Below is just a few poems I've written over the last spring semester of college:
Non-glow
When walls are backward towns
painted over with beige,
When your all is a roof stuck
under the tongue of a spoon.
And everything is
the cupped hands of air.
The world turns itself
outside your body.
Life escapes
a highway blur
in a camera lens.
We blink out of time
and turn into absence.
A corpse is not a missing person,
but a body missing a glow.
The end is a container of light
someone eclipsed with their hand.
Another Body We Don’t Share
We wash what we wear on the outside
and fit into the person leaving the house.
A soul is another body
we don’t share.
I always thought of it as a circle,
but mine is water-clogged
with tumbling.
What do you do with dry heat?
Lint collects. The vent blows through
the blurred slot of always looking
through what we don’t have.
When stone walls are the air
in my chest,
I have to breath past myself.
The house is a white sheet
blown up with air.
The washer stops running,
so continue like nature.
Be the climb of branches
that choke out the machines.
A line can’t drag itself
between the house and the yard.
What is domestic about nature
that we string it to ourselves,
and where does creation go
when God stops talking?
People are Distances
What takes place in turning
the knob to cold? Some twist
of water falling out of a head?
Some veil to shiver behind?
People are made of things
which break at glances
and collapse into words.
Some blue things bob under
black and surface as a bruise.
Everything ends,
but you wake up.
The world is carried
into a frown.
People are distances
you can’t walk towards.
That’s why mirrors don’t work.
The dull shine of your face
replaces the wall.
World Weary
Religious bones close
a grave inside your body—
everything blue
under your nails is real.
Your eyes turn up
toward the black
and rest on unblinking stars.
Anyone who isn’t a hunter
looks at a deer like a soul
struck in the open field.
World weary,
you can’t remember
how you came to be.
You fold your hands.
Buried Under Creation
An action requires consequence
then doesn’t. God sometimes a wife
who wipes down the world
with blood instead of bleach.
We are here. Or, you are here.
I’m just in the room with the drapes
unbundled and stretched over the panes,
so we can see only so far.
My eyes see until they don’t
want to. Then they are the fog
lights lowered to the asphalt.
I tell my friends, “I don’t feel
like a Baptist, not even on Sundays.”
Maybe the body looks for salvation
in the form of lungs,
realizes everyone has them,
and only goes back for air.
Age doesn’t remind me
of anything but peppermint hands.
I think of my grandmother
and wonder
if I’ll live in her fat forever
of forgetting everyone I meet.
Dementia is a sort of grace
to yourself. Not to others.
I sometimes wish nobody
met me. So I could be a secret
instead. One you’d bury under creation
and never miss. Because you wouldn’t
know me, or the person I’m becoming.
