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Comes with Spring

We spent all night, had buttery marrow, four roses, scallops, sour-aged cheeses, American tobacco.

We paid a man 1 dollar for some advice. He held up blackened hands (7 fingers, 2 thumbs) and said,

“Be careful of the edge. I knew a man with all the right equipment. With melted wings, he would brush off canyon dust, call the helicopter, and do it again.”

We each pulled a symbol from the deck. Mine showed a fertile bush. His, a shovel. Now, my stomach swells with evening.

#poetry #april 2015

Isovist // My joy on the right, my pain on the left

I found a man with too much pain – his speech patterns too fast, he doesn’t recognize fear. He measures distance in cigarettes.

From his place to the corner store: 1 cigarette. His place to mine: 3. He has a panoramic view of the city, everything he touches

he saw first in red, blue green, he has a velvet belly. Soft sweet. The Law says

that if we are anticipating something, the distance feels more. Like cosmic intercourse.

#poetry #april 2015

#prose poem #april 2015

Ours is a love that hibernates in mornings, after Pablo Neruda

I love you as if you were rows of salt, a trailing fire. We were in Chinatown the first time I spoke. You are the pheromones of damp earth, you sweat cosmic. Static clung to our skin, a buzz resounding from the underground. Sometimes you are the grain etched with silence. Ours is a love that hibernates in mornings, when dreaming is easy between waking and wanting to die again.

#poetry #april 2015

Ex Patriot: Ornament & Crime. Heaven Hill 6 year bourbon, becherovka, fresh lemon, foreign palm sugar, angostura bitters. A man sits 2 barstools down. I am against the wall so as to only have to defend one side. All men behind the bar. My bad posture. Futuristic dark ambient music; vinyl. Did I talk about myself too much today? ______ is finishing up his shift across the street. I wait. Drink slowly. The man 2 barstools down hides his phone beneath the bar like a teenager. I wonder how his mother treats him. This notebook page was sewn in upside down Nothing is worse than this indecision Nothing more exhausting to experience second hand I wish I could wear my choices upside down to my collar, stitched through to the skin My acorn hair In the course of a day he ages from 15 to 27 Where does he go in the adolescent space? The DJ takes bizarre liberties The bartender never misses Meyers Clean Day in the bathroom A precarious stack of paper towels “Tasteful” nudes Pictures of the moon Cold war Americana What will this war one day be called? The candle splatters timid light like windshield rain in sun Its dripping an exercise in self control as if placed in a room alone, melted down, reversed, and presented as a hologram Clean Nothing is better than you at Fifteen

Nothing Is Better Than You At Fifteen Or, We Woke Up Like This (lawless) Will you come in the morning? Will you spend your time on a cigarette? Balcony or fire escape? In the course of the day you age from 15 to 27 Nothing is better than you at 15 Bashful with morning Sometimes your passion is so engrained you mutter something about sashimi in your sleep Sometimes I feel I love you in my throat Sometimes with your elbows crooked around my ribcage/collarbone I am completely alone

A woman stumbles out from the bistro claiming “I was a little too aggressive with the starters course” [God-awful lawlessness] [She may never find a place for the sea warrior narrative; she struggles with myth] (The poet is a late bloomer when it comes to sharing. She is learning as an adult what not to say to each lover) Mostly alone

Your arms around me perhaps I could be anyone. I think I could be her Your love is still spent on _______ I wait for her name in the night I have no other names for you. You say “you are mine” I say “I am yours” And wait for meaning to catch up to us.

The bizarre DJ brings out some candles to light my writing and asks to take my photo for “promotional purposes” My handwriting grows messy with nerves and settling drink He takes a long time.

Your love is still spent on ________ I wait for her name in the night. Your arms around me perhaps I could be anyone I think I could be her.

I have no other names to offer you. You growl, you’re mine. I whimper, I am yours and wait for its meaning to catch up to us in the night.

#poetry #notes #april 2015

Seconds We dance in borrowed light like fools, mistaking shadows for truth. Nothing is worse than this second-hand indecision. I wear my choices upside down, stitched warm to my collarbones. I track the months, the weight of these things, considering each small mistake. I lay with the crook of your elbow against my lonely ribcage, waiting to hear her name in the night. I strain love from the dregs of my throat.

#wip #intermediate poetry workshop #poem #2015

In dreams the weight of our work surrounds us, a room fills with smoke so we crouch to the floorboards. Maybe I am the fire. The weight of some nighttime silence brushes against my skin and you are snoring easy. The weight scours at me till I am all pores opened, do I wait or wake you? I eternally balance in wait or wake. Maybe you nap on the shore while I tempt fate and wild river while you wait in sleeping worry and I beg weight to do the working under. What is press and what is weight? What is will and what is want? Will you wait too long till I am shipwrecked and mass-less, slave to manmade surface or pressed to handmade bottom? Will your wait be worth this? Did you leash and harness some thinking while I will ocean into sinking?

#wip #intermediate poetry workshop #2015 #poem

years of lead the morning cars drive along slick black streets to jobs downtown. your call interrupts the whir on wet tar. you list reasons you can’t love me while I imagine how I could close all the cracks in our wooden windowsill, decades of paint split open, so the mold won’t come this year.

