daylight:

smash the face of each person who gives you advice
on getting out of bed.
sneak in the side door at work.
eat the young of those foolish enough to speak to you
before 10:30 AM.
godforbid without coffee.
hate them for trying to shake you out of this.

perch your anger and remorse like weighty buzzards in a willow,
let guilt tunnel out the place your creativity once lived.
replace with resentment,
fast to harden like quick-set concrete.
siphon hysteria from the chaos you absorb from your manic boss.
stop eating.
replace food with the insides of cheeks, your molars, cuticles,
a random lover’s shoulder,
your co-worker’s bone marrow.
anything.
make your stomach an empty cave.
paint the walls with anxiety attacks.
brandish a pointed finger,
and never be a slow-draw to the showdown.

nightfall:
leave the office at bedtime.
make empty promises to the litter boxes,
to your sheets, your toothbrush.
gargle the hours of solitary confinement in cubicle walls.
let its sting burn the holes in your chewed mouth.
debate cleaning windows for 15 minutes.
detail the toilet.
scrub and re-scrub the shower.
if your skin isn’t white and peeling, continue until it is.
pace.

let your eardrums ring with the thud of your father’s hand on his lap,
as he asked you to help him brush his teeth.
rewind, hit play, rewind, hit play, rewind, hit play.
start smoking again.
tell yourself he’d understand.

carry unpaid bills like a new baby to a room of women.
when the stacks topple from the ledges into a paper snake on the hardwood,
leave them there.
tell bill collectors they have wrong number
when they call during business hours.
tighten the golden handcuffs.

watch hours of porn with disinterest.
chase your anger’s tail.
clip the cycle and force your entrance.
when this doesn’t work,
fuck men you admire and men you abhor.
discover that the imprints in the beds of those with missing last names
are more familiar than your own fingerprints.
than your mother’s laugh.
than your father’s silence.
become a soap carving of your wanted image,
wearing away with each shower.

the nights you don’t pass out in someone’s bed,
let a dying man’s curse fill the tinnitus in your ears.
when the static of Chicago’s streets quiet,
you can only hear
the din of your own thoughts,
the way they ricochet off each other,
then–
belly your burden until it blisters.
shape your spine and shoulders into the S of should.
bend broken without breaking,
until the extremities of you are all that is left swaying.

when the distractions are too much,
when the distractions become the distracting,
rely on chemistry to give you 4 hours of relief.
as you fall asleep,
chant your mantra:
you are not the sum of your failures.
you are not the sum of the universe.
you are not a failed universe.

no, the first kiss didn’t matter.
hardly remembered, really.
some boy in kindergarten or first grade,
lip-smackers and vaseline,
maybe a playground, under the risers at lunch.
but i remember the first time my second nature,
my sloppy flirtations,
threaded a boy’s oblivion.
side-swiped a consciousness.
the orange lamplight on washington street during kick the can.
my dad’s best friend’s son.
shaggy hair, glasses too big for his face,
and what my memory only hopes could be a navy member’s only jacket.
follow an inched finger behind an oak tree.
the first rattling behind my knees.
the solid tangibility of friction and awkwardness
of meaning and futures exchanged like a snap.
and later, when i was caught with horrible high school boys,
i would hold out for the one with streetside kisses.
there would be no background music, no island or beach, no starry skies.
but there was an awful teen sitcom, a basement clammy and mildewy,
a scratchy plaid couch, and the cool slip of a polyester sleeping bag.
i mouthed questions to the ceiling panels
about the inexplicable way the fibers didn’t melt on his skin
when his shoulder was on my neck–
my skin warmed at that return of the rattling in my knees.
this first, i will remember.

hold his picture in the light and tell him he has the same beard as Jesus.
will replace praying hands on a wall with fingerprints and palm sweat.
try to forget the ankle bracelet. or maybe even his extra long pinky nail.
will roll the bolder over the mouth of the cave.
i ache for grey and red striped sweaters, and i get sunken sockets instead.
someday i’ll pour intention into actions and gifts,
maybe even pills and poppers and plastic solo cups.
but right then, i didn’t know this.
and the rattling behind my kneecaps is stinging.
no astringent is strong enough to erase the last night.
the secret night walk to the house with the closed bedroom door
in the back….
where the steel and spoons
spoke more truths than my thighs.

