Break<fast> (Day 13 Poem: 30/30 Challenge)

Dear Ex Long-Distance Lover,
 
This morning, I found bread crumbs in my memory
from our glorious brunches on Church Sundays.
 
I was in love with you.
 
After a long night of sleep with eyes wide open,
You would pose on my couch,
wearing your no added-preservatives smile as a floater in a pot of full-cream sunlight,
wondering what the best way to love me would be today.
 
8am shopping for pancake mix was practice for our future
adoption agency and child protective service visits.
Raising your child made me feel purposeful, and you would walk with me to anything that would make me more intact with life.  
 
Early morning asphalt would look toasted into golden crisp,
you would hold my big hand in your small hands
and skip
as if we were not grown ups and all those years I had lived without you were
unaccounted for, as if I never had self-inflicted scars on my ribs, as if I had always been a normal person.

You would stand behind me
your nudity shielded from mine by an apron.

I’d ask you to hold onto me,
please.
It always made me break,
not because I am dramatic,
but because this hug had to stick well.
I knew I may never see you again.

I was in love while we made breakfast.
That is my truth,
it is my church.  
It is not for you to deny
or question,  
or belittle to scientific facts,
because it is my heart,
and my heart is still raw and uncooked.

If I could just pour your presence on my waffles
and bite it into tangibility,  
would you have stayed and kept loving me well?

I would shiver molten into your skin,
I would shiver during the withdrawal.

Trains made me nauseous,
and your goodbyes forced their open fingers into my throat
making me vomit everything you had fed me
onto my bedroom floor.
I would dip my hands and force feed it back into my stomach,
because you had made it and everything you are
belonged inside.

Next day,
my bones would dissipate.
You would be seated behind my laptop screen,
with your head on your nuckles,
your  drowsy eyes would stretch a hand into my soul,
picking me up from my skin.

No, I couldn’t do it myself,
because I was a suicidal cutter
and my life depended on every spoon-full of you.

We did move to the same city,
but things were not the same ever again;

When did loving me become a day-job, instead of an appetite?

When did you stop making me breakfast?

Didnt you know it was what made me want to live again?

                 **************

Coffee Violence (Day 12: 30/30 Challenge)

My mother would’ve be happier
if she was a speckle of dust dancing at the tip of my nose
in a beam of crisp morning sunlight.
than she is being a woman, at this moment.

As I sit on a Persian carpet
eying my parents taking sips
from pitch black Turkish coffee
I think
I’ll blame the darkness they cannibalized in neat cups every morning,
for tonight’s freak show.

The woman who memorized the geometry of my body
and the physics of lifting me up
has had bruises that match the coffee stains on a table cloth.

She is jittery, but its not the caffeine.
The bad habit, if you will, is my father.

I never saw them held as tight
as by early day silence,
when their lips puff soft murmurs of nothingness.

I only loved my father at this time of the day.
I realized. It is telling,  
the way you can chose to grip a glass cup with a circumference close to the size of a neck.
He handled his coffee the way he brought my mother to his lips.
There’s so much repentance to catch up with.

He was iron-fisted. so I taught myself to soften my grip enough to crack the theology in the curve of hips,
because it is painful and unfair
that I think
my mother would’ve be happier
if  she was in the speckles of dust dancing at the tip of my nose
in a beam of crisp morning sun-ray
than she is being my creator, at this moment.

                 **************

                        

Consider Blasphemy (Day 11: 30/30 Challenge)

Your thigh has laid out an aisle,
for my worship,
in health and in sickness.

I make my way walking
on my lips.

Behind your hip bone
rests a temple of sweat.

My tongue bends its knees
and rests.
This congregation of nerves
is all ears for the choir in your pallet.

You preach
directions to my proper devotion for your flesh.

Above the dome of your breasts
erects minarets.

Your goosebumps
are footwear splattered around the door of a mosque.

You pour
and I touch you
as if to wash up and cleanse.

I close my eyes
and pray it wasn’t me who wrote this.

