Cowboy Girl (11.29, on a crisis of confidence.)

in the dead western air, i am
triggerhappy gunshy.
Marlboro man-girl,
prickly and caged and there is
sunset only in my
indian hair.
such massacres as this, and
we begin to forget ourselves!
but there were never any
concrete terms, only a sensibility for
what is big and
empty.
oh war-poet, your time has
passed to peace and
postcard prose.

Felicia (for mum)

in the cold we wear, we wear
layers because no one ever told us how to dress
different from summer, blisters on our shoulders,
still. (you named it felicia, and)
when i fall asleep, i am
crying. in the cold, it is georgia and
we don’t know what to do, so
it makes us helpless, like
crying in the shower (glistening white tile in the
late afternoon sun and i’m drowning but)
because this is what we wish:
i am five again to retroactively forget my
dreams, (windows open all night, we don’t know
what to do with it) and
i wear turtlenecks under sundresses when
it drops to fifty-five—the trees skip
autumn for the fall, turn brown and
(die please don’t die please).

tribute to what hasn't died.

1.
there is something
living
in the space between you and me, like
tightrope walkers on powerlines.
there is electricity between my toes and
in your eye's contracting retina, simultaneous reflection
like the time you scraped your knee and i felt asphalt
grinding in my bones or how i tug on your shirtsleeve when i
wake up from bad dreams so you'll turn over and
carefully, sleepily, crush the ghosts outwards.
"we're still alive, i swear."

2.
or the way that i peel numbers off the clock when
I'm feeling ornery--
I lost minutes, seconds, washing them down the sink with
yesterday's breakfast and
throwing out the sponge. you apologize to the second hand
in my absence, "the flowers grow backward on the
windowsill now." (they forgot how to drink the sun and
your eyes are unstuck, the contracting retinas,
but they've never been so blue.)

3.
so we grow grew will grow a garden, feed it ashes, and
you draw all the diagrams on sunny yellow seed packets--
but I dig for roots in the detritus of
dead things because I dreamed no one survived last night and
I am hoping to find my stillwhite bones. (more diagrams--
the femur, the ribcage, all the vertebrae, but they forgot the
freckles on your cheekbones.)

4.
in the morning, there are
sunsets in my poems (this era is at an
end--) and i am scared of their symbolism
because i don't like the way
they juxtapose themselves over beginnings and suddenly
the day i met you comes after the
time you broke my heart.

well, here is this, anyway.


i hope the rain makes things colder.