The Poetry Marathon

In the Same Place, Another Must Go Also

loam loose underfoot, dark tome
for a quarrel rested between forest floor
and a lyric of mantra on the tongue, brittle sand
crisp from wind droning. i take a wisp
of gin on my lips and my father’s shovel to the grove.
i also take the outlandish shaking of flowers under my arm, cry
petal, a flurry of pink like blood spoors, ladle
heads in their slumped dryness, into beds
where my mother beneath tickles the bare
toes of petunias, unknown to the noses of wandering does.

dream girl who’ll never be #51: Underground Punk Show

as i chug the eighth note along,
i flick my eyes to glimpse
snapshots of the crowd,
then feel the heavy call of bass
in my hands, look down again,
to its centipede neck.
she is watching
when i look outward,
all eyes & slight head bobbing,
hair like the curve of a cardinal,
back against pillar, farther away
than she may seem.
within me, i know i cannot break
rhythm, despite the want to
search for eyes
in the black miasma of eyelash
& dimmed venue lights.
when our set ends, i wonder
if she will still be there,
or if the music
made me hallucinate.

To the Woman Who Died in the Ponderosa Villas Apartment Complex

We found your blouse–the one with the speckled lilies that are so small they look like dots of un-buttered popcorn. I wonder how the belligerent eyes of the fire, its lashes rising as if in question to the slated silhouette of night, didn’t see this, consume its flimsy blue fabric. What were you cooking at 2 in the morning? Were you like me, binging anime and sad songs, pulling at your drink, while your forgotten Digornio didn’t get off on the right foot and regurgitated flame? What were you sleeping on? Was it the unwilling fight against inevitable eyeshut, dreams of a future far from these weak walls, or the numbing of post-work insomnia finally wearing off? Was it drugs? But believe it or not, I somehow dredge up jealousy from all this. I want to sleep through disaster; I want to be unaware of my surroundings. I want to sleep through all my accidents and mistakes without feeling a thing. My anxiety burns me from inside out, invisible flames forcing me to flail for a temporary extinguishing, a purging of restless blood and nerves stamped with an unease levied by social malcontent. I can even light my voice on fire, but this is a singular plague that the heated wisps of will never spread. Smoldering migraines and the searing smile of cheap pocket knife gathering blood tinder isn’t enough to quell a body waiting to be ash. I’d burn my mouth on your fatally overcooked food so I wouldn’t have to speak another failed ignition at being a realistically compliant member of society. I envy you because I can be dead and feel everything at the same time. Being awake and living are two separate things. Why do you get the easy way out–trapped and escorted to a numbness unrivalled. To you who died just yesterday, my lukewarm jealousy will never reach a boil. To you whose lungs are now tar black, we have your dog, safe, who jumped down three stories to the pleading arms of the firefighters calls. To you who didnt survive after four hours intensive care, I’m sorry we never even passed through each other’s eyesight, a floor apart. I’m the look away. I’m the downcast eyes. I’m the one forgotten. I’m the disappearance from crowds. I’m the solace in solitude. I’m the heavy hands that fumble at belonging. I’m the feet that leave early, I’m the lungs that choke in hyperventilation. I am an unrecognizable plague. I’m a self-employed and reserved arsonist, always and only burning myself. This is my caloric eternity. I bite my nails and lips to fuel the kindling of nervousness. I want to burn without feeling the sting of shaky blood and panic. I want to burn worry and its terror. I want to burn the world to extinguish the ever-smoldering children of anxiety.

home, welcome

i burn chamomile
in our den,
lull the embers
with the heel of my thumb,
sniff the sullen warmth,
its soft tickle
like you
walking in, fingers on my shoulder,
to read another book.
the sun quells brightness,
reverts us to lamps.
breathless, we are quiet.
I think of the Davenport home
& how we searched the chain-linked mile
of pond for an alligator never found, or named.
i put your necklace back on when we left Miami.
Miami, grey as before, & still no laughter,
that same desire for a colder warm
in what you call
my heart. i don’t know
what it is. the Atlantic follows,
its bulbous yearning for us
to make waves, ruffle the salt-mist
where we were sandwiched between
two skies, fishing from our kayaks.
i will never get used to the light.
home is my ever-barefoot sidewalk &
the blister built callouses
i indulge in. i make myself
here & there. Detroit makes itself
bigger for us to excuse
claustrophobia. Cincinatti is an
inhale of rusted sweat, exhale
of brick demeanor.
i read you in glances: you haven’t moved.
the page is different every time.
i try not to shift
unless you do,
from where you want
to be.

Calling to you
holding half a lung back from screaming your name
or yelling through the ambiguous silence of a thousand leaves
falling at once on this November day
almost as if I could whisper and the stems of red oaks would
convey that trickled sound from my lips to the corner of your ear.

The white of your eyes no different than autumn’s grey dome
in lieu of rain and still brighter than its ashen cascade.
I am without jacket and have been since April.
The God that lives outside of my head hunkered over
and listening to all the nothing in there
like there’s only a fan blowing
and silence catches drift.