A naked poem as blasphemous
should not have cross my mind.
Consider what it means that it did.

                 **************

Politics of X (Day 10 Poem: 30/30 Challenge)

X.
One chromosome.

Sex: X  _
Two blanks.
My mother said
our family overdosed on the last letter of the alphabet.

XX
Femininity can cross out your  futures,
it just depends what border you find yourself within.  

My father had 4 daughters,
In his equation of a (blood)line;
the value of 4 XX does not equal the value of 1 XY.
Sons are always helpful, he says.

I do not know if it is a curse of a blessing that I can toy with gender politics
and mathematics simultaneously.

All I was taught is that
fathers, husbands, and penis owning mankind  
find the weather best at the Y-intercept -
i.e. The intersection of a line with the y-axis,
Where x is equal to 0,- in other words, Zero female heirs.

My father never put words to this,
just one letter volumes,
and a hesitant smile every time he was told he’ll be expecting.

To every culture that considers me my father’s mistake
And my double X  to be an error that only gives him partial credit,
I will say historically, X has always solved for Y.


I catch myself praying that my father knows
that the X he gave me is a cell that made me whole,
an accident that brought me into existence,
and as imperfect as it may seem,
I am thankful.

                 **************

Caffeinated Fortune (Day 9 Poem: 30/30 Challenge)

The gypsy reads the tea leaves,
yet we believe in coffee beans - mostly,
besides minarets and food on the table.   

My mother -in her beloved concern- had asked her aunt to tell my fortune
I should marry a man. 
 
My mother’s aunt sets two chairs on a balcony lined with her childrens’ fresh laundry.
She is a widowed woman, who knows the dried fruit of Damascus
with wrinkles predestined to rule the hunger within the ragged allies swarming with ants and children playing survival  of the fittest.

She had prepared the pot of brown brew over a stove that gives out an actual fire flame.
Houses and people like these had never known electric plates,
let alone starbucks.
During my college years in the States I had countless moments of self discovery,

I learned I’d rather be straight than a capitalist,

and that I’d rather love hunger than love big corporate assholes.

My aunt asks me to drink her heavy coffee, and talk to her about what has been troubling me;
Her nervous temper gets the best of her, and she ignores giving me a second to answer instead she tells me why she thinks my capacity to love a woman is unnatural.

Apparently, I am more interested in her kitchen than her opinions on my love life.
I think to myself; the pot used to prepare my drink had been in a civil union with the
face of open fire for centuries;
its how it goes.
According to my aunt I should have rooted myself in some man’s tiles already,
I find myself not understanding whats so unnatural about two women
making love and coffee in a kitchen like that.

It happens to be my dream,
I romanticize her life, except I’d rather be romantic with another Arab woman as I live it.

I ask her how she makes her coffee.
Her voice trembles as if a concern-monkey is balancing on her voice-strings;
you add contaminated tap water to the pot,
then 4 spoons of ground arabica beans
then you stir,
then it boils,
then you take it away from the fire,
then you stir again,
then you pour.

Much like lesbian sex in the Middle East;
you add taboo to a bed;
then 4 spoons of trust that this chick does not tell on you;
then you stir her between her legs
then she sweats
then you stop stirring and you kiss her neck
then you stir again
then she pours.

I ask my aunt if coffee is unnatural too.
She ignores my question
and asks me to finish the coffee.
That’s the thing with Muslim Arabs,
they do not enjoy questions that make them question themselves.

I finish my cup.
She asks me to flip it and have it rest face down.
I suddenly relate to the cup, people around this side of the globe make me wonder if my face should belong on the ground with feet and flipflop toes.

She leaves me in my admiration for a flower pot next to the wall.
I try to think up a poem to match it,
or at least a line.

She takes the cup.
The coffee had left queer patterns on the inside walls.
She tries to read them.
Her face begins to look like the Prophet’s in cave Hiraq,
when he first received the message of Islam from God.  

Her son walks in,
asking about his lunch.
She leaves to prepare it.  

