[she says...]

she says
my body ain’t a sanctuary but you can
flee here if you please,
because her
body says yes and so do her eyes
and the voice in her head is silent
or calling someone else’s name.

and she says
I want somebody who won’t love me;
somebody, she says, who’s forgivable
forgettable, fragile, fake.

I want a masquerade, she says,
something false to replace the realness she doesn’t feel.
she says
I want somebody to hold me,
somebody who can fake the love
and feel the moment.

she says I want to taste the
exhales that you make,
your lips pressed somewhere on
the other side of this kiss.

she says I want to forget your name,
know the texture of your flesh
and the way your eyes move.

I want to hold you close to me,
she says,
I want you to breathe with me.

She Doesn't Read Pornography

in adolescence she stays up until
the sun warms the far side of her horizon,
enraptured by light on those pages that
seem to radiate gold and the touch of dust,
the paper sucking moisture from each fingerprint
even leaving her mouth dry as she follows the words
lips vaguely parted, and bare legs
bending where they might

she drags her tongue across her lips,
slowly, bringing moisture back
and she is aware of the textures around her;
the floating particles of dust illuminated by her lamp;
the temperature of the darkness outside her window.
she reads these poems late at night
and sighs with each stanza
savoring the mouthy syllables,
sucking them, feeling kisses.

I'm Sick of Kissing Lips

Tonight, I want to chop your pineapple.
I want to jiggle your flan with my
sticky, green, fertile mallets;
I will pour you pancakes
from spoiled, purple batter and
thwart your lilipads with
bullfrog noses.

I will suffocate your nicotine eyeballs
with lipstick pillows and
starfruit-flavored popsicles,
damp, leather petals that fall upon
your headstand;
I will bite like red wine or
sting like fresh daisies and onion tears.

All at once, you will catch my dying canary
between a tennis racket
and my resolve, or if
that is too far out of reach,
a coffee mug plastered with
riveted ferret wings,
buttercups, ammonium dichromate,
sex.

Afterwards, we will melt
into a gelatin puddle of pumpkin juice
and cotton balls, where the world will
circle us, rosebud jealous,
and we will dwell on the final wisps of
some sugary odor which sizzles
into everywhere with one
great
rollercoaster machine.

And I will fry your sofa with tender chicken digits.

Duryea Zouave

she misses her ghosts
when the light is dim, like tonight:
with the inevitable glow of streetlamps
filtered in the fog;
nights when she finds herself lonely
and one-jacket warm;

nights, she imagines,
that resemble those long hours
between battles
july 3rd to 5th
or 2nd to 4th—
she never remembers

but she knows of Pickett’s Charge
of Devil’s Den
she’s looked on a triangular field,
nearly seen the soldiers she knew were once there.

she’s walked on Little Round Top,
pictured Chamberlain’s men
lined up, guns bared, barrels empty
and bayonets affixed;
thought of the fear that
you must have been able to smell;
infantrymen wear wool
even in those summer months.

it is on these nights
she searches the mist
for a figure walking towards her
someone regal, with a glass eye,
to recount battle scars, fatal wounds;

but the mist is always empty,
and her ghosts, they never come.

AWOL

I.
Now picture this:
It is early in the morning of December 7th, 1941;
The Japanese want you dead.

II.
Hours later, after the gunfire, after the flaming ships
sink below the tips of waves that will never pass again,
in the dark on the Oklahoma, or under her,
or upside-down in her thick, sleepy belly,
you are losing oxygen in a room with a radio
and numerous dying men.

You cannot see them, but the bolted tables hang from the ceiling,
waiting to rust free and fall to lie with you.

Your companions take turns to sleep,
one after another allowing the dwindling air to forget them
momentarily, so maybe no one will die
when the air goes empty and still.
You punch the walls, but only hard enough to save your breath.
Maybe someone is looking for you.

There are muffled knocks, once, or twice,
upside-down calls for help from more capsized sailors
on the other side of these metal walls,
sailors who search for pockets of air
or a way up to her hull,

where 89 lives are saved and all others lost at sea.
Somehow when they come along, rapping at your new ceiling.
someone is awake and breathing enough to hear and yell back,
pounding on the metal and letting the next room know
that after days of slow suffocation, you are still alive.

III.
I never knew you and
sometimes I don’t even remember your name;
but you are my mother’s uncle,
a Hannon, defined by religion,
origin, ears,
and we have this in common—
more or less.

And I should tell you,
I swell with pride
like a robin’s breast,
a frog’s chest before the noise,
a splintering ankle
when I think of you.

