Pretty Girl Distance

I have a problem with the distance.
The 4 steps from the bed 
to the door
is ok.

But the calculated miles
that I can't walk with quiet
footfalls
are not.

The idea of foreign parties
and pretty girls I've never seen
wrenches my insides
like a quick bullet.

The land of approximately 
one-thousand lakes
is a far, low cry
from my golden plains,
rolling suburbs.
I would like very much
to reach across
the many squares
of farm fields,
and the many grazing cows
and poke you in the shoulder,
don't you
dare
forget about me,
I'd like to say.

I imagine the letters
I'll send you.
Buy new stationary,
a blue pen 
and practice my penmanship
so my pretty alphabits
will keep you close to me,
I will nestle you up into
the curve of a q
or a g.

All the many miles
and feet and inches
for maybe nothing at all.
Maybe I didn't feel it right,
maybe you didn't say the nice things
and I am a walking illusion.

Perhaps the pretty lake country
will change you,
or the hot Ohio summer
will change me.

Perhaps winter will come and
we'll meet in the snowflakes
and you'll tell me there
weren't even any pretty girls
at all.

Going

I wonder how many times
I can let people in 
through the screen door
before it falls off its hinges.

How many times I can 
light the lantern we keep on the
table for our storytelling nights.
Sitting in its spindly glow,
throwing our shadows
as we weave silken threads
into tall tales.

You would come up
the sagging wooden steps
in the cricket-time,
the first glow of fireflies
in the tall grass.
The porch creaking in welcome
of your familiar weight,
as the screen door
flies open
like an awaiting, laughing mouth.

We danced across the worn floorboards
of the hot kitchen,
little red radio playing up a ditty
for our restless summer feet.

I wonder how many times 
I can dance alone 
while I wash the dishes,
before I feel your phantom hands
on my waist,
hear your whispers
and snatches of stories
against my ear.

Before there lingers
forever the soft scent
you carried,
deep in the linens
on my bed. 

The stories died down
for a while,
the screen door's hinges rusted,
and a minty whisp
of your voice fluttered
by my ear.

Blackberrying.

It was like angry red welts
and Rage Against the Machine
on the radio. 
Something furious
filtered through a degree 
of separation.
Light under water.

Hands wrung out and 
pale with blackberry-picking
scars, the little briars
pulling and sticking
like thorny crowns
in your prophet's head.
You wear these thin lines,
criss-crosses of 
roads you've taken-
or might have,
had they existed at
that time.

Slender wrists
and a black shirt
with sleeves too short,
as you pull all that lion's mane
into a shining mess
of dandelion fluff
and dig elbow deep
into the bleeding
beautiful bundles
that glisten,
bulbous as happy tears,
hit under the sun like
raging hornets.

Pulling handfuls and 
making your shirt into
a quick basket,
childlike,
forgetting yourself
as you tenderly pluck 
the clustered blackberries
and the branches
tell you no,
try weakly to stop
your greedy, purpled hands
with scratchy lines of
beading red that you will let
scar over,

a reminder
to the short season
of happiness and loss
you filter through these
wispy cuts
as you pop tenuous flesh
of these fruits against your teeth.

A degree of separation
the weeks of mourning each year,
as you gather each last plump
bead, each morning in the mist.
Taking them down the deep pasture.
letting them hit the 
crumbling cement
of Baby
3 days
and 
Ivory Mae
3 years.

Favorites.
And you let the lacy
scarring remind you.

Rosy

Little ghost lips
and the shaky feeling
of breathing sheets,
the curtains wheezing
in a humid breeze.
Little ghosty hands
I wrapped like a 
laurel crown
lightly around your neck.

Ectoplasmic and you
can see my insides,
the quivering of my 
organs
and the flutter-beat 
of my strong heart muscle,
made weak
for a moment,
by your trace smile
and quick wink. 

We are like the teasing
of lilacs by a wandering zephyr,
our bodies
trying to click into place
like little soggy picture puzzle pieces
instead
we sway and bend like newborn
willow branches.

Your ghost face still holds
its chiseled jaw,
while my fingers
become thinner
and wispy,
I want us to meld together,
and so I straighten your face
and we brush
little pale lips
past each other
for an infinitesimally 
small pause
of the heavens' movements.

We become one mass of 
translucent ghost matter
for a moment for so
in human time
and then my weight comes back.
Hands dropping and fingers
ending where they should.

Our bodies fill in 
and the bird-wings of my heart
are hidden again.

We part ways,
as though carried by separate currents,
though a ghostly trace of
pale pink kiss
lingers, syrupy,
in the air.

First Kiss

The beating of tidal waves 
like a deep ocean crash
formed sailor's knots
against the walls of my
stomach. 
My hands,
pale and red at once,
tremble visibly
on the steering wheel. 

My insides are poorly set-up
Jell-o. 
Green a sloshy,
the kind your great-grandmother makes
for those stifling summer reunions.
The windows are rolled down 
and the early summer heat rolls
by and dampens my brow
and I am sweaty and 
terrified.

The brunette girl in my passenger
seat is excited, egging me on intently.
I leave her in the car, my best friend,
and make shaky steps
up concrete steps past
overflowing purple phlox.

He steps out in an apron, messy hands
and a smile.
"I really like your dress"

And all the moments
in movies come flooding by
like static on an analog television
and he is adjusting the rabbit-ears
and I lean in with 
an unsteady hand to
graze the stubble of his jaw
and tilt his face by slight degrees.

