wheel or deal
In relinquishing meaning
It will not cheat its own secret-keeping
Nor bleed or interbreed
with inferior species of speeches
It will not teach me, nor acknowledge my seeking
But it keeps a gold eye on these proceedings
Watching my weeping, reading, bookkeeping
And vain attempts at sneaking into its skein
With undisguised disdain,

Yellow-skin-sealed.
It will not yield.

Aside, a token moon-like eggshell, broken
and crumbled beneath my curled fingernail
glued by oxidized blood
shards of a fossilized veil
that might be mistaken, on a good day,
for fragments of castaway mail
and might be mistaken, on a blind-fingered day,
for snatches of song in Braille

from my friends,
waiting out back
toeing and and acting, eyes averted
(mine too)
down a line running oblique to the fact
that most of what we do
is meaning, diverted
a light that we all see,
but braided beyond recognition
or else absurdly inverted
into the yellow of a yoke we collectively pull
attached to a skein recklessly unspooled
into which we pitch,
but are incontrovertibly girded

tugged along by some giant way up ahead
whose footfall we feel, and fills us with dread
and the length of the skein trembles taut,
entangles and webs

but it will not yield.

But me, I spend my time inside, hunched
on a spare wooden chair,
trying to conjure a lunch
from an uncompromisingly empty plate

On ink, predominately blue-dyed
nestled between meticulous lines,
broken eggshell aside:
the yolk, intact
unmitigated fact
regally sealed, obstinate, glowingly wheeled

(of course) it will not yield

so I examine from alternate angles,
I falter, wrangle,
prod and push:
"core of life, burning bush
eternal tangle
hub of world's unbroken spoke
bud of my stutter, breath of my babble"
I choke, I strangle
"holy yolk! holy meal!"
I croak
"uncloak! reveal!"

but it will not yield

under the great unsparing yellow-eyed stare,
no artificial fluorescent incandescence
can whisperingly unbend to unveil an essence
(that I only half-suspect, these days, is there)

no incantation of mine
no hoax or rhyme
can undisguise this
can coax or hitch its way
into reality, into the skein

we are soaring through pain
on clicking wings of clocks

the safety hatch is locked
you can't
jump off
this plane.

some girls are so beautiful

some girls are so beautiful that they break your heart before
they ever open their mouths

and when they do, their words go through
so many revolutions in the air
and bounce back between so many mirrors
that they are blind, white noise by the time they reach you

and so you nod

and apologize under your breath
when they duck their heads to tuck a piece of gleaming hair
or they turn their long and muscled neck
to catch a glimpse of something
they hope to be half as beautiful as the simple act
of their turning --

you apologize that they are the wives that we covet

whether we are wives or we want them
you apologize that you can't hear their words
the way they mean them
you apologize that to some, they are nothing more
than a sin

than a dark and tempting thought,
than the guilt of desire undesired
or the rabid rouge of desire desired

you apologize that they are the object of so many sentences
quietly regretted.

I am sorry
because you did not ask for this.

And I say it to the ugly woman too.

I am sorry
because you did not ask for this.

I am sorry for my thoughts
and for all the others.

woman's work.

the lady of the kerchief walks, somehow,
upright, stooped, and slow;
her footstep falls through sleeping halls
in ways similar to snow

please peek not at her drooping hair,
neither at her ankles;
follow not her drowsy curves,
admire not her angles

she beats ideas out of these phenomena
like dust from a tapestry;
tha-thump against the front porch
tha-thump against basketry

she beats verses from these curses
like the dust from a carpet;
the dust, she cans for her shelf
but the rug she lugs to the market

curled, colored, furled, and tucked
under one long, curving arm;
she drags her wares to city fairs
and disorients with charm

she comes back to cradle
and ladle, back and forth,
a paltry balm, from palm to palm:
her dusty scurf of worth

when she walks, she walks, somehow,
upright, stooped, and slow;
but her blood flames through sleeping veins
shadowless and aglow

The morning’s face is very pale when I run into you. All its blood has flushed into me, and I do not know what to say. My hands, clasping together, sculpt silent apologies. Left hand twists the right. Right thumb digs left palm like a dumb dog in the backyard, sniffing and sifting through lines and scars to find an empty spot and bury a bone-white fingernail. I enact the rituals you once performed with overtones, now, of savagery: where your hands once glided, barely touching, so as not to disturb the gorgeous slumber of each curve but only to brush across its breathing, I twist, now, like an angry insomniac twists her sweaty sheet, hundreds of hours into hot not-sleeping.

I lock and tighten my hands, my eyes trained on you. And pressed between my palms, I know, in the tiny spaces between the hollows of my palms, little glass sculptures are forming: moments of air so tightly compressed that they swell into substance and meaning. I squeeze harder to feel the pressure and shape of their bodies against my hands. They are burning red when they flash through the atomic gaps between my fingers, like sunrise slicing through morning window slats. Furtively, when you are not looking, I slip the sculptures into my pocket, achingly aware that they are not to be shared.

