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Jailor

I still send secrets through your ribcage

Prison my pieces with your heart

You safeguard my sense where you left me

Empty-handed by the water, tangled madly in gray.

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Weatherman

I wish that I could remember those sunrises without you.

The sandy grit of shattered shells imprinting on my thighs, leaving puckered empty hollows, begging my body to remember the slow violence of their brokenness.

The blood orange sun flowing forth from indigo seas like a baby’s crowning head.

Some painful birth, or a canvas flowering beneath a brush plucked from a box of paints, and I wonder if there is even a difference.

The coffee is cold by the time you pull yourself out.

Enough time for me to fall soundly asleep to the hush-a-bye curling songs of water and shores.

If you wait long enough, warmth will fade from just about anything.

But as lucky as a greening copper penny gummed to the sidewalk,

Light always seems to find tomorrow.

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Timeline

We let the wildflowers grow

Lace in soft mountain air

Sipping wine on the wooden swing

You leapt and laughed

Brassy brightness in old oak arms

Clinging to the creaking cicada songs

Auspicious and alight

Do you remember what happened next?

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Thick Skin

Palming and praying

Over bodies of broken bark

Perfect in growth and fractures

You were not so far away.

God

Light freckling in branches and breezes

Do you know how to pray?

This is how I say amen -

One foot in front of the other.

I'll Keep Me Warm

Steadily straying towards

Divergent threads parsing snowy pines

I saw the hearth

I saw the peak

I chose to climb

Coloring

That’s what I love most about art. There is truth with no answers. It’s all in the seeking.

Spoonfuls of Sugar

Where silence excavates each exhalation

I touch these canyon walls

Breathe in the echoes and earth

Speak aloud the goodbye I've already said

Strength was something I had earned

In carefully measured doses

Medicine for a maker

Warming my insides until sundown arrived

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I Hope You Find It

I wasn't still because I couldn't keep up

I was only still learning why you spend your whole life running away

When you never turned around

I matched your pace cross the compass rose and ran

Your mirror is already breaking babe,

and your love's light is just the same -

A halfhearted reflection from a waning crescent moon,

When I deserve the sun.

- Your pace isn't peace and neither is she.

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Hardwood Lessons

Tomorrow is the first place I fell.

Hand me storied stitches in tangles of yesterdays

Brittle frays with bitten ends

Arrange this graveyard in families of forevers

Nothing but names to remember us by

The laughter isn't lost on me

In these silken seams that shouldn't be

Unhinge infallible from its rust-ransomed frame

Easy come and easier go

Faith was a slip knot tied round my waist

The farther I felt, the tighter the twist

Weave wild and wonder at the monsters I made

As you split me to shattered, I sang

The littlest lullaby I could remember

Between the scorch-earth sting

Of your ignition triggers and my thundering resolve

Grasp my gasp in a white knuckled fist

Today the floor I hit taught me to stand.

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Counting

Abacus rings on the maples

Wishing years would just unwind

Sweet world and sun tea

Growing one in kind

Handshake

I don't know who you are but you feel familiar

I would like to memorize each movement

Fold them into hazy happy days

Let them grow wild and slow in my palms with each melded moment

I don't know who you are but the space between us is lined with light

There is something here beaconing my footfalls forward

Coax me in and draw me close,

I want to fathom this flutter could be more than I've felt

It's nice to meet you.

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Shaper

The middle of nowhere is the center of joy

Climb the stairs on an honest day

Reach the roof and sit to stare

For just a little while, for just us two


The junipers and sagebrush mill about

Their soft sounds weaving canopies

Around the twinkle of crickets and birdsong

The sharp smell of soil, a circle of arms


Your warmth and these sunbeams soaking into my skin

Kiss the places I forgot to love today

The wild meadows and the whispering mountains

Draw each drop of caution clean from my blood


Simmering summer sunsets

Radiant and reckless

I’ll find myself here, lost in your gaze

You draw me in outside of the lines


I’ll find a flower from each field of forever

Softly sew their sweet stems

The petals of each pasture are butterfly wings

Far more fearless than fragile.

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Gold

Take me to your hiding place

Where warm honey softly turns in trees

We are a golden grove of autumn aspen

Our braided roots some ancient arterial atlas

Trace these tributaries till you touch

Where sun spills sweet over me

The forests we have shouldered

Will alight in a daze of ardent reverie

Becoming

When I hand you the light in my eyes

Will you hear each word I have whispered to yours?

Touch the gravity of always and old oak arms and dizzy tiger lily prayers

Here, we know this one by heart.

