Argument

The power of your skin stretching over your knuckles like a landscape, a work of art, that is majesty. They cannot argue with the beauty of your hands and so they cannot argue with your existence. You are royalty.

ROADTRIP HAIKU #2

Car going sixty.

Moonlit river rushes by.

Helical winds blow.

It has come to my attention

It has come to my attention that I am a romantic and also that the world may end, and so, if there's to be no air to breathe, no room for truth or liberty, and if tomorrow we could be pulled apart in a world cleaved, then all I ask is this: let me hold your hands and head, and tell me what you cherish and dread as we stare down the abyss.

AN OPEN LETTER TO MY ANXIETIES RE: 2016'S POLITICAL ATMOSPHERES

The sound an acorn makes after being kicked, that skittering sound of the nut's hard shell against asphalt, the tap, tap, tap sound as the nut comes to a rest in an intersection.

Impossible apology

The man sitting in front of me wears a Multnomah County Fair t-shirt. He has light eyes and an auburn beard and speaks intensely. Our knees touch as he offers me freshly sliced apples on a red plastic plate. Their fragrance wraps around us like a cloud and I struggle to focus on the questions I am asking him about how his brother's eye came to have a pellet in it. He offers the apples once again as I leave, gently mocking: "They're not dirty." I smile weakly and pick two pieces and a whole apple and my mouth waters as my stomach knots with an impossible apology for my country, occupying his.

KEEP GROUNDED

Faded pink high-tops sit like flower pots, adorning the center of the apartment.  In each, a yellow or a blue sock blooms with frills and improvised folds; laces, dirty and frayed, blend as they reach into the carpet.

STILLNESS

"There's plenty harm to be had in a few drinks," he said—the ash protrusion struggling to grip the end of his embering cigarette between the plosive push and the cryptic grin—to nobody in particular.

I resent you most

I resent you most when you are gentle because it destroys the framework I have built to accommodate your cruelty.

I GAVE HER A PIECE OF ME

I gave her a little piece of me and asked her to be kind.  She held it between her forefinger and thumb, and squished it like a bug.

Home

LAZY POEM

Smart girls

Smart girls are always being boring at parties, arms folded, smile wry, making sociology of everything.

STRUCTURE

Inner Beauty

"I want to fuck her brain," you say, urgent, eyes glazed.

"Okay," I respond, "but you're not going to be able to do that. All you'll do is put a part of you in a part of her and she'll be untouched."

SAMPLE CULTURE

Sometimes I see others' words and know that a slight shift could make them sound poetic, like sliding to the other side of the bed to be in the last sliver of morning sunlight through the blinds.

You weren't

You weren't a lover, you were a tourist.

FROZEN

When you said "Hey" in the way that we say "Hey"—like the breath is being gently plucked from our lungs—I softened. When you kissed me, I melted. When you left, I froze.

28 years

It has taken 28 years for life to seem irrevocable.

FLAME MAKES WAX OF CANDLE

I'm so hungover it hurts.  Obviously.

Dream logic

About a week afterward, I dreamt of entering the hotel room where we fucked and finding it empty of you but full of books that you'd read and left behind. There were at least a dozen, and under dream logic it didn't seem strange that you would have read so many in only three or four days. It made sense to me that you had, and that you would read fiercely and fast and leave behind what was finished. I didn't remember the dream as a dream and so it burrowed somewhere deep in my brain and became part of the way I understood you. It was months before I was able to extract it and identify it as an impostor truth. How had I failed to square it with the real fact of your enormous library? How had I ever thought it possible that you could be so unattached? I once asked these questions aloud to a friend and she stared at me, eyebrows flat, and said: The books are you. That's what the dream's about.

I hate that kind of clarity. 

STAYING POWER

"If you leave now, we're over," she said like a wet booklet of matches.

A discrete thing

Full disclosure: I am drunk. A blizzard is approaching, I am very far away from any notion of home, and so, imagining myself in a short dress in the south of Spain, I have taken myself out in cold, theatrical New York City, to drink bourbon and read a book by candle light and try not to take personally the boys at the bar rating women and rolling their eyes at feminism and distinguishing black outs from brown outs because, really, I'm just as ridiculous as them.

Times like this, it's easy to remember I am not, in fact, so different or distant from everything around me. But I am a discrete thing, yes, thanks to my skin. My skin is a membrane that makes me a unit and contains me and separates me from the world, and it is enough.

This odd solitary adventure is the exact thing I have been seeking.

BLACK AND WHITE

Mascara stains on my sheets from where you cried.