Contrast

We're sitting on the bed and he is looking at me
like I am some sort of broke-wing bird
with a new year's party smile,
hollow and drunk.
Time curls around us warmly,
asking for sleep
which he gives like a compliment.

In contrast,
I am a computer screen,
new century channel surfing
with an index finger and bleary eyes.

Outside, snow has deleted the landscape
and it is bright like a bathroom light
exploding after waking up
from a nightmare.

Heat

Each one of me is
a dying sun
and you are the center
where there is still some heat.

Slowly,
black and grey and darker greys
crawl across the grass
to my toes,
pry their way under my nails,

even up and farther,
until there is no more light
and you are a trembling stone
floating behind the shadow of the moon.

Quiet

I am silenced by the
freckles in your left iris,
the way your eyelashes
catch dusk and scatter
shadows across my skin.

Brink

I know it looks like the spiders have spread their legs
and are treading iris in your grey,
but in reality, this is a slipknot that
will shorten every song on our playlist
by twenty seconds.
We will be taken in, cuffed for our crimes
and our conversations during commercial breaks.
The stars will spread out
like skin cancer
and that night you hold so tightly to
will become just another back-alley mural
painted over.

Stranger

She is a red M&M bleaching out in a sidewalk puddle,
steps taken over and around candy-coat color.

I screen my calls for gunshot victims.
They whisper secrets followed by last-known addresses
of the estranged.

I write each of their lasts on a yellow post-it
and press them onto the inside of my closet doors,
then close them.

Coat Hangers

When he is home I am a lead statue
on a crash diet because these sharp shells
crack so easily and my toes inadvertently draw
clumsy crimson battle lines.

We live in glass boxes with wheels.
Mine is covered in fingerprints and he
has installed cordless mini-blinds in his.

He rolls over and smiles, asleep somewhere else.
I watch the sickle slice the ceiling
into hours, days, years and am reminded
of a cabin we made love in two
summers ago.

One day he will come home
and find me hanging neatly next to
the lingerie.

twice.

Head against the glass
intent on the yellow light out in the field
that is visible for the mile or so
until that left turn

and it may take us home
but, the furniture has been rearranged
by persons
not us
or are they us, now?

Did I do this?

-

Eight months of four hundred miles
up in the green and ice
water and oil spilling over if you can't move
fast enough

and you never have - not ever

     you are the first born and you will always be second

(You're my first,
but that doesn't mean the same
as the tracks your car left
in the new snow
when you told me we were near her house and that was funny.

No.
It wasn't.)

Fugue

I slip dark pieces of a shattering vase
behind my eyes
so I only see a wet shade of red.

I have the compulsion to hold my hands over my mouth
when yours is dragging heavy,
like a body.

A field of earth, churned
until it's sick and broken
and eventually becomes just
dirt and smell.