A Little Prayer

If tomorrow is a place I hope the sun shines sweet and gold

That your hands on my skin are as warm as the light

And your eyes are kind and bright and shining with love

If this house is a home

Let it be ours

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Student Handbook

I would like to hold your hand in the hallway
Any hallway
This polished tile, locker-laidened corridor of junior high school
The Louvre or the Taj Mahal
I would just like to hold your hand

Kiss you on the cheek
Or the lips if we’re feeling really gutsy
Wear your hoodie
Your baseball hat indoors
Backwards
Tipped to the side

Let’s slow dance
In the tarp-covered gymnasium, your hands on my shoulders, mine on your waist
Because we don’t know how to slow dance
I want to let you steal my sketchbook as if it wasn’t the one thing I wanted most in the world
To tell you how frustrated I am with the boy that I love when that boy is really you and all that I want is so desperately for you to heed your own advice
Touch my hand under the armrest of a movie theater seat
Because making out is so seventies or so high school or so grownup or so gross or so…


Touch my hand

Because I know the static electricity that will pass between us could ricochet off the moon,
I want to wait to really know you.
You are far too precious to hold before we know what we are worth.
Before we understand the gravity of letting go and dismiss the mere suggestion of that idea as lunacy

I want to go to the third floor of a building, the restricted area
The basement, the roof
Shout in the library
Be late for class
Miss the bell
I mean bus, I mean train.

I want to love
How they always told us not to love in the student handbook,
the right way.

I missed a lot of bells, busses, and trains, to reach you,
I was late for a lot more than class
Late to say “I love you” to all the wrong hearts
But that hesitancy was all just the pause between the prayer and the amen
Waiting.

For here,
for you,
and now.

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Daydream Litany

I will love the way your flannels feel against my summer skin, hiding me from the window’s soft breeze

 

The way I gently pull your glasses from where they’ve slipped on the bridge of your nose, after you’ve fallen asleep on the sofa to the drone of NPR

 

The way you bring me coffee in bed on lazy Sundays, just enough cream to turn it the color of my childhood room’s walls

 

How I will make dinner with you, sipping white wine and kissing by the counter

 

Our little breakfast table with the yellow cotton cover, and the mason jar of wildflowers I refuse to let go stale

 

Our bookshelf full of creaky bookshop treasures

 

The way you will dip me upside down, Dirty Dancing style, as you kiss me hello after work

 

How you won’t mind my incessant singing as if no one can hear

 

I will love the sunlight bathing our window seat in the bedroom

 

The old record player’s putter when the vinyl is through

 

Our trips to the market and the bouquet you slip into the basket while I’m counting coupons

 

The way our dog’s feet will pad softly across our aching wooden floors

 

The box of old letters in our dresser drawer, from times both oceans and little living rooms apart

 

The mingling of our handwriting on our grocery list by the fridge

 

How you still send me a postcard every time you travel

 

The way I will pull all of the covers to my side every night in my sleep, but how you will forgive me time and time again

 

I will love kissing your shoulders, running my lips over the freckles sprinkled on the nape of your neck

 

Our bathtub with the clawed feet and my organic lilac soap that you refuse to admit you use

 

My Hunter boots towering over your loafers beside the door

 

The tree house we’ll build together in the old oak tree and the nights we’ll spend there, counting falling stars

 

I will love Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong—dancing barefoot across the kitchen, my cheek to your shoulder

 

The farmer’s stand on the corner of the street, and the carton of strawberries that won’t make it the walk home

 

Christmastime strolling the avenues with breathy snow drifts settling in our hair, Vince Guaraldi flavoring every moment and our little tree with the crooked star

 

The chalkboard by the door where I’ll leave you sweet thoughts

 

Our jar of pennies for a rainy day

 

The sound your keys make in the door when you return home

 

The notes you slip into my work-bag while I’m in the shower

 

I will love the quiet rain stuttering against the bedroom window on soft nights, while jazz pours from the speakers in the corner

 

The whistle of the kettle, two cups waiting nearby

 

The way you drift off with a book draped across your chest

 

Our collection of photographs, scattered across every surface in mismatched frames

 

How your beard will turn my chin rosy, but I’ll keep on kissing you

 

Pressing our palms together and watching your fingers fold over mine

 

I will love the sweet strum of your guitar from the den as I sit down to write

 

The way your eyes light up when you laugh

 

The way I light up when you laugh

 

Our wicker basket of laundry after doing the wash, our linens tangled together

 

The bouquet of dried lavender from the fields near our home, hung over the stove

 

The night in the middle of winter when we built a castle of quilts and cushions

 

My grandfather’s apron that I’ll wear as I cook, and your banter of domesticity that will earn you a light-hearted swing from the wooden spoon in my hand

 

My little green seedlings growing by our open window, waiting to be planted in the window box on the balcony

 

I will love the days when we get into the car with a map, a collection of music, and a camera—setting off with an undetermined location in mind

 

I will,

love,

You.

 

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Catch Me If You Can

I used to watch stars and wait for them to fall


But that isn’t how the world works,

or the sky.

Shrapnel

Between your lines I write

Wartime letters begging you to stay

Morse code movements, still tap dancing love

Counting knots in my belay


And I’m so scared to play that song

I miss the floor beneath my feet

While my ears ring with church bells

You sound lonely in my sleep


That silver shine river takes us and

Here we’re soft as water

Prayers and stories to be found

You, are yesterday’s daughter