Knotholes

my home is an old and crickety creature
who bends and buckles at the corners
and doesn’t quite close at the seams:
doors won’t shut, hallways squeal,
my fourth bedroom wall hangs limp from the ceiling,
a gap for toes or toys interrupting its affair
with those painted floorboards.

but it doesn’t matter that I can see the basement light
through the kitchen floor;
that our foundation floods with every storm;
or that my mother has just informed me
that a vine on the side of our house
is now peeking through a window frame:

it is the staircase.

away from home,
I remember standing on those ancient steps,
so steep, I climb them when I rush, even now,
palms slapping the warped wood to pull me up faster.

I remember
I must have been three or four,
clutching my favorite blanket
as mother told me something I forget
and in the shadows on the stairs
I picked apart the pale blue fabric
and talked to her through the hole.

and when I was six or seven or five
I would build a bed on the landing,
making a mattress over those knotholes and cracks,
and drift off into my childish dreams
of train tracks, or large bears,
and the parties continued downstairs,
noise floating upwards like clouds of rising steam;
and I only ever half-woke when daddy carried me to bed,
where I would find myself when morning came
and wonder how I fell asleep.

and it is not that I don’t like quiet stairs,
whole ones, stairs with paint or carpet or sealer;
it’s just that the sound of the door opening
calls like an animal in the night
when I tiptoe up the edges, clinging to the walls,
so the boards won’t whine and wake mom and dad
at three AM when I am finally going to sleep.

it is simply that they are home,
they are there,
and I imagine my mom sitting on the third step,
like I do,
whenever she answers the phone.

(merf. poem from sept. '06)

I am in love with a boy who plays guitar.
He is long, and thin,
with far too many elbows,
but he has a strong jaw,
and a firm chin—
one with a small indent
where my finger fits perfectly,
pressing a tiny print into his stubble.

Sometimes I wish I could forget him:
those gorgeous eyes—
they're always watching me!
He is a mirror of myself
and I can read him like a poem,
deciphering the symbolism in the broken necklace he gave me
when it was whole.

I want to push him out,
shut my eyes,
so I can no longer remember that perfect shade of brown,
or the texture of his hair.
I want to forget the temperature of his skin,
and the angle of his cheekbone,
and the way he looks at me
through his hair
when I am beautiful
and he wishes I was all his
like before.

I am in love with this boy, this musician,
in a way where I am yelling and I want to cry,
and in a way where I am silent and cannot breathe,
where I whisper the days of the week
and numbers one through twenty
in French
just to see him quiver
and long to wrap his arms around me once more.

I want to forget the rhythm of his heartbeat,
and sometimes I hope,
one day,
our breathing might fall out of synch.

(poem from september '06)

it was getting on four in the morning
maybe even half past

and a tiny spot of light crept in
through the window
long before I drew down the blinds

this patch of golden light—
sunrise, streetlamp, who knows—
rested there
on your bony shoulder
in our warm, dark room

and left an imprint there
in the shape of a dorsal fin
or the inside of a pocket
that maybe once held pennies
or dimes

and I thought
how beautiful you were
your eyelids shut,
hair wisping across your features

how delicate,
with that strong jaw
and so very many elbows

and I held my breath
so my rattling coughs would not
shake the bed
and wake you

and I wondered
how much will I forget
when the sun comes up
will I remember these gentle words
your pigeon curves

the way your lips pucker
as you sleep

The Color of Your Eyes

You are kissing me in approximately the same way I remember you kissing me. My face tilted up, wide open, your lips to my cheek. You know we both want more from this. You know we both want to wrap our arms around each other and breathe in synchronized patterns.

I love the smell of your hair and your skin, but you can’t tell from the photograph. All you can see is two giddy girls smiling and sharing a kiss. A kiss to the cheek. I’d turn the other cheek if only two more dimensions would intervene and allow for such nonsense. I’d turn and kiss you back if only I could make the page curve just so to let me. You can easily see that I miss you. Not even oxygen passing between cheek and lips, you can tell that you’re still too far away from me.

Upon closer inspection, you see it is only my eyes looking upwards, searching, blatantly wishing for an answer. Neither of us had really realized, on this, our sixth-month anniversary of ever talking, that we were tongue-tied so completely. It was all the clichés, with all of the passion and none of the fears. Polite reservations ruled our actions. You said platonic life-mate lover. I said yes, but we agreed it made no sense.