I leave to see my girl,
who I had missed.

She never tells me what she found in the dirt of my coffee,
it could’ve been something horrible.

                 **************

In The Know (Day 8 Poem: 30/30 Challenge)

My last memory of a memory,
is my Crucifixion on the kitchen table,
something about 5 dollar bills and
my daughter’s name tangled within my ex husband’s voicebox,
who did not write me a Notebook,
once the Alzheimer’s started.

Don’t quote me on anything.

****

I am the daughter.
My last memory of my name wrung by her lips
is a locket necklace I wear around my lungs.
It lasted 3 minutes. Happened 2 years ago.
I am an existentialist,  
whose creator has no recollection of.

The way my mother abandoned the past to its circus games,

guilt acrobatics swung back and forth into our lives

is vicious.

Its something to take note of.



******

Brains are merciless.

Dark rooms are more worthwhile for negatives and picture development,  
than they are for sex and pregnancy test positive signs.  

I could had been a good mother,
a good lover,
a friend, a family business of warmth.
My deathbed will find me,
not knowing who I had spent a lifetime being,
who I would have killed for,
who I had pushed from between my legs.

                 **************

911 call from my heart to my brains (Day 7: 30/30 Challenge)

In case of an emergency,
Break the glass with your knuckles and jump head first.

~ A 911 call from my heart to my brains~

Hello.
This is 911, what is your emergency?

I had thought this over.

Who is this?

I had thought she lacked the human content to electrify the pump.

but then…

Oh, fuck, heart.
Give me a break-
dance me into cardiac arrest.
Again? Calm down,
What’s the address?

Left atrium.

What happened?
 

I’m on edge.

Edge of what?

Edge of Falling.

IQ declining I see.

I meant to wait for a while after the break-up

She does not dance with me drunk, because dancing in pubs

is the equivalent of dog piss.

Fancy symbolism.

She does not want to mark me as territory.

Your typical ignorant gibberish,
We had agreed, just sex. You pussy.
Get off that cliff,
I cant deal with you in free-fall again.
Hold on,
Stomach is upset.


                                                ***
So whats up?

This isn’t up to me.
There’s something about the way she holds a cup to her mouth.

I gave you a range of options ~ FB
Fuck Buddy or Friends with Benefits.

I am not your carriage horse. Your two-way murphy blinds

are so manipulative. As as soon as I managed to

get them off. BAM, I’m in…

L-words aren’t welcome,
not now, not ever -
no Like, no “5-letter words that shall not be spelled”

I’d rather be in denial.

Yeah you are, but she is something.
She is dutch fries with lots of mayonnaise during

Amsterdam sunsets.  

That spells heart attack to me.

Yea, I do feel attacked right now.

You are one harsh logic-fueled moron machine.

I really dont get how you got yourself here.           

                       
I feel…           

You are a hippie, always have been.
I’m the one who ends up regretting the mistakes you make.
You keep being stupid.

My passions got you where you are.
Just chill, THC may help with that.
                                   

I think I’m in freefall.           

Fuck man,
So what do we do.
                                               

Follow my beats, homie.  

Gag me.

Yeah. I win.

Fuck this place.         
I’m terrified.

Shit, I didnt think about that…

Seat-belt?

Ah, too late.

      

>

                 **************

The Tourist (Day 6 Poem: 30/30 Challenge)

This city believes in smoke.
Its governors believes in tourists.

I define my mornings by whatever happens over the cup of coffee my mother makes.
An old man sits in his winter underwear on his matchbox balcony
smoking a virgin cigarette as he watches a 2 foot-tall girl in high heels and an ill-matched dress. She reappears from the corner store, bearing a bag of bread and an infant brother.

This is a sight to remember, not to take grey-scale pictures of.

We’ve made evenings out to smell like burnt thorn bushes,
edging into long nights of pulling air from hookahs
and breathing in the last stranger’s breath.
I can comfortably say,
My lungs are the only common ground I’ve got left with my countrymen.