here, the cancer begins.
someplace between liver and spleen and spine, coffee and cigarettes,
playlists and poems, and numbness and scorn….
the roots are secured in blood and bone,
filter through what should have been and what was.
the graduation and the reunion.
the recovery and sobriety.
california and dark-haired babies.
but right now, i feed the tumor with photos and ink,
at night, drive the praying hands to the church drop box.
when it chimes off-key harmonies, ask forgiveness from a god i turned away from years before.
swallow martyrdom with a nervous chuckle.

each turned back feeds the metastasis.
there are pictures, sulfur clinging longer than the smiles,
love notes and drawings on denny’s napkins,
and textbooks marbled with cursive incantations of possible names of unborn babies.
i learn bottled cologne on sticky skin never
scents skin like the earthiness of when our two collarbones collided.
the jersey sheets documented when my tongue was sweet and metallic,
but this cancer is feeding on my breath,
consuming all oxygen in sucked-in sighs.

when i saw him on holiday break,
we were cordial.
nerves washed like a tsunami, he is brother,
he is friend.
he was lover.
share a smoke and a smile.
maybe even coffee, but he’s got curfew.
and sobriety.
and i am 18, stringy spaghetti limbs, sunken eyes,
the buzzing filament of a nearly-burned light bulb,
an ache that hurts to stand near.
i tell stories, trying to tempt the boulder from inside the cave.
i am thirsty for his musk, and forgiveness, camaraderie,
and washington street, and poems, and agreements,
and allowances. and washington street, and oversized glasses,
and sleeping bags.
i am a used notebook, spiral unbinding, coffee-stained,
a hornet’s nest in the attic, a 6th-floor screen imprint on fingertips,
sprawled and praying,
one fabulous mesmerizing clusterfuck.

but my skin is pocked, and weathered.
he saves my life in a sentence.
“stick to your club drugs–don’t mess with the hard stuff.”
a hug and goodbye,
his pea coat is scratchy like the plaid couch,
and i smirk to myself.
hug this to the hollow cancer growing behind my breastplate,
feed this moment to the roots.
my buick rolls off the gravel parking lot,
and i’ll sample this night with a few others,
replay it like a broken record,
want to shape the shine to quaint perfection.
but it is shredded wheat stabbed into mushy pulp.
and the rattling behind my knees is now a dull thud.
solid and silent.

the time was irrelevant, but i remember it was morning and probably a sunday.
i should have been sleeping or heading to church,
but i never was That Girl.
gray snow melting outside, overcast, and just the way
you’d want it when you get that call.
i’ve heard the pattern too many times.
the first w’s sucked-in shrill and squat demand,
the “how” already sorted before the lungs exhale.
the matter as irrelevant in the moment the sound turned off,
the talking muted, and the ringing, the fucking ringing
like the low bellow of a metal cross on donation bin,
and the lightness of a body.
the lightness of a body.
the lightness of a body.
the lightness of my body.
the awkward threading of a girl’s sideswiped oblivion by
a boy’s sloppy flirtation with a spoon.

i don’t remember going outside to smoke,
but i remember the calm and emptiness of the campus.
i wanted people to gather in a group.
to listen to me testify the sharp corners of his lessons,
to shake my fist and ask for sunlight or thunderstorms,
to slap god for irony–
he was addict. i was addict.
he was sober, i was still a junkie,
instead, i stood atop the forced-round corners of college benches,
dipped my toe with each step,
and felt the rattling of my knee caps,
the weight lifted from my legs,
and settled into the growing cancer in my belly.

Says–not said–because that improper grammar is embedded in half my DNA–
that the disrespect I have for her was given to me by my father.
She denies this half of me.
But here, this woman, my mother, says these words to me on mother’s day.
The day of thanks we give to her for life and tending to us as children.
She says these words as if the thanks for her gift is to a welcome cut to the core.
To remind me of the 15 rebellious years, 10 years ago,
that I made her regret not swallowing the plus sign on that test.
Tipped uterus and bed rest
and all 6 years settling after 3 lost births and 3 live ones
and now, as if to place all the spite of losing the three who could
have been,
might have been better than me–
pouring each anger into each word of this conversation,
into this disappointing daughter.