You know how we also agreed it would be silly of me to ever ask you to leave him? I thought so then, but by the middle of February I was lost in your green eyes. I love green, you know. That’s your fault. I wanted to curl up in your eyes, wrap the color around me and settle down for a nap, dreaming of viridian seas and indigo skies. I wanted to steal your perfume, the one with the intriguing name, the one that made me smolder on the inside; steal it and make a living off of breathing you in and remembering your hugs and how we slept side by side.

But the photograph tells none of this. None of the agony of jealousy, none of the grief that he was never good enough for you, and you didn’t know. You can see none of my thought process, none of my resolutions to stop thinking of you, stop visiting you, even stop speaking to you altogether, after the gauntlet was thrown down and the challenge surrendered.

I could sense you from across the room, you know. I could feel you watching me, smell you heading my way. I wanted to sit on the edge of your bed and wrap my arms around your body, watching your reflection smile just a little bit and shyly look away (but you didn’t do that; I never saw the corners of your lips turn up after the phone rang fatefully). I wanted to sense you in any and every way, wrap my right arm around your body and be painfully aware of the warmth of the small of your back under my palm as bass pumped in our ears, telling us we were adrenaline-rushed and perfect.

But for now, I will be delighted with just this one kiss. It is really more like two or three or four. You are happy now too, and camera-crazy. You can’t see all of my face, but we both know I’m grinning happily, making faces. My azure eyes continue gazing upwards as the flash goes off, and you move away. My eyes close and wish you closer. You giggle in that way that you giggle, and I swoon.

We went off dancing into the night. It was salsa, remember? You clapped your hands with glee and I fell and I fell and I fell.

But the picture doesn’t tell all that.

[maybe you are...]

Maybe you are Rhode Island.
Maybe your hair trickles through my fingers like sand,
or a salty handful of the sea.
Maybe your body is smooth like dunes,
rolling, almost white in the sun.
Maybe your eyes are pebbles I pocket on the shore,
and the roads I follow everywhere.
Maybe your hands are the waves,
tickling my feet, beckoning.

Maybe you are Massachusetts,
and I trace the curves of your body
like back roads on a map, or in my memory,
sliding my mind’s eye over each hilltop,
each empty palm, or bony hip.
Maybe you are mountains in the distance,
wrapped all around my horizon.

Maybe you are home,
something I call warm, or safe.
Maybe you are a house,
woodstove burning,
chimney sighing soft grey smoke into the night.

Cathedral

we were cloaked in blankets
do you remember?
slender limbs propped
to suspend this cathedral
between our fingertips

the way the cloth fell
and your face was never fully visible
in the dark that was faintly red
and the quiet that felt like a Sunday afternoon

and your breath was slowly there
and I made sure to listen
to the curve of your smile,
each intake of breath,

and when you finally spoke
the words were small and white

Providence (from senior project)

You are the city.

You are teenagers lying, maybe reading or writing, in the grass; blue book in your hand or palm to your cheek. You are the delicacies of the afternoon, bathed in the warm light of summer. I could almost take a bite from it, could almost taste the cherries in her hair, lime- or maybe watermelon-flavored Jell-O in those vivacious blades of grass.

5 AM hits. You are sprinklers ejaculating at dawn, climaxing for what seems like minutes or even hours, but was only the slow blink of an eye, the sedated stirring of coffee, a half-empty packet of sugar tossed into a trash can. You are light coming from nowhere, leaving no shadows, no regrets. You are happy hour, lights out, 5:30 Dunkin Donuts, empty streets. You are a nap or maybe a farewell in the intersection of Thayer and a name you forgot, or never knew. The traffic light changes, nothing moves.

You are stores closing at 2 AM; a glance over the shoulder, down the street. Curfew’s a funny thing. You are a living city now, asleep for the moment, still safer than the days before the Prince. You are signs of this newfound safety surrounding: gleaming blue lights and the nod of a security guard. You are the absence of a fear for your family, yourself, your florist, the man you see riding his bicycle up Thayer St. every morning…

Someone shot him, you know. Last week, or a week before last summer. But that is nothing. You weren’t listening hard enough to hear the week-old echo of a gunshot, only hard enough for the locations of the nearest ATMs and a dismissal, and then you were gone, out the door to scribble down those ideas you always wanted, hoping to capture a moment before it’s gone.

You are the dull thud of a bass rising up from headphones that sound like the ocean, the drums that sneak in to tap you on the shoulder, kiss your cheek, then twist through the membranes in your head, mapping out the streets you plan to take that night as you stroll the sidewalks in search of a free slice of pizza, a drawing in black ink. You are the color of eyelids closed in the humidity, the color of the dark, the color of the sound, the ripples in a grey-green shirt I want to touch, maybe cling on to for a moment, maybe hold his hand.