#poetry #poem #2014

This is your brain on small death. You are a cat, 9 small deaths, building, or a candle burning down. A lesson in abstinence, where the cup gets passed around till there is nothing less, only germs and lipstick stains. This is your body on promiscuity. This is your body on small death. This is your future imploding. Rewinding: less kids, less mortgage, less grad school, less man to marry, less sobriety, less growing small, less dust. Becoming ash. This is how poetry sounds when you’re drunk. Isn’t that what it always is? Describing a vague thing with new words?

#prose poem #poetry #writing #2014 #small death

Kitchen Poems

I Do we recycle these feelings that stick like oblong stains on the countertop, like little pieces of butter smeared on the cutting board, like she clings to every kitchen she’s ever lived in? The drain collects bits of egg shell 3 days rotten, while she dreams of sticking her hand down the garbage disposal, while the cat paces nervous, trailing tufts of loose fur along the windowsill wanting for the cat in the alley, just as the girl wants for the kitchen of her childhood.

II Our shoes peel off the floorboards in dried juice and beer. We hear the fruit flies’ lovemaking as they dive in and out of the bottles on the counter in the honey light.

III The spaces I occupy get smaller as I get older. I have become less than bones. He left in the night and took the olive oil, the butter, left some ice packs in the freezer and some blackened bok choy on the bottom shelf. He left a silence as insatiable as rust. The negative space of hunger filled the time we could have spent loving each other

For the next two weeks the only thing that could be found in the ice box was a fast-waning handle of honey whiskey. I gained weight and wisdom in the wrong places.

-JM

#sixfold #kitchen poems #poem

I fold my thumbs and sit on my hands just to avoid counting too much.

-JM

#american sentence #haiku #meta #poem

Reaping

How do they communicate? In circles. How do they make love? Separately. How does she touch him? Sometimes she holds him like the wheat scrapes against the sky. Somewhere in Middle America a field moves all at once, though the blades are lonely. The sky asks the grain to not make a big deal out of it. The sky tells the grain it’s not just about showing up.

He did his panic-research on her body, listened for the crickets in her gut but rolled his eyes every time she complained of pain. Says he is familiar with the cicadas in her skull like he knows the sound of blood being drawn. Can he remember how brave she was that afternoon, lying on the cutting block?

The sky feels right to the grain, but does it matter? The blight will come anyway. The wheat holds up the sky.

#sixfold #poem

Migration

Cockroaches would crawl from the space between her teeth while no one was looking. Their glistening shells would slip through her full-bloom lips, one after another, till her sallow skin was on the verge of disappearing beneath their insectuous migration.

In the next room, my father stood on a balance beam. He was a temple there, a house of cards. He was a window covered in moths vying for the glow of my mother porch light. We couldn’t touch her, just follow her through the house, sweeping up those thorned legs and dried wings as bees colonized in her lungs and cicadas groaned in her stomach.

-JM

#sixfold #poem

Maybe pieces will leave my body in smoke rings, my brain in small deaths.

-JM

#haiku #american sentence #poem

I’ve held séances, vigils with enough flame to burn the whole building down. Begged on the phone with my mother for release. And she chanted Sweetie, you’re going to be alright. You’re going to be alright.

But finally, finally he speaks to me from beyond the grave. He leaves messages on our mirror; in the hair pomade and toothpaste I can still make out the pressure of those broad tips, still feel his touch like a whisper on my neck. His spirit follows me to the bedroom, to the mattress, where I am speaking in tongues only he and I could understand, in our filthy honeymoon sheets.

When the blood and viscera came, I spent days on a mound of wet moss, spent nights soaking sheets with fever and lost opportunities for children.

Each motion is a part of the healing process. Each movement is so full of intention. The intention is to rid myself of this pain but still breathe in my feelings.

I try to clean the apartment where our love began to fall apart but each stain holds a memory. I am scraping pink wax off the floor where he dropped the candle and I can hear his cursing echo through the empty rooms. The blood and spit-stained compress in the freezer from the weekend I tried to nurse him back to normalcy; his face so bruised by his own hand.

I try to reclaim myself but he will always haunt a piece of me. His shadow weaves through my intestines, tying my organs up in eternal reminder.

I wish I could hold him once more, touch his sweet smooth honey skin, we would weep together, and I would tell him, Sweetie you’re going to be alright, sweetie you’re going to be alright.

#revising

In the next room, my father stood on a balance beam. He was a temple there, a house of cards. He was a window covered in moths vying for the glow of my mother porch light. We couldn't touch her, just follow her through the house, sweeping up those thorned legs and dried wings as bees colonized her lungs and cicadas groaned in her stomach.

#prompt 2014 #prose

shell + curious

What salt and calcium made you? Your gills are still filled with sand. I could hold you up to the sun and see shadows of sparrows flickering against your skin. You are so solid but sometimes when the moon calls, you become transparent and I could crush you in my palms. You still smell like your mother after thousands of years. You still sound like your mother when you are sure you are right. Oh, but your symmetry. The chemistry of why I need to hold you, why I need to rub my thumbs along your earlobes with my eyes closed. You unfold down the middle and become sharp. My spine splits open with the possibility of you, my skin burns from the inside.

#poem #prompt 2014

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