My father told us, “life is a shit sandwich, and each day i’m forced to take another bite.”
My mother bought that line, and swallowed her bitterness with each bite,
another day, another brick to build the expectation higher,
another shovel of dirt you dig into the mountain behind you.
As if there was no other way to live.
Here she spews words as though they are cottonballs and feathers to soften,
but they are filled in a heavy sack, smothering.

See, she is yellow roses and swollen knuckles.
surgeries and 100-pounds overweight,
meat and potatoes and dessert,
boxed wine and a high school education,
clotheslines with comforters in the fall,
calloused feet in grassy kiddy pools,
tired eyes and grumpy morning alarm clocks,
green breath, coffee, cigarettes, and Texas sheet cake
that strangely enough, always tasted a little like coconut.
She is limeade when you only wanted sun tea.
She is shiny baubles and dollar-store tchotckes,
She is hand-me-down love seats and Irish pride.

The world has been all gems to her–beautiful and dangerous.
Each person, an imperfect diamond–
so hard they cut every being of her shine, her reflection,
imperfect as if her smooth silhouette should be better valued for that one facet.

We are etched glass, rattling between the wood and the caulk,
always chattering with the flexing of the wind on both sides.
She is half my hands and the nerves that run through me.
She is the pulse and the sweat of my anxiety–
the kind that makes walls breathe inward and carotids pray for valium.
She has taught me to love like prickly bushes,
to fall down like autumn leaves,
to deny the death of expectation,
to put on the facades & wear your skeletons in shame,
brush the problems away
like lint
on pants
on fire.

our love was not sacred and soft.
your fingertips were just soldiers following orders.
you left my body a well-worked battlefield,
too ragged for future troops.

ps i still have your toothbrush.

Hold your breath.
I failed a swimming test trying to touch the bottom of the deep end.
The swim instructor focused my breathing and rubbed my back.
“Ssssshhhhhh—it’s okay.
You can breathe now.
You can breathe now.
Take a deeeeeeeep breath.”

This is where you breathe.

5 years ago, my father died– a tidal wave that
rippled more like bath water than tsunami–
My life shifted like the shallow waves of turquoise,
rocking with my rib cage in a porcelain tub.

Hold your breath.

Like every good fisherman, you get sea legs.
You don’t notice the rocking of the boat.
When you step on land, it is foreign.
To watch a chest rise and fall, beckon its
crashing only for relief from its wake–
the way each breath would smash the boat,
toss it like a toy in bathwater–
to have that constant motion–
and to step on land.
The thrashing of the ocean become more familiar
than the solid of earth beneath feet.

This is where you breathe.

I tell how my father died
the same way you’d read off a train schedule.
I’ve learned to cast worm-less hooks,
and prepare for no bites.
After 5 years,
the tsunami breached the levies.

Hold your breath.

My father rested in the metal bed in the living room, overlooking his lake.
He wore dignity, plaid short-sleeved shirt, and khaki shorts
until standing to change was a daily root canal
he felt inside his femur.
The weight of his pregnant belly buckled his knees,
and humility flooded him quickly.
His eyes told me he’d wished he’d gone “easy”–
a grabber like his best friend,
a sleeper like my friend’s OD,
a tangled soup of metal and gas like his brother-in-law.

This is where you breathe.

We watched the horizon,
didn’t pay attention to our course.
A sinkhole drained our 6-month voyage into 11 days.
Seven days later, his hands fell by his side
when he asked me to help him brush his teeth.
I felt the tide rise past my toes.

Hold your breath.

Mortality is stubborn.

This is where you breathe

34 hours later, what I knew of the scientist,
the baseball pitcher,
the PBR-drinking, dirty-talking, lanky-quiet man
who taught me to fish
and play HORSE,
had gone–
but the leg of a starfish, the half of an earthworm,
the snail out of its shell –
still yelped for its other half.

for 16 hours he called every 10 seconds for jesus to save him.
8 hours with words–the rest came in whelps,
like the bobbing of a drowning anchor.

Hold your breath

It is easy to forget that we BREATHE
without thinking,
that we SWALLOW
without thinking.
By the 12th gestational week, a fetus can swallow.
There are 13 phases and it takes 25 muscles.
It’s also one of the most complex actions for a body to complete,
and one of the first to fail.