Its what we do,
gay and straight people alike, we sit in cafes and smoke,
together, believe it or not.
Its the one place where gay does not stain.

Our honesty at its finest,
is a flower boy begging a foreigner for money,
instead of selling his supply of roses.
Mr. Tourist, are you Jesus?

Mr. White Tourist,  in glasses, with a voice full of horse carriages on cobble stone walks ruins my appetite by looking awkward, and reminding me of occupation.
He has a lonesome dinner on a porch overlooking hills mounted by fatigued houses, giving out lots of radio buzz, and infant shrieks.
Its a sight this moron admires.
His eyes skim over the roofs accented with laundry lines and metal water tanks,
its all we got to show for our honest day’s sweat.

Its what this city has to offer you…poverty. Mr. Tourist, is it good enough?

                 **************

Flowers for Ann (Day 5 Poem: 30/30 Challenge)

The way life ought to be, through the lens of people who decide what life ought to be about,
flowers are apologetic.

It is easy to lose people to guilt. I cannot say I had ever lost anyone other than myself.
It was a waste of my time, it still is.

You are not ready to vase the hypothetical scenario of receiving flowers from me;
Flowers in our circumstances would not be apologetic,
just a funeral bouquet for the “casual” in the thing we got going.

I am not ready to give you any flowers either,
because of my history with flowers.
I had grown wild fields of weeds on my palms because I had touched quite the number of people who needed apologies from quite a number of people.
I do not talk about it, because I do not like to talk about myself.
It makes me seem to have known struggle in my life; except I am privileged,
and my stories are mundane.

For what its worth, I do have a passion for flowers.
Aside from the fact that they remind me of vaginas,
Their stance in beauty in a world so broken by its people consoles me.
Makes me think it is still okay to love,
I mean okay to love regardless of being loved back.

I drive by a flower-shop on my way to your house on those evenings that I do come by.
I never remember to stop,but one day I will,
and when I do, I’ll park my car on the busy highway.
I’ll pick the yellow and purple tulips. I’ll pick violet mesh for my friend-flower-boy to wrap them with.
Once I get to your house; I’ll either have grown the guts to give them to you
or I’ll just leave the freshly picked bouquet in my car, until you ask me about who they’re for;
and then,I’ll either tell you I’m a coward or I’ll be defensive and answer;

they are flowers for Ann.

                 **************

Grammatical Seconds (Day 4 Poem: 30/30 Challenge)

My life is made up of seconds.
In the next second,

I have skin in my ink bottle.

A woman who tastes like a gulp of dim
lays on my sheets, like a moist verb,
asking to be embraced by my mouth and nouned.

Her thighs are open for expression.  
Their silhouettes project onto my blinds circling vicariously with second-hands
and ticks.

We have a dialogue in one syllable moans.

I believe in Polaroid orgasms,
and the hammer of heartbeats through my ribcage
with the force to drive a nail in to hang a portrait.

She moves musically
A quaver in friction.

Her nerves stand on the edge of a plank,
and then she free falls.

I curl into a possessive apostrophe,
and hold her.

Her breath rhymes with my hands,
and then I remember
why I had been wanting to line my bed sheets for weeks.

                 **************

Two Points (Day 3 Poem: 30/30 Challenge)

The distance between two points increases with time.

Your warmth is an expanding universe,
that mushroom clouds upon me.

In a parallel universe, my mother sets a pot of soup on my kitchen table,
in repentance for the distance we have lodged between us,
for loving.  
I swallow warmth in spoon-fulls.

I may well be a black hole for lunatics and tabula rasas,
but what it is about you is that I have not come across such a pair of cracked irises
in my entire 1988 miles of looking for a place to nest.
Their outliers remind me of homegrown almonds dripping from trees my parents tended in the backyard of their first doll house.
All I had kept from that memory was the serenity I used to pluck out of strings sunlight on Friday mornings.

I have matured.
I now prefer chemistry over physics and its gravity crashes.

I have undressed in the most inconvenient of places too,
and apart from the smiles behind a crust of uncanny accomplishment.

