Thank you

I would like to thank Marit for reminding me I can share my poetry. I still write, and I'm actually working on a novel, but I think I've grown afraid to share my writing. Well that's silly. I'll get back to it. It's not like many people read this anyway, I think there are 3 people? So here is a poem I wrote:

This is How You Cook While Troubled

You lean the ugly russet potato
that you hoped you would have the luxury
of throwing away.

The knife is wide and indifferent
slicing vegetable & meat alike
so you are careful with the blade balanced
on the lump on your cutting board.

Salted water boils faster but not
if you stare. At least
it will be hot.

Beat

Beat


A brown strip of leather, smoothed
on one side, cracked on the other
both from years of wear. Fold it,
in half, the cracked surfaces touching
your knuckles tight, the smooth leather
safe in your palm, the silver buckle in the other.
Snap the leather against itself. So loud
like the silence after words like kick, constrict--
the echo of that last syllable standing
in the back of your throat.

When you're dead

I.
I will smile on my pillow in the morning
because in winter it's still dark this early
& I don't have to share it with anyone.

II.
I broke a cup, one of the green set,
the green I might see in a pool.

III.
I've given up looking at anything. My eyes
are voluntarily blind, milked over, staring at empty space
all day. I've learned only the bedroom
and bathroom by touch and even the light switch
is heavy.

IV.
I went to the counter to pay and I had nothing
not even my wallet, just bread crumbs in my purse
left over from a stash of pumpkin bread. The cinnamon
stung my eyes.

V.
You need to break free—this binary view of images
is suffocating. I stare at the line tying the raft to shore
and am too frightened to untie the knot—so the boat rocks
so do I.

VI.
It was ten years ago but I'm not thinking. It is as if
I've found time travel with this rage—like I can feel
all the pain that was, that is and will be.

A Lesson from the Moon

A car turns near
a lighted tree. The blue light reflected
by the windshield, by the rainwater left
at its edges. An eon-second
of awe and as the car turns away
I realize why lampposts have panes of glass
that fog and mist—
  that light is more beautiful refracted
its implication, that soft hush glow
is what we love,
  we prefer light caught
hidden. Not bare, like the broken bulb,
the naked burning filament
staring over you at a table
in a small windowless room.

Craven. (prose poem?)

I feel nailed, hammered in. Craven. I do not know the dictionary definition of the word but it's the word I want to describe the pain I feel when a sob causes my shoulders to pinch in, makes my chest concave with the blow of dismissal. Craven. Probably the wrong word.

I wrote a letter to Bill Clinton when I was in the fourth grade. He wrote back, with his rubber-stamped signature. My mother had the letter laminated. I didn't know it; I thought it was a plastic pocket for the letter, so I could still take it out and touch the fancy paper. I peeled apart the plastic, thinking it was like a zip-lock bag, but the paper adhered and split in two revealing a chasm of dry, tree pulp. I'd ruined it. I yelled at my mother. She blamed my ignorance.

I felt spite toward her, toward "You don't know." I think it's because I did know, I knew what I'd done to the letter, rent it in it's mangled laminate package. I knew what that felt like. I knew I'd wanted a frame, the possibility of exit from the slim place between two panes of glass, anything but stagnant.