I watched nature reverse human into instinct,
from man into notion.
When I asked him to stop shaking as I squeezed the dropper of liquid morphine into his cheek–
maybe I was pleading for him to go,
maybe I thought his inversion to afterthought was here,
maybe his unfocused blue eyes were really searching for my blurry face,
to say “stop–not yet!”

Maybe I could still see a bit of him coming to the surface,
maybe that’s when I heard the gurgling in his throat,
as I realized I was drowning him with the morphine.

This is where you breathe.

He was this moving thing, this palor, this sweaty chest
that snapped up like cat in the air and fell like an oak leaf,
with the eyes like a Maine morning’s tide–grey and unapologetic–
the same tint of a wave cresting in response to some seemingly small underwater earthquake.

In the morning, he was a fish out of water.
My hand reached out to steady the fish on the line.
Said, “it’s okay. You can go now.”

Hold your breath.

Mortality is stubborn.

This is where you breathe.

When the chest fails to rise again–
you are not wishing for waves—
you are kissing the shores.

You are watching the boat leave you in the distance.
You are remembering almost drowning in 2nd grade, gasping for clarity of lungs…
gasping for expansion of ribs.

There was such silence at the bottom of that pool.

You want to forget this, because HERE–
NOW—
you want there to be music and you want there to be some movie-style-ending,
but you DON’T want it to be some stupid fucking Tuesday morning.

Hold your breath.

And you are pushing out your lungs,
holding your own breath as if to save the air for him,
as if you are taking too much that you don’t deserve,
as if last night, you thought you were throwing him a life preserver,
but you were dropping the anchor down his throat.

This is where you breathe.

And you are begging the end of the breastplate’s magnetic pull to the ceiling,
the positive and negative pinching between the spreading of ribs,
The swell and retreat of oxygen–
This is where you breathe.
You want to end the suffering of the fish,
Take it off its hook,
Throw it back into the ocean.
Let it slip into the calm,
let it float with the rocking of the swell–

And

Then

there is silence.

And, still, the only thing you can think is…

This is where you breathe now….

This is where you breathe now….

This is where you breathe now….

This is where you….

i am clenched fists, tumbling in the riptide.
current dragging ankles on the silt bottom of underwater shores,
the disintegration of my forefather’s merchant ships
slipping beneath my heels.

old Mexican men, with thick ruddy skin and white mustaches,
stand in their Carharts and green cordoroys at the bus stop.
cracked-skinned hands grip blue plastic lunch coolers,
which later will double for chairs on their lunch breaks at the worksite.
a bar with faux Mexican, “historic,” wooden arched entrance charms customers
to duck inside for quasi-ethnic food.
a thrift shop storefront is shaded white with condensation,
clouding the view of the vintage, hip, disheveled mannequins wearing recycled
Twiggy dresses, chopped burgundy 80s boots, plaid western button-ups, and large-cuffed Levis 501 denim.
the street is lined with grey snow, compacted and buffed slick
by the melting and refreezing of 3 nights now.
a small puddle is now a lake of ice in the alley,
awaiting a bicyclist or pedestrian to slip in the dark of night.

across the street, there is another Mexican food joint,
this one lacking the grandeur of its neighbor,
but rather, simply and humbling, staking its claim, not with neon fronts and cliché atmosphere,
but with a small, once-white, now ivory, plastic sign with a generic picture of a taco and burrito,
and its name, something like, “Jose’s Taco Palace,” written in plain, simple font
–black paint sheering the tips of the letters.
the neighbors stop for menudo and burritos covered in molé,
recipe perfected by 70-year-old Mexican women in terra cotta kitchens.
they tuck secrets in their aprons: the number of ingredients, the time to simmer,
how to balance the perfect amount of heat and chocolate.
a big-name bank and Starbucks just moved into the new corner building.
the suited businessmen and stockinged women pull their SUVs or silver sedans into a meter spot,
rush in, get cash and a lowfatcranberrymuffin and a skinnyventilatte
before balancing a cell phone on their ears and a muffin and coffee in their hands,
all while shivering their way back to their cars.
the Mexican men on the corner stand at the bus stop, watching the city tango,
while drinking the coffee that their wives poured into plaid thermoses.
black.