I’d like to make a few memories with you.
The distance between the event and its memory increases with time too,
until the two are unrelated.

Its what they call Alzheimer’s,
so why think twice about what happens,
why hope everything ends well,
when I’m not even going to have a recollection of it.

                 **************

Murder She Wrote (Day 2: 30/30 Challenge)

The stain will not come out.
From the moment he was born to the moment he ceased to move, he found comfort in buckets of warm soap-water. Self-worth gets dirty, easily. He gets stuck in pages, and my ink stains are permanent.  

In his years of youth, he believe in fields of Black Eyed Susans. His eyes friended scenes of trailer trucks and corners of the virgin wild, where people lose sobriety, hymens, and a whole lot of faith. He found beauty in that. It thinned him into fragile, and that made him human to me. He longed for women’s nail beds; the kind that coil a man’s spinal pride into snail-shell hearts, cursed to move (on) slowly.

His upbringing knew little boys are not meant to penetrate. But life begs to differ with normalcy, and fiction tends to tell stories about the miserable.

I gave him a mother who had a love affairs with trucker men and who made out with the medicine cabinet at 5 a.m. At 7 years old, I scripted it so that the back of his neck warmed garage walls, and his hands had never met in prayer unless they were bent behind his back. Since then, his water broke in the presence of naked women, and so he urinated pants-on the first time his high school sweetheart unbuttoned her shirt.

He was raised to believe in circumstances and coincidence. I wrote him into an illusion of free-will. My pen grew God in its ink chambers.  

He stole his grandfather’s pick-up truck on one God-forsaken night, thinking he could drive himself into the “epilogue”, because it was excruciating and there is no suicide unless I co-signed. He used the dollar bill in his pocket to sniff cocaine from from the plastic bag from two chapters ago. The more words that spilled from my fingers the more of a desperado he had become. He never fell in love, or got married. I wrote him out of the picket fences I gave out to supporting characters.

I could’ve sworn I had loved him. I lost him to real people’s hunger for human suffering; it makes them feel on the subway drive back home, after hours of desk phones, and paper pins; the typical sorry life real people lead in cities like New York.

Suffering is celebrated when the world stops feeling. But, characters break. They hate. They stop moving. And once they do, you are left with nothing less disappointing than an unfinished work.

                 **************

Rain Behind Shut Doors (Day 1 Poem: 30/30 Challenge)

After the door shuts and the footsteps die,
I get lost inside the god
I find in pieces of chipped wallpaper by the window sill.
 
I don’t do physics.
I mother rain storms behind panes,
and feel myself into perpetual shipwrecks,
on her ribs.
 
Broken as my sweetheart was,
I soaked her well in my arms.
 
I was never built to keep a woman’s breath floating.
It is no responsibility for underwater orphanages or people with obsolete backbones.
But I had flowed for this one;
Ached to learn I can love hard enough to wake the dark into noticing a desk lamp
that had dimmed itself down for the sake of passion, for the sake of saying
“You are not void. You are full and I will bow down, and fast on my electric surge to tend to your existence. Stay. We’ll be good together.”
 
I don’t do faith,
but I been bruised shins begging her almighty to live the downpour with me.  
Either grow a tree with me or run for cover from my desperation for her knee caps.
She did both.
 
In love as I was, I poured myself empty.
In love as she was the second I got done raining,
thinned back and cracked translucent sunlight,
I still pray a hurricane seduces her into shrinking the lover I am into a drizzle.
 
I’ll live knowing I walk out.
And so it will go…
 
One day, I will have children. My children will have two mothers.
Every night, my babies will dock.
 
Doors will be shut and footsteps will be killed

                                                                          I’ll lay beside my soulmate,
                                                  then excuse myself from bed,
                                        to write.

                                            I’ll be writing you into falling in love with me again.

I will write us into loving healthily; into not breaking any of the promises we had made.