A soft, supple
press of lips.
Oddly,
I haven't messed up.
I am quaking like an infant sapling
but he is calm,
a glassy sea.

Our bodies,
seeking for familiar comfort,
find each other
in a warm, lengthy embrace.
I am safe and calm 
in the sinewy strength
of a tall, tall boy who
steadies me.

The sailor knots loosen 
by his hand,
and the waves are contained,
a sailor found,
as a I drift 
down the porch and 
past this lighthouse sailor.

Dover

Life dropped off
like a swift cleft 
in the sea. It's floor
creaking open its
mouth and all just 
falls in.
Silently, a subtle
shift.

And somehow,
it gets darker.
You sink a few inches
deeper into the muck,
the morass of your life,
and the older you get
the shorter you become,
knee-deep in the quicksand
of the hourglass
kept down with the threat
of eternity. 

Suddenly,
you are pushing a cart
through the grocery,
praying you can pay for the
loaf of bread
and cheap boxed dinners,
a gallon of milk
and some toilet paper.

You are watering your own
small green plants.
And wandering around town
in the evenings alone,
eating dinner alone
with the television on,
for the quality of human voices
as company.

You forget to call your mother
and the water bill
is too much to handle
you worry about cold showers.

The White Cliffs of Dover,
and you're waving below,
a little bobbing buoy
with hair,
your white bathing suit
translucent in the waves.

A drop off
and this becomes your life faster
than you can remember what happened
before
this.
Was there ever anything?

Did you really make lemonade with real lemons
on the weekends?
Those books on the shelf-
you've read them?

You come home in the evenings
and sometimes go straight
to bed, without even
brushing 
your 
teeth.

White House

Her hand draped languidly 
across the bedspread.
Her subtlety sinking deep
into the down.

And her downy legs 
soft, resting 
against my thigh,
like a ship rocking at a dock.

Green means go.
The trees blossomed
out the window,
and we both wondered
silently,
how we live so many months
each year without leaves.
Without the verdant breath across
our cheeks.

We didn't have to settle tonight,
and crawled like 
defeated beasts
underneath the heavy 
comforter and starchy sheets,
overturned and tucked hotel-style
by an elusive set of maids.

Her warm breath drew across
my face like
a wind along the Sahara,
across the high dry points
of Africa,
across the low and shimmering
Las Vegas salt flats.

Ankles entwined like
lusting grapevines
we grew one thousand years
in the space of
four hours,
heavy with damp breath
and flung limbs
in sedative sleep.

She sang out bold melodies
in her dreams,
that I was privy to
in these husky hours
of the morning,
stretching themselves awake
one by one.

I whispered slow
responses into her waiting
ears, a soft aural kiss
into her consciousness,
hiding deep somewhere beyond me.

She was an island unto herself,
and I took six ships to get there.
And one each a gem left behind,
a swishing of skirts
and sun.
A tinkling of laughter
like a great clatter of silver
flatware against champagne flutes.

A few were scattered, empty
and longing across her wide 
white room, an expanse of herself.
Our skin touched and stuck slightly
with the sweat of sleep
and waking nightmares.
And I worried about her 
hired help and what that 
really meant,
and why I was here
in her downy white bed
laced with lavender
and beechwood.

Instead, her arm reached
up across her face to block out
the invisible light of the coming dawn,
and she mumbled
and murmured
reassurances towards me,
warm sea breezes
across her private life,
her estate of herself

without me.

Once in a Jungle Some Place South

There are cracks in my fingers
so deep, rivers ran there
in a past life.
My hands a delta
in South America.

Nameless, in another
jungle unknown to 
the white man's sword,
the unending 
prejudice of those,
pale-faced.

Walking with woman-thighs
and a swift trail
of hair swinging
below my shoulders.
Golden and glowing,
here with glossy
leaves and the
tittering of birds.

The city breathes its
sidewalks out,
the hot exhaling
 of the subway's
beastly pummeling
into the dark tunnels,
into the unknown.

Here is me,
golden-toned and
thunder-thighed
with one arm clutching
onto the strap
above my head
in the stomach of this
iron monster.

Plummeting farther
and further
against the jungle,
the roaring of the 
rivers in my hands
and my soul.

These rivers in my
palms,
the past of me,
flowing from the 
heart
of South America.

Moving Day

It was like sliding
into third,

gritty and all
at once. 

Cinder block walls
in a formation
not unlike a prison cell.
A cheap pine bed,
meant for children
half my age.
The air,
stifling.
From August heat,
or new oppression-
I can't tell,
won't ever be able to.

The room is mirrored
like two halves of my brain,
identical in an unnerving way.

A poster falls onto the bed
with a defeated whoosh
in the heat-
A Space Jam poster.

I can't handle the closet small
enough I can't even disappear there.
There is a gross damp feel
under my feet
from the humid bathroom for a whole
hall of bleach-blonde girls who
don't notice one
misfit here or there.

Rented Time

The Persian rug lies under our backs.
It seemed like a good idea at the time,
a cheap bottle of wine,
a good time.
a sweet, sunny moscato
out of chintzy plastic cups.

The master keyring 
singing its soprano 
charm, 
as we giggle through
the locks and stumble 
into a rich surprise
with wide windows.

Your tinkling laugh
as we fall into
ourselves sprawling
on the ethnic
rug, royally wasting
our hours.

The lights turned low
and sultry,
we make shadows on the wall
in the house
marketed
"FOR SALE"
with your name and 
number.