You are the lips that crossed out the words I wanted to hear; the mouth that formed the syllables that made pocketeer, lockateer; long shock of hair; or eyes I couldn’t meet.

Your laziness, your tranquility and your haziness become the crosshatching of streets; the bridges on Waterman and maybe Memorial; the canal-called-river; the lack of pigeons; the sound of a saxophone dancing through the ambience; the smell of fireworks from a park on a hill; a bonfire waiting upon a corridor of dead fish, belly-up amid empty bottles, cigarette butts. You are the uneven faces and distorted cobblestones, the pedestrians stepping lightly around puddles.

I would sit on the steps beside your wretched river and reconsider why I still love you: your orange eyes and saxophonic tendencies. I followed your whistles and whispers, you called me there into the night, as hands clasped, lovers roamed and no one noticed my internal passion for such a spotless town. Your clean streets; swollen pigeons missing, no nauseous rainbow polka-dots rippling on feathered necks.

(another piece from my senior project)

her eyelids gently drop
to narrow this sultry aperture;
his eyes are getting dark
and she is finding herself lost.

there is a path out of here:
a trembling trail,
down his chest, to rest
above his waist
and her hands can feel
these ridges in his hips
and she can nearly taste his lips,
with her heart up in her throat.

and as the sun is rising
over skyscrapers,
to kiss the grass with dewy rays of light,
she brushes a sleepy hand—
once—
through her hair,
and bids him nothing,
but goodnight.

Wooden Leg (from senior project '06)

you were not there when
i heard the story
of why your leg was wood
(there was a war and a plane
and they almost bailed-out,
but you still landed okay).

you were not there
when mother told me
you watched deep throat
on good friday
and banned it from your city.

you were not there
and i was not there
the time my brother stepped into a box
and hobbled around, one-legged,
telling my mother and her sister
he was you.

and i was not there
when the sailboat escaped
and your sons swam out to help
and you only had one leg.

i was not there
the day you caught the biggest bass
in your plaid pants
that were either yellow or blue.

but i was there
and you were not there
when we hung the fish
above the door in our new house
and when we named it after you.

and you had only just left
the day they all wanted your leg
and my mother’s sister won in the end.

you were not there the
one thousand times
we called you The Judge
or recalled another tale.

but i still smile when
mother says your name,
and i still see those things that make you family:
my uncles’ ears,
your balding head,
the eyes i almost know;
and sometimes i wonder
if you still felt your leg,
late at night,
and looked down to only a shadow.

(another piece from my senior project)

It was only one word she scribbled;
one or two, or maybe three or four.

It was no more than a sentence…
or a paragraph; a poem,
or maybe a phrase wrenched
from the gut of her favorite song.

It was for fifty-four steps and
a handful of coins—
half-dollars, nickels, and dimes—
down from the top.

It was for graffiti and rhythm;
it was for paper and paint.

It was sour lighting,
fluorescent, cross-eyed, slow.

It was vines of spraypaint twisting,
perilous faces portrayed
in this stenciled spectacle.

It was the loud bang of a heavy door,
the mad dash to exit before
our paradise flooded,
our sense of awe interrupted;
coins and phrases all abandoned,
save maybe thirty-something cents
and a shadow of a name.

(from senior project. can you tell I can't remember titles?)

She was made of neurotic epiphanies of color;
purples twisting down to hiss
with lime along her ribs,
turquoise dyed indigo
in the slowly fading light.

She was a splayed-armed girl,
open-handed crazy,
marked by palmfuls of angry hair;
Medusa-smiling locks
shocked pink and magenta.

She was all-out akimbo;
Chinadoll fine,
but fierce like a knife.

She was blue-veined beauty,
dapple-eyed madness
outlined by scribbled-out sentences;
eyes like circles cut from a tree,
whose rings spoke a different language than age,
but rather strings of fairytales
that only ever began in Egypt,
and only ever spoke of a borrowed umbrella,
a missing belt,
a too-shy kiss she probably forgot.

(yet another piece from my senior project)

I was four. I remember that because that was the day I became four. You left that day and I’m not sure I knew at the time what it meant. You were sick and sleeping in the extra room downstairs. I wore my white dress with the pink flowers, or the pink dress with the yellow and blue flowers. The cake was outside on the table, the glass-top one, isn’t that right? The hall to the kitchen was yellow and the carpet on the stairs was blue. I remember because I fell down once and ended up at the bottom, spinning and dizzy, but giddy from my trip. The carpet was thick and felt like maybe a very stuffed teddy-bear, or sandpaper clouds, puffy and not-a-very-bad-headache.