There, they tinkle and giggle and talk together as if they were beautiful, wise women at a Bible study. Keeping an eye on you, I strain to catch what they are saying. It is too much. It is too hard. My eyes wander. I turn and leave.

I step carefully on my way home, both hands in my pockets, passing their little figures through my fingers and lightly cupping them -- as if they were precious, spillable spring water -- when I run across the last intersection before my home (they titter, a little derisively, at these precautionary measures). I still run, even though I should know I'm safe by now. When I cross my threshold, they silence their own voices forever. Their blood stills, dries, evaporates. I am their lips and tongue. I bow my head.

Arriving to my room, I kneel by the window and take them out, one by one, their tiny tinkling shapes, and lay them carefully upright on the sill, side by side, like they are sea glass I hunted for and prize.

They are infinitely precious.

I touch them like you once touched my hands, marveling with dove-eyed delicacy, afraid to tarnish.

In the window, a slow sunset: the light changes from white to red as it dips down further and further through their bodies like so many bloody marys being drunk by quiet, nursing ghosts. When night falls and they are finally emptied, I turn each upside down over my outstretched, cat-pink tongue and tap its base with one long index finger to catch any last drops of blood that the ghosts might have left. I do it casually, in case they are watching, like it is for the sake of cleanliness and not because it is the only thing in my life with color precious and immortal. If they knew how I crave it, they might be more careful not to leave any. I don't know why they would, it is only a superstition, but I stay on the safe side and play it coy, just in case. The ghosts so rarely leave anything, anyways.

Having utterly expunged the bloody pulp of our interaction, licking what was left me from the corners of the glass, I take the newly clean and crystalline statues (blanched yellow in the artificial light) and place them, at random, in different positions in my room. I rest one on the mantelpiece, upright, and consider its figure there for a moment before swiftly taking it up again and placing it somewhere else. I am seldom satisfied. Sometimes I hold two so that they face each other and move them slightly as if they were talking together, and whisper two parts to a conversation for them, glancing over their heads at myself in a mirror. But even though I'm the one who speaks -- even then! even then! -- I still cannot make out what they say to each other. Absurd. I swish the drops of bloody from right to left inside my mouth. I set them down and watch myself for a moment. I'll wait to swallow.

One sculpture, I leave to play with last, and I carry this to my bed and lay it sideways on my pillow. I have done this so many nights now that little glass figurines cover my entire mattress and there is nowhere left for me to lie down. So I sit cross-legged beside the bed, resting my chin on the edge of the pillow, and I watch the glass sculpture lying on its side for a little while, sometimes imagining, between long, slow blinks, that I can see it breathing a little bit.

It is infinitely precious.

Once I am satisfied of its slumber, I rise and pick a precise path between the glass figurines of so many years covering the floor. I place my feet deliberately in the ever-diminishing spaces between them and make it to the door, where I turn and survey them for a moment, my finger on the light switch. They are gathered in thick swathes now, like a tiny terra cotta army, and the places where my feet fit between them are very small and far apart. Soon there will be no way of getting through them anymore.

I'm not sure what I will do then -- I could, cross-legged, encircle myself with their worshipful forms, like a shrine or a museum, and never leave. There are enough ways to arrange and rearrange them to keep me occupied unto decay. Maybe even the older ones, when placed on the windowsill, would fill up and empty with precious color, too. I've never tried that before. Maybe I could figure out a way to beat the ghosts to that blood and have it all to myself. I flush to think of such excess --a full glass! I would be drunk for weeks on just one.

I shake my head.

I don't think I deserve that.

I could leave the room utterly, and never come back, start a new room, maybe make new shapes with my palms. I have been making these for a while, and though they are mysteries, I know the questions they make me ask well. I love them, but I have been asking these questions so long…

It could be nice to start a new room. It wouldn't be the first or second time, I know the way now, I could start right away, no more scary nights of almost-emptiness needed.

Or I could consecrate the dark temptation that sometimes flits through the sacred glass hours, probably on the wings of the same drunken ghosts that blow tiny gusts on the glass when I am not looking. They do this so that the figures are in slightly different positions when I turn back to review and I never have quite a fully working knowledge of where everything is, even though I was the one who put it there (the ghosts try to trick me but I trick them too, pretending I don’t care about the leftover blood).

This sudden-coming thought of probably scheming ghosts is to, one night, not pick a path between the glass, but rather to dance wildly across it, not watching my step at all, so that I crush it into shards and then dust beneath my bloody feet and then I would lay in my bed and roll all around, roll all the glass beneath my warm, flexible body and it would tremble and shatter beneath me and fragments would glue to my skin, sticky with blood. Then, the ghosts whisper, I could just drink that, not in droplets from the bottom of glasses but in massive, sweeping laps of the tongue, a great glut of poetry and life and it would all be my own, my very own -- not the carcassy leftovers of my rivals -- my own, my ending and my beginning and my middle, all self-contained, all infinitely looping.

