3 Poems for Feb '23

A single green sprouting thing / would restore me… .

If you discover a very thick and deep shadow, be sure that there is, somewhere within you, a great light. You must learn to use one to reach the other.

— Mirra Alfassa, later Mirra Morisset and Mirra Richard (February 21, 1878 November 17, 1973)

Love is a gift / that springs from an unlit spot. Resin and rue. / Even when I’m in the dark I’m in the dark with you.”

— Alice Fulton, from “Triptych for Topological Heart,” Poetry

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hypereosinophilia means my white blood cells have Aries placements 

It's Friday night and I fill my bathtub with tepid memory only to walk outside, barefoot in February
ripping the dead grass
staining my arches with gravel
palms full of mint and clay

new rosemary pushes through
the remains of summer
Rilke said: even when we don't desire it
God is ripening

When it comes
When my time is near
I will, still, not be ready
I will text death “I'm on my way”
Even though I haven't left the house

When I die
Don't bury me like everyone else
Take me apart on a table. Strip me for alloy.
I know my kneecaps will fit under that wobbly dresser. Plug my spine into the lampost on the corner. How could I hold something my whole life and still believe my hands will end up empty

My atoms still flickering
Molecules postering
more than slouching
towards Bethlehem

Please do not mourn whatever emptiness
That is lost in the name of a new light

As with love. “please, not here, not right now,” our hearts object
Hear (comes) the evidence:
blinding and irrefutable,
so bright you can feel it
that buzzing in your head
rattling in your chest

It makes a noise
Like wings
Like leaves
Like electric sand
Amen.

---

The registrar’s office throws a 500 error

The lab tech takes the 6th vial
pats my arm and asks if I know how lucky,
remarkably lucky, I am
to roam the halls of life once more

When you start again
no-one reads the sign on your door
That’s when I whisper
to the nail, “thanks for nothing.”

And stand over
the ditch of my old lives, all of their belongings
seized and forfeited. Fenced in now,
what a cold morning—

glitter scabs on my bathroom tile,
philodendron climbing up the corner of old dreams,
with their artichoke
hearts soaked in oil.

I want to hold the weight of everything,
without flinching
a haunting sense that
what was lost must be transformed
before it can ever be found

It’s just down the street.
My neighbor called after the storm
Delivery boxes stacked on their porch,
damped and dented, dripping their ink
staining my hands and collar as I carry them home,
the pines drip, the earth drips
and sticks to your floor

God snaps three talons off Michael
and holds them out for us.
Rise or wise up, they both say,
and trade your sorrow for [more] hands to hold

Yes, your wings are still beating
Yes, our hearts can go on singing
[I have to] come down from this tower
Before it swallows me whole

---

Sparkling, shimmery, synthpop

Someone once swore I had Ophiuchus
down my back
shoulder blades sharp enough,
to slice the serpent
cursed on the days when this disorder
makes me bleed
I have no lining to shed
but ask you to hold my hand anyway.

Speak your distilled water on me,
Nudge my neckline with a text at 3 am.
I want to watch another poet undress,
take off their pages,
while the forward someone else wrote blurs
through the tempered glass of
another skin against another skin,
and I turn away
to keep from craving
any form of anything

Imagine my disgust at discovering
I am perceivable, readable, and uncomplicated,
that I could find nothing in me worth noting
except for this hex of being stuck here for 3 years
and no way to release it.

I made a day-long playlist about sex.
But it still leads to music that leads to leaving.
If it wasn’t for the clock of my body imitating
the rhythm of loving someone, I could forego
this delayed gratification forever. There’s no need
for that fog over your face, silver utensils melting in your hot hands pressed
against the wolf of my body, your banshee howl shattering this two-way mirror
that allows you to see straight through [me]

life will present itself to us
as we walk out of the bathroom,
toothbrushes still in our mouths,
it’s ready and waiting

like the steaming drip of anything melting,
while the walls blister
to your ritual reading of Rilke,
and the print of your palms permeating the walls
anyone has built

I can blame anything on this, your hollowed hips,
The flip-flop that made its way into your stomach.
I can’t stop striking what life keeps trying to douse
Preserve this moment with a prayer
Turn the air into amber with your arms

Kiss me into deep bass that fills the room
I want to dance till our feet tell us to sit down
Love playing so loud 
You have to lean in
to hear anything else