With My Coffee,
Your friend liked my friend — The Cellar Lounge
You approached with determination, your glass
held with three fingers, another embracing
the straw. You said, “My friend thinks you’re cute,”
to my best friend. She shrank. It was as adorable
as your friend already thought she was.
When I spoke up and leaned in,
you couldn’t have expected the turn
in conversation, from my friend’s folding inward,
to gender stereotypes, to how well I’ve aged
(I claimed that I was fourty-five), to Girls Gone Wild.
When you stumbled to explain your accusation
that shyness is female, I found your tilted smile
disturbing. The juxtaposition of your dark scruff
and large, light eyes did not compensate
for the way you presumptuously squeezed
yourself into our conversation.
When you walked away and returned
to your friends, you loudly told the story
of every word we said. I had to restrain myself
from holding your face between my hands
and forcing you to consider your insincerity,
as you shrugged your wide shoulders as if we
were nothing of any consequence and your hand
on my shoulder was not an attempt at seduction.
If your friend wants to see my friend outside
the shelter of our bodies leaning over the table,
hiding her from sight, I think we could arrange
an accidental collision of their shrinking shyness
and our obvious need to meddle.
(Yes, I posted this on Craigslist’s missed connections)
When Words Fall
Sometimes, I fall out of love
with words. They keep me awake
at night like a partner, snoring,
steady and loud, throwing off
my rhythm like covers in the morning.
I cannot turn them into a poem,
or twist them into a metaphor snug
in a story’s rising plotline. I can
only worry them, turn them over
as they beat against my mind, sticks
held by the angry fists of an amateur
musician, using my skull as a drum. Words,
that do not sound like the wind slipping
shyly through a sycamore’s blossoms,
but a cracked cart’s broken axis, crashing
over cobblestone, trying to reach a destination
distant and dilapidated. I fall from my love,
not flat, not fast, but base jumping, intentionally
floating gently, a petal abandoned
by words, in the hope that they will return,
sorry. Missing me, willing to be molded,
malleable. I hope, words will knock,
a smooth rhythm on my door, beating
the grain like the poem I would find
in them, in love again, with words
that hope for me.
—A.
<3. If you think the poem at the beginning is good, the poem at the end is better. The middle is almost a poem, too.
Air Rights
This air is the smell of trees,
torn down and chipped, withered
until they were good for burning.
Ashes breathed into lungs,
blackened, then broken into embers
rising through his esophagus,
exhaled into the space I occupy.
This air is clean and clear, the smoke
invisible. The chill is crisp paper,
folded into origami birds that will
never fly, the blue of the Pacific
waves that made them. My skin
meets air that bends against
my weight. This air is silent, the paper
blank. Each shadow is a smudge
of scribblings erased, dark nothings
without edges or hints of messages
left by the one who will never
breathe this air.
—A.
"
You’re wondering if I’m lonely:
OK then, yes, I’m lonely
as a plane rides lonely and level
on its radio beam, aiming
across the Rockies
for the blue-strung aisles
of an airfield on the ocean
You want to ask, am I lonely?
Well, of course, lonely
as a woman driving across country
day after day, leaving behind
mile after mile
little towns she might have stopped
and lived and died in, lonely
If I’m lonely
it must be the loneliness
of waking first, of breathing
dawn’s first cold breath on the city
of being the one awake
in a house wrapped in sleep
If I’m lonely
it’s with the rowboat ice-fast on the shore
in the last red light of the year
that knows what it is, that knows it’s neither
ice nor mud nor winter light
but wood, with a gift for burning
(Source: theoryoflostthings)
