Along the highway: 
scutch bangs hang, a lone buzzy 
cane cholla fans out,  
an escarpment looms in its distance, 
and a sudden flush of violet  
blooms at the median’s edge. 

I want a playhouse  
a live-in scrapbook of only the best times: 
travels, conversations and laughter 
over a delicious and bountiful dinner   

and when I touch his fingers I try to feel yours, and
he is a grain and you… and you
are the sand in Seine adjacent sidewalk cracks.

It’s not ideal to tell family and friends 
your favorite Christmas present.  

However, you can write it in poetry 
because everything put in poetry   

disappears.  

What lies next to me is bigger than you 
and stronger than you. And even 
- shall I say - a little more crumpled than you. But 
I’m not. 

You didn’t know the terminology
until your first visit with the oncologist
where you sat on your hands and listened close
as if listening would change the outcome.
It wouldn't.

My voice is here; it’s a crescendoing tune I’m harnessing
into a symphony. What it says is all up to who hears it.

Bringing stained fingertips  
to lips with an unformed question 
at my center about what now 
I might call grace 

Where I said farewell to a little girl  
When next month I will greet a young woman  
Who, when I wasn’t looking,  
When I wasn’t allowed to look 
Lost the last vestiges  
Of soft and round and sweet  

if I do this | for real this time | there will be nothing left of him | just dirt on parchment & those canyon eyes | all the things we would do if we knew better way back when

By and by the daylight journeys by, 
adds another stone to praise the spring. An altar 
says my grandfather, is a remembering thing,  
what Moses built when he saw into Canaan

I needn’t this cage around my heart 
if you will try to beat it anyway. 
I’ll instead bind the bars 
And make you forget 
So you do not regret 
Because I don’t, really.  

Or this backyard: lawn blending seamlessly into forest,  
dappled light on the stream in the distance, cultivated wildness  
of an English garden. Here you could be the kind of person  
who spreads an antique quilt to read Tolstoy among the rosebushes,  
the only person in bookclub who made it all the way through

There is more to life than what’s on
screen. If it were me, I’d take a knife to the film, cut my
own happy ending.

yet this barrier is not real 
it’s imagined because there really 
are no limits—only in your mind 
where your inner critic lives—  

I once believed sharpened
the future tense of glistened and if you could just see

me as gentle then who’d care if I was invisible or heavy
metal or anything but your scum, your resin, your spittle.

And now you can figure shit out

Rip apart any paradox

And reduce us all to sets

And so it was that I found myself inescapably distraught, watching the same reel loop over and over,
words blocking the exits and flicking the lights and throwing popcorn at my head. Until finally I sat
on one. The rest frenetically fled, zipping every which way - it was like a bloodbath, or an angry
bowl of alphabet soup.

and the lilacs remind me of my best friends’  

laughter, so I buy them for a few pounds more 
than someone else might.  

some see letter opener as weapon 
she cuts back the envelope of violence 
sharp to edge 
hoping to not bleed for once 
she still bleeds