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.

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.

this is a draft of my poem i wrote for you,
this is a draft of your poem,
i am a draft of a poem i wrote for you,
i am a draft of a poem,
i am a draft.
i am a draft.
i am just a draft for you.

and you’ll try to forget the way
the chair
or book
or candlestick
flew through the air.

i am a held breath.
the glass rattling in a loosely caulked window,
wind pushing on both sides.

maybe the hippie who lives in my back room was right.
living off the map.
staying away from sex.
not having bills in his name.

maybe being less responsible is the way to go.
letting hair grow long,
muscles lithe,
and frustrations lost between beers and splifs.

not,
lists of purchases for hygiene products,
and paper goods,
and mobile phone bills,
picking up packages,
or collecting insurance moneys.

maybe this….
“slacker”
has got us all beat
in this game.

i have 3 minutes to make an 8-minute walk.
i am swimming through creme brulee.
the warm, thick pudding drips, cascades through hair,
sweetens my skin, flanks, thighs.
like small spiders creeping to the safety of the concrete below.
later, sugar crust sets in,
within the barely air-conditioned steel ride to indiana.