I remember I offered you a slice of cake, but you were sick and you smiled and said no thanks, but later Mommy told me you could only drink your pink milkshakes, which ended up being strawberry smoothies.

Mommy told me I was in the room when you left, and I think that is why my eyes get wet and blurry when I think of you. I always called you my favorite, you know, and I was only four. What does a four-year-old know about favorite? Mommy said she took me out of the room when you were gone, but I don’t remember. She said later the extra bedroom was empty, and I saw.

So I watched Star Wars with Conor. I’ve always watched Star Wars. You were the one with the original three. Now that’s ours, and I love them. Yoda went quiet and disappeared, and years later Mommy told me that I turned and told Conor that you did that.

“Uncle Kevin did that!” I said. But I don’t know if that’s true. It might be, like the time my brother stuck his foot in a long thin box, and hobbled around saying, “Grandpa Joe has one of these!” because Mommy’s Dad, the Judge, got his leg shot off in the war and had to wear a wooden one, except when he went swimming.

I remember we went to the Air and Space Museum in D.C. with you, I think, but I don’t remember now; I always thought it was the zoo, but I have this photograph and it says no. Do you remember my doll? I called her Broken Baby, but only after I bit off most of her tiny hollow fingers. You can see her in that photograph of you, the one where you are holding me, and I am wearing my navy-blue dress. I hardly recognize your face. I feel my body hanging down, the corduroy, the drooping tights, the soft canvas of Broken Baby’s torso…


… still your face fails to fade in. I cannot feel the tickle of your mustache on my cheek, or your breath on my pale hair. I cannot imagine the way you might have looked at me, or the way you might have looked at me a decade later, when I had grown up at least a little, and I might be your beautiful little niece.

Mother (from my senior project)

I wanted to tell her she was beautiful,
but that was my big baby brother
and I was not in the picture.

Somebody told her she was beautiful,
I’m sure, and that is why she wears her ring.
and that is why she loves her little boy.

I still want to tell her she is beautiful.
Did you see her brown eyes,
overflowing with love and exhaustion?

Because she is beautiful,
even though I never tell her enough;
she is always the most beautiful thing.

Metaphor

I wanted to write a metaphor about the way I feel when
your eyes grow large and I know you want to tell me I’m beautiful,
but your pupils are not made of onyx,
and your gaze does not turn me to stone.

I couldn’t compare us to Greek myths;
you are not Medusa, and I am no Venus.
Still you manage to see beauty in these blue eyes of mine,
these long limbs, these bony hips,
and leave me breathless and still.

There were no fireworks,
no thousand sunsets, no gleaming trombones,
no butterflies in my stomach.

It is only that suddenly we are alone,
and there are rabbits jumping in my chest—
and a lake pressing behind my eyes—
each only wanting to find their way out to you.

(another piece from my senior project)

I always hated lying on your bed and looking up at all the photographs you had of her. The black and red dress; the bouquet of yellow flowers (sunshining her face); the blue print, poorly lit. I hated her in her cut-up t-shirt, the day you walked to Easthampton and then went on a picnic. I hated her in her coat and hat; it was winter and you probably thought you loved her.

Gradually my face joined hers upon the wall—the day I bought suspenders, the day I cut my hair— but still she haunted me. It didn’t help that I knew you still loved her, and it didn’t help that I felt I could never be good enough. You had evaded me for so long, how could I possibly be good enough? Especially now, now that you could see what you were missing, and it’s not all that great. I was terrified you would go back to her.

Forget that I was nicer to you, sweeter to you, loved you more. All I could think of was how she was your first love, and the sight of all those tears in your eyes when she broke your heart and broke your heart and broke your heart.

I wish you had a photograph of how hard I hugged you that day, or how much I wanted to kiss you and make it all better; more helpful reminders that I’m not good enough—I’m better.

Photograph by photograph, she was taken down, until only three smiles watched me as I snuggled beneath your blankets and looked up at the stripes on your walls.

Three perfect smiles that don’t scare me anymore.

Baby (from my senior project, spring '06)

tiny white fingers,
like lollipops,
why she sucks them
all afternoon until
she pulls them puckered
and pink from her kissy lips;
why she sleeps just so
arm folded like a blanket,
elbow under chest,
and holds her tongue in place;
why daddy rocks her to and fro
against his sweater,
one large hand full
of her sweet sleepy head.