“On Settling”
If I could commit, I would become the girl who searches
for your hand in public. I would be normal like the others
& pick my outfit the night before. I would remember
to ask about your family & give you the kind of listening
you deserve. I would let you hold me before falling asleep
& not measure my breathing to bare it all.
Friend #1 maintains a windowsill garden and loves that you love me.
She is unreliable, pays her half of the rent on the 6th.
Her aloe plants die every season, during the summer from too much
water and during the winter from too much sun.
She finds comfort in her quirks, the bags of tangerines she keeps bedside;
that her clothes smell like lemon from scattered peels in her closet.
Friend #2 doesn’t communicate well but senses marriage in our future.
On the phone, between her second and fourth drink or while eating
99cent bags of Lay’s, she wishes I would commit. That I could choose
a signature scent and not flip flop between hints of jasmine and eucalyptus.
She likes things that come in packages of one: movie tickets, chicken
cutlets, fruit at the corner market. She tells me to choose because it feels right,
and then maybe I could get a good night’s sleep.
I am a terrible sleeper. I don’t like being touched or sharing
blankets. I constantly search for the cold side of a pillow.
If I could get closer to you, I would. I would give you something
definite like a song with no interludes, no string
section to take up time. But I’m a girl who was taught
to touch every sample of fabric.
“In the back-roads”
I was imported –soft in the hillock
where they found me
aching in a private darklong
I absorbed crossfires and became the factional
spirit – I was fragmentist
I incorporated sermon-songs
powdered remains
ashaming to ashaming
I was baptized in heathen-coal
fed on desuetude
I was not destructful
was not destructed
I vitrified –
none of me was the same
I was manyhead:
how can I say
this – I was domesticated
trusted, treasured
I was translucent but not clear –
eyed – put me to your lip-labor –
Don’t forget
what you have
given me,
I will not give.
“Application for a Permit to Conduct a Special Event in Lafayette Square”
Rally (n.) 1650s, originally in the military sense of ‘a regrouping of renewed
Imagine writing this in black ink and keeping
sound regulations and liability The agency does not
I ask you to consider the feelings I harbor
Surrender my own as well I speak now
authorities fail to protect both sides yes –
Do you want a mound a fraying a continuous
everything roses, daisies, sunflowers most bouquets
still wrapped
I present to you the dried petals crushed of a paled
left it to die in such an aftermath Even I couldn’t
Left the bloom in my windowsill Its death was better that way
“Northeast Regional”
Brunette warns only me to stay safe in Charlottesville
it hasn’t – I haven’t been safe for quite some time –
there was a fire that summer, an eruption right off Market Street
there was an eruption within only me, and it happens
again as the train leaves Alexandria for Charlottesville
the train jerks right and left, searching for its rhythm
and what little rhythm I had left is now gone,
then the man next to me asks if all is
well, and I have forgotten what well means –
if he’s asking about my well-being or the unwellness
of a friend when he approached only me earlier today
with his weighted sadness about the United Right –
his eruption of sadness doesn’t correlate, his sadness
rooted a state away, and I had felt that heat having
learned the function of power, its difference from quiet,
the next day – the whole of Charlottesville stunted,
the roads barren how I walked through that thickness
and stole a hydrangea from the memorial to let
it rot on my kitchen table because it was too
beautiful to die there.
“Southern Kindness”
Nails clipped hair parted we take off
our patent Sunday shoes
ready for the stinging
cold of tile floors.
We join together like couplets
forgetting commas and what it means
to be endstopped.
You are regular, white
as the lace trim on your starched dress.
I’m stamped special
stamped as the dear black friend
with coarse braided pigtails,
skin light as an unmarked country road.
We taste danger: drowning
ant hills after sunset
staining our teeth with your mother’s favorite
lipstick because you strain to be more
more beautiful; we lock
arms hold ice cream
watching it drip over
our fingers, let’s make vanilla puddles
so someone
will slip and fall.