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still waiting
(advent poem two) i bought all the presents careening through target three times cringing at each total. i ordered with expedited shipping. i argued with my love about what qualifies as ridiculous. i sped across town in the dark to get that one last thing. i’ve been pondering how to get my family, with their flip flops and tangled curls, into decent clothes for church. i hate christmas. i wish i could just take jesus out for beers next week, call mary on sunday. or hell, i’ll host a party with stars in the piñata, i make excellent punch. i am waiting to feel the spirit, again, the one who got lost in aisle nineteen as i was yelling god dammit because the man in the puff coat just got the last hundred dollar crock pot. and then she snuck up on me this morning at five a.m. while sleep was still stuck under my eyelids. i remembered in a few days i am going to tell a sanctuary full of children the improbable story, that i actually believe, of mary in the cold dark birthing jesus, and the light that finds the deepest cracks. i am waiting to watch their widening eyes behind the tangled curls as they fidget in scratchy dresses and too tight suit jackets. i am waiting for the opening of dangerous possibilities.
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teaching writing
every day i stand outside a different door and breathe. today, maybe i will make no mistakes. likely not. likely today i will misplace the file, forget her name, miss that planning meeting. today i will stare across the table after you’ve spoken your deepest hurt and all i will be able to say is thank you. thank you for opening up your mistakes so that we can see the possibility in them. thank you for damning the violence done to you without damning yourself. thank you for tossing that memory into the circle so we all taste your mother’s tamales, or cup of noodles with hot sauce, or burnt pancakes. i cry a lot. more and more as i get older i can’t contain the truth, it pours out of me saline on the page. i hold their notebooks away from my body. there are dangerous phrases in here, they could overthrow something. i sneak them out in my arms. later i put on an apron and an old shirt. working in the dirty sink i break the words so the pain comes out. advent
i am in love with the empty church an hour before the service while the chairs are still stacked and the coffee just begins to bubble. the altar is covered in a blue cloth, the spotlight is off. jesus has breath held, hoping the guests arrive. we row the chairs, stack the hymnals. they begin to enter, pressed pants and sparkly shoes. good morning. a small hand in a larger, rougher one. a cane scrapes the floor. a gorgeous hat, a wide smile. these weeks before christmas we say we are waiting for the light to be born into the world, for the first cry, the infant sigh. but mornings like this I think the light is already here. we are waiting til we’re ready to open our eyes. here
i shot out the door into the rain late getting there to do six things at once then i was late somewhere else twice socks damp from puddles a roll of rolos for dinner spilling snapple on the passenger seat i forgot more things than i remembered today only to make it to the end and breathe in the smell of wet almost december but this poem is not going there to a realization we need to take time to appreciate every moment no this poem is about something harder this poem is about fleeing from that moment (many moments actually) at six years old when abuse broke my body and the cracks run all the way into today trying to perform something for you that will approach perfection so this is a little harder than listening to the rain this is listening to the sound of something i could not say then no but i’m saying it now no to the cut corners in search of accomplishing everything i’m going to sit here for a minute engine running fogging the windows singing as loud as i want to freak book
my uncle had books of curiosities hidden among the standards between Shakespeare and Whitman these tall volumes like oversized comic books full of photos. on visits i would dig them out. they were far more educational than the classics: multiple piercings full body tattoos political ideas suggestive practices. freaks. a sideshow in that sunlit midwestern living room. run away and join our circus, they said, your beard will grow, you’ll learn the trapeze. i found out which volume i belonged in, chewing my lip on the braided rug. i fit right there in between the tattooed girl and the fire eater. i grew up to be both a tattooed girl and a fire eater. posted in a dark seething city intersection swallowing the flame leaving the night completely black. the problem of beating
i cried all the way over the bridge it wasn’t exactly that you snapped or the long string of her angry texts or the emails i had hoped to get it wasn’t any of that exactly it might have been the way the light gets caught in the wildfire smoke and i’m down here starving for brightness or something about the way we let intent be obscured by the daily miscommunications and before you hung up the phone all i wanted to say was i love you in between the beat down of the work day and the things i maybe should have done between the questions and the long silence i love you it’s ok to cry it means this broke heart still wrestles with the problem of beating it means i still stare through the thick like a star might break it it means after all the issues and every problematic potential and after misuse and abuse and after the goddamn parking meter didn’t take my quarters i love you/her/myself and nothing can block that out survivor stories
what about the ones who slipped under the surface a silent drowning the antidote to everything the antidote to everything is your truck cutting off in the driveway your boots on the steps your key fighting with the lock. it’s five thirty and the october cold still sheets the windows. you brought entemann’s donuts and cello wrapped cinnamon rolls from the twenty four hour grocery. i brought this kiss in the quiet kitchen. it lifts my heels and i feel the sunrise early light bouncing on the linoleum firing the possibilities of this day. the antidote to everything: part two the antidote to everything is a sleepy girl with stringy hair eating a donut and doing math at six a.m. she is all the reasons to exist, asking me questions wondering if she got the answer right. you are the right answer sticky fingered child. close the book. take on the day like a blue butane flame clear, steady, burning a hole in all of it. the antidote to everything: part three this morning’s story sits sweet on the counter icing on tinfoil, a sugared smile. but the truth is there’s still blood under my nails. i dreamt searing light and a hand coming down. the nightmares are all real. today is going to burn. but if i tell you about the bit of cinnamon on my finger tip i might remember it myself. the antidote to everything is a word escaping through my teeth: love or no. what i want what i mourn and all the rage. listen to the hiss of the heat, flame escaping chapped lips, cracking the corners of my mouth. wish list
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February 2019
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