                 **************

Jet fighter

I’ll be in your hip bone

Rattling side to side with you

Every time you take a boys hand and dance

Remember you promised me that waist once,

I would’ve asked for your womb, if I didn’t have wide hips too,

But I do.

The rise in your voice

Under the tent of my flat sheet is speechless.

Give me the ribbon in your goodnight

So I can tie it around my pride

You’ve talk my chest into a tambourine once.

My woman is an ak47

And together we took shots at things that aren’t meant to be ours

I’ve held her

strapped shoulder to waist

Like a seat belt for a patriot

Like my baby.

Murderers, as much as we are in love.

City girl,

took a bite from her curves

never needed a cannon between my legs

to take her hand and dance.

She believed in me

The touch of black hair

Smooth alcohol as the last Saturday night we spent

I apologized for failures as heavy as baseballs

When she gazed at me through cracked window pane eyes

We are Arab

As much we are people.

I’ve felt for the sand grains

In her roots

Come home with me

Make home in my posture

Give me more of you until

I crumble

Like old men with time

Because if you cant grow old with me

Grow the old in me

get old in my jaws

until no one wants to hear of you no more.

I have crimes in my baggage.

I know the rhythm in her back when we reenact sunsets between her legs

Too well to unpack in my mother’s presence

That last night we spent

new york city had no mercy on me

slow dancing in a room of burning flower pots
seducing the breath out of me

got moist laying naked on top  me

felt her wet on my thigh

That night she broke my fire hydrant of a libido

the ash under my skin was witness

that we had too much fire inside

People speak liquorish,

White truth center coated by black sweet lies

Maybe I know this only when I’m high but

Black sweet lies drip from their mouths when they talk

Under all this sugar, I know they wonder…  

Do we get wet?

Do I taste you well?

do we fuck right?

My baby, jet plane, smashed

She leaks jet black scars sometimes

Jetfighter seducing ground  

Is how I fell for her

The straight in me exploded,

I’ve been conquered since then.

Girl, I’ve been waiting on your curves to get me twisted

Baby  I know the flat in your foot

is the straightforward nature of yours

nothing bent about the way you sway

in my arms like a willow tree when things get hard.

Well, things get hard sometimes…

I wish we could have a pregnancy scare once

I wish it could be a mistake not using a condom once

I wish I could get her on birth control to avoid the mistake next time

Give me a mistake once

That shits on itself,

And that I can sing to sleep sometimes.

Sometimes I like to sing things other than anthems and sirens.

People like me can change diapers.

 Just give me a next time. 

                 **************

National Affair 

Only under your reign, do I rid my soul of its saddle. At night, I run, catching a high off of passing street lights. My mind floats barefoot as if it is the only kind of wilderness I’ll know, as your woman, your citizen. You earth me low /enough to touch the dirt roads pegged with motherless children/urging for the scraped plates we carry as chests. You made me eat all the feeling I’ve got left. 
I am the bullied child, who found loyalty in the distances crossed by bicycles.  I am the poet who writes tent flutters with pulse,  yet my poetry flat-lines in your ventricle.
 
My arms have whispered to orphans begging you for coffins. I am the woman who has fallen in love with dirt that prays God for explosions.

You have humbled our fathers into kings, because at checkpoints check the checkmate positions they’re in, yet we still smile because they still walk away believing one day we will win.  

My throat has become a tin bucket that rattles in your storm, my tongue a withering mop erasing spilled mistakes off your lips. Hush. You say we do not harvest we kill, yet I drive past bodies heaping into hills, memories wrinkling  into young widows waiting by window sills for a fleeting gesture to detonate into bloom.

Stay, because I am the woman who sailed with you once before you called me your sea-sickness. Your politics has lied passed out on my bathroom floor, I clipped your hungover hypocrisy to my laundry lines. I have peeled your body, you confided in my nudity. Next morning we both knew I am that difference between beach and desert you thirst for.