I shudder with almost unbearable pleasure at the presumption.

I sweep my gaze across all the glass on the floor and on the bed.

It is infinitely precious.

I finger the light switch and flick it. I close the door delicately, tongue between my teeth as I turn the knob, willing its own tongue to slide into the latch as quietly as possible. But my hand slips. The knob jumps. The latch screams. The ground shakes. The glass shudders and screeches from inside the door. My teeth bite down on my own tongue in horror. The tongue severs. My mouth floods with blood. I swallow, reel, and collapse. 

an open letter to kayla.

I watch and memorize your details, dear, because I love you

And you inspire me to strengthen my weakness.

I forget my keys, my meals, my schedule, my clothes, even,
But retain the abstract of each, the way they make me feel, the ideas they represent
And that's okay, I like it that way.
I have all these feelings, you know, and sometimes I don't have any
But either way it's very distracting
And so I lose my shoes outdoors, somehow,
Drop my phone countlessly,
Ask the store clerk to please hand me my purchases
While I have, in fact, been holding them the whole time
And I break my heart to find a meaning in all this.

But then when I do, or when I read it somewhere and it really moves me --
Well, these days, every time I find this beautiful thesis
I remember that someone like Rumi, for example, or Rilke
The way they tell me to love seems to capture the whole and arrive
But I never think about it when I really need to
In a moment of pettiness
When someone chews loudly, or says something I've heard a thousand times before
With equally unoriginal self-satisfaction
And I instantly hate myself for how I am thinking about them
And say nothing
But fear, deeply, for my soul.

And the fact that those beautiful words
-- mine, bled out, or others', drunk in --
haven't changed anything about the present reality
About these small details of kindness and acceptance
Makes me lose my faith in meaning
And in ideas and words
And in what I thought I was hunting for.

And it makes me want to burn all my notebooks
And everyone else's, too, for trying to trick me
Again and again and again and again,
Into thinking I could make sense of any of this.

But I am still slack-jawed and absent-minded,
Never having learned even that lesson fully
And stop, very clearly, seeing the things in front of me
Stop hearing the words that are said to me
Because I'm paying more attention to what they reminded me of
Or how they might be rearranged,
Or what truth they could lead me to
And it's all very exciting
But it still hasn't led me to anything that has changed anything,
Really.

I'm still the sad, self-estranged girl I started out as.
I know how to make friends. I know how to kiss.
But I haven't solved a single one of the problems I began with.
I don't even know how to name or count them.
You know a lot about them.
You know a lot about me.
Because you pay attention.

I look in the mirror a lot
I always have, since I was a little girl
Not because I really like the way I look
(sometimes it makes me very sad)
But because it's the most personal example
Of the connection between form and substance
I watch my body and my body watches me.
We are the same, we are together.
I am the theory that connects the facts
Of my limbs and movements and senses
I am the decider and the designer of my actions
And my actions are me, to the world.

This is happening to everyone.

I don't feel like I actually know anyone at all,
as they are, as they intend to be.
I think a lot of people feel this too.
We helplessly theorize, but we are led astray
By our own personalities, our own desires, our own patterns
And we do not recognize each others'.

But you, dear,
With you, I vow to see know both form and substance
Like I do with myself,
Both meaning and detail,
Theory and fact.

So I see you as bonfire, branch extended, bird attentive, book in flight,
But I see also the exact color of your hair in each various kind of light.

And the particular upward regal curve
Of your arm when you reach to pluck a grape
And the pause you take,
Pressing it between a forefinger and thumb,
Before you slide it through your square front teeth:
A moment of imperial appreciation for each.

So, much beyond knowing the idea of you
Or what you represent to me
Or any other pattern I could impose on you,
I hunt down your habits
And idiosyncrasies
(because you are so much more important
than my keys)

When you talk, I don't want to pay attention to what you remind me of
Or the good words that have been said about friendship and love.

My focus is you. I will make my focus you.

The present reality of you before me
The way you eat a grape
The dead skin you pick at
The colors you like to wear
The exact words you say
Your avoidance of trimming your nails

They are sharp and white like elephant tusks
They comb your hair through in a swoop
And gather it on one side of your neck
And then you rest both hands on the tops of your thighs
As you sit, knees folded,
Rocking ever so slightly from side to side,
And listen to me

Watchfully talking to you,
Like watching myself talk in a mirror,
Amazed that a meaning I feel so deeply
Dwells in something that I can see
Amazed to see both theory and fact:
Your light, unreal and invisible,
And the shape and color, also,
Of your small, pointed hands
Cupped over air upon your jeans.

I see both, I recognize both, I praise both, I love both.

You, firebrand in a fishbowl,
I know exactly how you sneeze.
Bless you.