I’ve never seen the northern lights
or the blood moon
but I have seen you turning to your name
under the purging of every tree on campus
and walking to me
and I wished you could be the first to hear these thoughts
churning like a spark of heaven
in a hellish mind.

I Haunt Myself

Place a pillow
over night’s closed
door, recumbent
light peering
into silent dark.
Lulled to sleep
by a confusion
so desolate.
What is truly
haunting, is
possibility.
Illuminate concern,
at the stained
glow of
caramelized morning.
Wonder if
the tongue-parch
and hunger from
insomniac burst
is a marriage
of constructed
fear.

Why Cities Can’t Love Me like Nature Loves Itself

today I see worlds in vent slits,
caramel tongue of Cincinnati
pollution. you are not my basement smoke
love.
i know you are not my lime pucker
of chiseled trial love.
i know
you are not
my tilted cup of highway hoodie
spilling golden wisps love.
i know you
are not my silver stadium jersey haze love.
love you are not straight line thrown
boomerang back into finger hinge.
love you are not black patience of
screen void in my pocket.
love
you teeter on my feet like heavy air conditioning. love
you cold my warm, my history of heat.
love
you know you are not known
until i reach out
and am not startled.

Corina

My breath is caught by late winter wind,
a deliberate expulsion of my lungs, to feel more like a smoker
or a locomotive. Neither seem better though.
I miss you more even when you’re across the table

or across the room. I was executed during
a snowball fight, dunked under the snow of my demise.
I shook out my coat from the blinding powder, black hat pulled
down over my eyes. “I don’t have eyes anymore,” I said.

We’re all on the same frozen island, subjected to
our burgeoning youth. “I can’t feel my fingertips anymore,”
Alyssa said, bundled up like a desert raider on Tatooine.
I shook your hair as if I were an annoying brother or something.

Your father’s aftershave still looks the same. And I almost forgot
about Kinai, your adorable shiba, and you you kissed his forehead.
Maybe these words are just meant for spaciousness, to help
make you feel poetically bigger than the world, like a transcendence.

I could have reached for your mitten-veiled hand on the way to the garage,
after my execution. We watched Star Wars with your father and cat.
I asked him how his Christmas went and he said, “She was here,”
nodding to you, “and that was enough to make it great.”

We both smiled at you smiling. I couldn’t help but glance at you,
in your favorite movie a watching chair, and see what
your father aludded to: the purity of his daughter,
the warmth of your eyes,

clear and blind to how I want to feel.

tables
after Lisa Wamsley

piled documents and unused candles
on the table between us. can
we adjust our eyesight towards each other
like we do in the dark. father
leans eyes to his goulash, one hand
patient on napkin. my mother on
the phone three hours. Davey,
from the basement. i eat dinner in
my room to avoid hearing the names
of anyone that aren’t fictional or my own.
i don’t feel any closer to people at tables
anymore.
we break up over text & i eat my spaghetti
without choking on worry.

Driving Home

I’m driving back into town and the sun is so bright it makes the air glaze over
as if swales of dust were sprinkling in from the north. Dust, I thought, dust!
I don’t know why I am so excited. I played pop-punk bands on the stereo
all the way back because the sun and sky looked no different than the glistening of summer at its peak.
I felt warm in the unheated car doing 55 in whatever the sign said five miles ago. The road has melted
and I can see its filmstrip face sleek with newborn slush. I love the sound of it curdling underneath the tires.
Receipts crinkle in my back pocket as I lull the car to a stop after 20 miles without a shift in the speedometer.
Its indicator is content, and so am I. Content with the sounds of my own summer beckoning from within
the January calendar. The bay doesn’t even look like a lake anymore but rather a memory of everything
I’ve wanted to leave in the back of my eyes, where the migraines take their vacation time, leisurely every month.
I’m driving so I never have to take my own. I’m driving so I can fall in love with places without entering
their presence symbiotically, but skirting their periphery. I’m driving so I can be the center of attention
for two seconds at nameless intersections that want to be remembered for their fast food joints or
their homegrown boutiques, something for someone to sit down at and plant a memory. I can remember
the places but not the names. My hands turn the wheel to where I parked for a movie here last week
and didn’t cry at the end. My summer was icing over then and has been blizzarding to the point of no return.
The sun looks like a bonfire of everything I needed to forget before the snow: homework, receipts, magazines,
boxes, leftover branches dwindling from this past autumn and its storms. I’ve forgotten all the songs I would play
in autumn, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to play in winter, but I can play anything without restraint,
because the snow won’t seem to go when asked. I don’t want it to go. I want to go with it to ice-capped mountains,
ice-clothed lakes, and ice-paved roads that lead to me staring into revelation in the rearview mirror,
my lungs shivering with cold, the arms of my breath hugging itself as I exhale, think about my best route home.
I want to go home without lying down upon my name. I want to be home without feeling the heater or
air conditioning on as I open the door.
I want to be my home.