I didn’t touch myself for 4 weeks because my hands waited for yours…
They never arrived with softness or attention–
only crude power behind closed doors.
So I shoved my hands into my pockets,
hoping the denim would warm them when yours weren’t there.
They rarely ever were.
I wore the fancy underthings in hopes of a drop-in or overnight,
but you and I were dots on a roadmap, LA and New York,
I tried pulling the edges together but they’d never stay.
I forgot the landscapes of my own curves
when you weren’t there to map the route with your palms.
So I let his fingers trace my ribs.

Dismissal is the dry bread our relationship fed me.
Its spongy sorrow swells in my mouth each time you rolled away from me.
But regret is sticky fingers, too fat to buttress these tiny bones next to these lungs.

He promised he wouldn’t make any unwanted moves, & I fell asleep.
I dreamed he and I made 9 manuals of how to fit pieces of 2 humans together–
named the series, “Variations on Spooning.”
I tossed and turned, my own bed now unfamiliar to his weight.
While he thought I slept, he spun my belly piercing like a child’s new toy.
My pupils dilated, searching for the bedroom door exit in the thick black.
Hoped he wouldn’t notice the change in the pattern of my breath.
Wouldn’t know I was wondering why you never felt light like that,
or when I shifted at night, why you never rolled with me like that,
or never bothered to touch my bones like that.
You were never a bass cleft curled behind me,
too afraid to steady a heaving chest with your own.
You were only strong enough to slide in and out of my skin,
trying it on like a winter coat in summer.
You were too fearful that staying would
make you fat with the weight of my reactions,
that you’d get stuck sweating
your responsibility through the tiny pores of my humility.

When you and I laid in the dark,
did your forefingers trace my veins, routing roadmaps back to you
just so you could retreat across the country?
Or did you intentionally draw detours over my skin’s frozen lakes—vast plateaus where nerves were too afraid to sense your touch?
Did mountain ridges rise in your route like the puffed skin of handprints
you slapped over bent mountains?
While I laid bare to you, were you planning your path back to the ocean?

I wanted to clone your limbs,
amputate your arms like tentacles,
generate a sweeter version of you.
But his arm wrapped around me like kite string
and held me like unlocked handcuffs.
Instead, I woke to the taste of regret, swirling my mouth–
It’s always the same–saliva and beer and cigarettes and someone else’s tongue.
In the morning, he was still there.
but I wanted your familiar absence.
How strange he would stay without taking.
How strange I would leave without giving.
How foreign.
How wronged the ribs.

can is the cousin of want and need.
the separation prosciutto thin, and divided between
what we want to recognize as truth, what we are ready to see,
and what we want to see.
a thirsty cycle divided by shifting foci.
when deserve and try visit,
the loop is thrown further into unstable orbit.
so we stick with the details and ignore the overall direction.
we see what we want, but want will not make truth of perception.
want cannot will others’ actions into our truth.

intention does not always equal impact–
especially when intention is unclear.
communication is over-analyzed and dissected,
but never spoons with intention.
murky waters need time to clarify,
but even when settled,
do we accept that the potential dangers still exist?
reality is what we are ready to see at the point at which we see it.
it is of our own construction to the heights and depths we wish to build.
our reality is our sanctuary.
our security is
man-made and detailed to the extent that we believe its truth.
we adorn our walls with gilded treasures–
time markers.
trinkets.
reminders of our worth.
godforbid we learn that walls are permeable,
crumble, and temporary.
we enclose ourselves with fancy cottons.
learn as babies, to swaddle the skin to soothe.
we lose sight that both concrete and mortar and grey matter
are only as strong as the foundation on which they lay.
your grey matter matters.
but if you want to see shame and fault and error,
then you will miss the truth others have hidden behind the curtain.
we’ve lost our object permanence and the great fear of the uncertain and hopeful.

we will battle our ways.
we will settle when we are tired.
and perhaps, the only thing to agree upon is to give up and resolve to exist.
simply for ourselves and what we’ve been told.
because our DNA demands it.
and we are far less understanding than
the strength and cohesion in our DNA’s code.