I am the human excuse for your regime. I am excuses. I am the the walks that consumed you into roads with purpose. I am purpose. I’ve become the odd chaos of your bazaars, and the pettiness of your flee markets. We made love in wealth and in reckless war, but we both blame the circumstances. I am the walls that made a castle out of your rubble, and you throne inside, worrying about governance.

Forgetting that I am a nation and you are nothing, unless I say so.                

                 **************

Homosexual Park Bench

I was a homosexual park bench on a Wednesday evening. Sitting within myself, ribs bare as a king’s plate. Chest creaking as the crickets beneath me played symphonies for fountains and flowers and soles and souls and land posts and maybe even for me. Most days I am stuck in a sitting position, peeking through the top edge of a book, watching new lovers hold hands, and smile, already gasping for release from tomorrow’s troubles. Sometimes I remind myself of the hush in her palms, as she vines her fingers around my waist, and how it once gave me the life to age. It filled whatever girth I had with something that moved and kicked like a womb or a tumbling prayer crashing down on an empty field midway to heaven.

I do talk to her, as if she is here, and in this life she’s the moon and i am a park bench. If only we could make concrete pulse. But she shrinks, she comes back full, she leaves. I am no throne for a cold rock and things haven’t changed since the last time I fell in love with her. I age. I chip suicide notes. I pick up. I seat other lovers as they argue about undelivered letters and irrelevant children.

She once said, I’ll have what it takes to be someone sometime, and then, I could play her hair like a violin, watch her bathe in the moonlight, and make it back to her arms. But tonight isn’t my time to be alive, because the moon looks barren as a virgin.

I watch men sneakily pluck daffodils and give them to other men, other women, depending on their tastes or genes -whichever you believe. And those who receive them stare at them, as if flowers can transitioned into a blooming spotlight, part happy, part confused, anyone would find them worthy of a gesture.  Other people, 85 year-old heterosexual couples looking like fragile stick figures, walking with nothing to hold them up but each other. They have nothing left but that child inside them hungry for one more breath and all the different stuff you can do with it, which things like me appreciate, like wink, look at a cloud you’ve never seen before, dig into your memory for that nickname you had for her a few decades ago. 


Sometimes I regret not having grabbed her hand and took her somewhere where people don’t eat with forks. That’s why next time she reaches out for me, I’ll yell; “hold on for dear life”. I’ll Unscrew the nails on my feet and run, run like a man with a heart full of victorious horsemen galloping home-bound with the sunrise clinched in their fists, and then, I will conquer something. Then, I’ll finally be someone.

In my past life, I held her face, kissed her forehead, watched her fall asleep. I also waved goodbye. This life, I don’t have the arms for that. I consider it a blessing.

I want to forgive her for the way she spins like a gypsy making a dirt road out of the night sky, teasing the breath out of me. Forgive how untouchable she is. Some nights I feel like I’ve mothered Distance with her, cradling him as he lays in my arms minutes away from becoming an orphan. I know, when I finally leave him on a stranger’s doorstep, he’ll wrap his whole hand around my index finger, and I’ll tell him; “let go”. That day, I’ll never look back. It sounds cruel, but isn’t that what the world thrives on? I can make a good mother but, some other time. Or some other child.

I’ve watched a fatherless kid teach himself how to ride a bike today, and at the moment when he got his feet off the ground I learned life should not take more strength than this. And if it does…then negotiate with it. Give and take. Its how we all grow wrinkles, lose lovers, and finally shush our hearts and find peace in dirt.

                 **************

What Small Victory I found along The Road

It had been a while since we last left the city. By that point, I had run away from reality so deliberately, I had nothing but footprints in my back pocket.

Once we managed to get my car’s engine groaning, we drove. Our free arms were suspended from the windows, wearing the car’s metallic body like a t-shirt.  Blazed as I was, not even the highway could keep me grounded. We drove past the abandoned bicycles, past fields of wild roses, past the hunger, wooden shacks and livestock. We drove until nothing mattered but her and the telephone poles passing by.

Eventually, even roads became unfaithful to us. There was nothing left but the sunset right before us and empty cans of fried beans licked down to the tin sitting on the hood of my car.

