half my hands

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.

No Comments Posted in General, Poetry, Writing on 06.06.11.

the taste of our war

i like when my mouth tastes of yours.
or maybe it’s just my tongue’s memory of what your tongue tastes like….
the chemistry of our salivas sliding and mixing,
lips igniting heat between lips,
teeth gently gnashing lip or cheek,
pushing chin, arching up,
held head in hands,
soft palms, firm grip—
cupping my tiny ears.
nimble fingers combing hair,
sweeping sanctioned hair strands from crossing invisible boundary lines….
your hands heading off to war–
purveyors of underswept shirt,
loosening clasps and hook and eyes,
dodging past scar tissue.
your cleansing placed between soft and bend,
rinsing battle wounds old and deep,
crease and crux, polished with lotions and loofahs,
islands of tawny porous pilgrimage,
awaiting the moment your warriors crossed land lines,
you strip layer of clothing with layer of inhibition,
off parts undeserving of sunlight’s rays.
bare-breasted backbones,
the epic travels of pointer and pinky straddle their dunes;
shoulders bowed in sheepishly now aching recumbent,
each kiss a hand grenade beneath collar bones receding.
hollowing a place to bleed out,
each clench of fingers into flesh, hungry lungs lunge and heave,
each thrust of your warmth laid upon toothpick frame,
bones bracing the fires,
bones bucking the bombs,
bones collapsing beneath the casualties of our unofficial wars.
hands, no longer soft and tender, pull tousles from their nest.
palms to flesh, stinging red welts, deeper the battle scars flush to surface.
soft linen sheets gossamer in mortuary moments,
settle over creases and feet, creases and feats,
the chill of goosebumps coaxed by open-window breezes.
where hot breath once raised skin with electricity,
the untraversed dunes wait for nature to flatten them silent and quiet.

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.

No Comments Posted in General, Poetry, Writing on 06.14.10.

This Is Where You Breathe

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….

No Comments Posted in Poetry, Writing on 06.03.10.