Artemis
asks me if I ever noticed
she is a mirage of weeping willows,
thorns hiding under ditches,
and deer in headlights.
asks me what I’ve taken
from grassy pockets on hillsides
and if it felt good in the back of my teeth.
asks me if roadkill is
a slipper for sin
or a bucket for the sick.
asks if I’ll ever stop making homes
in holes as fresh as graves.
Her foxes and coyotes are growing huffy.
asks me if the hunt is always screeching
or never screeching.My throat holds life’s pursuits.
Artemis asks if I have a child,
will I scrub nature from their feet
or follow their nosedive
into rushing water.
Backside Hymn
A stitch of clouds on my exposed back
to keep me a being above grass.
As a teenager, the doctor told me
my spine curved toward my heart.
It wouldn’t affect-
Yet even when sun barks at me
to open my eyes, swollen shut
with dew,
I lean toward what’s left behind.
The results come back again and again
and again
instruct to pound my right foot
forcefully into the dirt,
like I’m not scared of it
and ask my body to know
this life
is right.
From the Mouths of Great Aunts
It seems like life is just repaving driveways.
But the way she tells it,
if it’s with someone you love that’s enough.
She paints the white house through her tongue and teeth.
Kneels sunlight,
that is always already breaking through.
It seems like life is just getting parts
for the broken-down mower.
But that’s enough for me, to hop in his truck
on a weeknight,
and feel like we’re following the wind,
even though I know he knows the way.But we both believe in the magic of gravel roads
and evenings of orange and pink pouring themselves
over it.It seems like life is just waiting for the other.
But that’s enough,
because in my waiting I can
stretch out.
Wind is
the flapping flag of memory.
You don’t remember living until
you’ve done it long enough.
And one twenty-year-old day
I became aware I was living.
My movements are closer to now than on time.
I burn when I look at my dog and realize
this moment is already memory.The same burning when I look at photographs.
I can hold her but by the time I meet myself
her fur is no longer sanctifying my palms.
I have no answer for this,
no answer for the wind that feels
as if it’s already passed through.The only thing one can do
is continue to feel it.
TW: Mention of Death.
On a Sparse Summer Tuesday
Trying to coax out a spiritual experience,
mirage of a miracle,
as I brace blurred homecoming.
Arrival can be profound.
Guilt that it’s her I came for,
Grandpa is a faded knick
in my memory.
I never get out of my car
because I’m too scared the grass is holy
because I’m too scared the grass is unholy.
But on a sparse summer Tuesday, I can’t thwart the call
to flip the plastic bird on her birth year,
right side up.
I hold off the piercing ring
of my stomach.
The panic of fresh pavement.
Acorns outline corners of her.
I want to swipe ‘em,
shove ‘em into my pocket’s craters.
As if she had grown them.
As if a present living thing
had touched her
and waited for me
to feel.
Time
Time hightails the weight of memories
leaving me with the sagging hold
of moss-coated sores.
is threaded
between
swatches of freedom.
is ill, reminding me the sweetness of a fever
cannot be revived.
sits in the back of teeth
like an abiding tombstone.
The more I chew,
the more it spits on rain-drowned ground.
cackles when I try to form it
into a flight of butterflies,
specs of dust,
or dying hair follicles.
Forming
We can sit on ledges that exhibit what has been birthed,
shed our bathing suites,
We can transform into any being.
Cicadas on the hunt for prairies,
that one good song everyone stands
and sways in unison for
at a folk concert.
We can share a patch of earth,
alive or wanted dead,
braided by flocks of phlox.
We can barrel into the world,
be the wind that knocks lovers out.
We can read homegrown stories,
paste their clippings on tongues
of all awkward and open mouths.
We can both lay on your side of the bed
and become one person
who always leans toward the cool side of life.
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