Coda

“When you’re five, endings are sweet.
The familiar turning of a car on your street
in your sleep, and the sighing of brakes
before the door opens to wake you
with the cool taste of night.
The sound of rustling paper—
last page falling on the story your mother
read you, when you’re already tucked in bed:
“The End,” in all-caps whisper—
“Sleep well,” ‘Good night.'”

Cat’s Cradle

We fit like zig-zags, 
serrated teeth
biting in opposite directions. 

We gnashed our hungry ghosts
and lashed electric DNA 
on time’s angry barbed-wire fence,
calling all the cockatoos
to our sleeping tree. 

The child is the one who stayed,
bending the branches low
and, with her pink disarming chirping,
demanded the moon obey…

Moon in Scorpio

I’m an envelope carried for too long, 
protecting my contents; my skin is paper
sheathing over fire that’s learned the art
of not combusting. 
I’m doing the dishes today.
Washing and shelving plates.
Answering my child’s questions.
Driving through a forest in the dark,
the moon in Scorpio and moonlight
twisting my cold feet in their boots…

Gravity

There’s a place beyond the runway lights
where clouds learn to talk to each other.
The air traffic signals
bounce off the silver linings,
radiating light spokes into the ether
and the wheels turning
sound like the music
of departure from the body;
the bullroar hum
indicating something otherworldly
and not quite comfortable
to the habits of feet…

May-September

…I was still new, and you were much newer
and sometimes I think about that, this whole time thing—
all the clocks with their arms and alarm bells
making awkward ticks and tocks toward winter:
you had such little hands then, hands I would have 
held in mine and walked to the swings with,
and everything would have been different

but you caught me at the end of apple season
while I still have leaf-piles to jump in
so get it now while you can—…

Archaeos

for L.T. Rest in adventure, friend… you are cherished and remembered forever.

if you read between the lines
that striate my iris,

you’ll find a hidden reservoir of blue
with a name written on the other side
in invisible ink—

a poem written so long ago
and with such a young and heavy hand
that pen trespassed paper and broke into sky,

until I cried because no page could contain
the words that could describe him—

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