The disappointment in my mother’s throat has been having so much jab in it, it makes want to stand right at the rim of our balcony, and look down. I hate recognizing the moments I will regret once my family is gone. Like being happy with another woman, or stopping my mother half way through a sentence, because I am tired of hopping over the cracks in her voice. I cannot promise I wont punish myself for it. 

I cherish my girlfriend’s silence. She holds my hand like a tricycle’s handlebar. Those are the moments when she makes me feel so giant.We ran with a chest of wild horses. We ran away with fatherless souls, and dreams that often cartwheeled off of each other’s tongues. It had been a while since I felt the void between us, and maybe, I ought to feel.

I know I am capable of loving, because I too ashamed to take laxative pills as long as it’s a meal shared with her. I may be an aged penitentiary, so she occasionally lets me plan my life around her like barbed wire. And I love her for that.

The dark played tag with our eyelids. We laid flat on the dirt. Once I looked at her, she looked back, smiling, and an orange orchard bloomed inside my lungs. I could hold her all through the night like a ripe banana peel, its one of the few pieces of me that I am proud of. 

She makes my body feel like a no man’s land. And as small as a victory as this is, I finally feel myself exhaling.  

                 **************

        

Train Station Affair

I used to love with a heart

that was less of a massacre,

and more like a train station platform.

                                                                                  I used to hold

                                                                                     adequately.

I might have had hinges installed on my ribs

because they would spring wide open,

like cemetery gates on the first day of spring.

Embracing home-comers

as diligently as they did the heartless.

                                                                                    The truth is

                                                                          the first time we undressed

                                                                           my chest had a rush hour                                                         

For moments,

I loved as inevitably as people in crowds

learn each others smell

without ever

drawing boundaries for intimacy. 

                                                     I used to talk.

                                       I used to trust.

                          I have yellowed.

                                                                            I mind the gaps now.

You went by like a busy day

after a few good breakfasts

you would pack what you had flung on my bedroom floor.

                                                     What I missed most once you were gone,

                                                    was the way my floor had texture and color,

                                                                          like vomit.

I began hating you in subway stations.

once you developed the habit of placing me on the wrong side of the window.

You would wave from your seat in the metro,

and it would crash,

making a beach out of my chest.

                                I hated how the saline water would make my eyes red.

I would still hold your hand on the way back home from the train station on market and 31^st

wearing my soul on my soles

and crushing dry leaves,

with intent.

                                                                          I have wondered

                                                                     which you would survive first                                                                               

                                                                             a train crash

                                                                                  or us?

I once made promises like rain drops.

I was once as patient as a cork on a wine bottle.  

                                                                    I have not yet forgiven you

                           for the nights I had to lay a pillow horizontally next to cut skin.

Maybe I had a God but no religion

and made a church out of your perfume bottles.

                                                                   Maybe I am just a poet

                                                                     who loves pain and

                                                               loves lies that make me sound

                                                                       like a martyr.

                 **************

Pulse

With you over there,

I woke up to my own forearm,

An arm I pointed to my head last night,

Like a threat,

Or a weapon.

I enjoy razor blades.

in violence

and satiated silence.  

Makes me nauseate.

I endure it much like I endure food, desks, white walls

and myself.  

I enjoy laxative pills,

And the bulimic smile of naked ribs.

I think i thin

to keep myself within

limits.

I fantasize about curved bodies

The kind you can draw with your head

As you listen to fine fine music.

How easy is it to assume

you can put boarders on the beauty of women?

My love is the end of needles

Stitching me together like a grandmother’s quilt.

But she who justifies my presence,

Despises me as much as much she despises her own mother.

I have the identity crisis of an underwater

island.

The depth of pain seeps through like fire through the tip of a blunt

Thick,

Lazy,

with as much ecstasy. 

These days,

my heart

is the only thing in me that walks.

Holding my limbs tight to its chest

I realize

my cutting

Is an attempt at stripping down to my most humble

Pulse.