The Saboteur

Each morning, the first thing I do
is throw a hammer at the source of my pain.
I grab a hammer from the boomerang pile,
its handle is yellow. That means nothing to me.

I throw the heavy, rusted thing up at the sky.
It breaks through a cloud’s silver lining and
then falls directly on me.
Another hole in my head. I can’t say I mind.
Gravity is too honest. It is the condition of the sky.
A plague named honesty. I keep throwing this
damn hammer up at the showrunner who pulls my strings
and casts me in tragedies as the lead, but it always falls back
down and hits whoever is responsible.

Next time, I’ll throw some nails up, too.
If I’m going to have all these dents,
I may as well decorate.
One hammer and five nails later,
I’m gravity’s ghostwriter and misery’s museum,
the author of my own autobiography of blame.

History

All to be a miserable thirty, paint the outside of your house, fill in the Scantron sheet, make due with whatever box of noodles you have—even if it’s rotini, even if it can’t soften the right amount. Throw the spaghetti against the wall to try to summon a childhood through the wallpaper. Laugh with all your former selves as it slides down and hits the floor, somehow that piece of pasta stays there for a week, undisturbed by any cat. I’ve lost my say, or never had it, I realize that when I open a new book. That dead boy has been gone nine years; I can’t possibly fit another decade of life into this machine. Gratitude can’t fix us. This isn’t about me, but time, and childhood—all of it taking the shape of a noodle, all of it fitting into one pot. All of it missing something. All of it trying to share the dead boy’s name. All of us trying to call him. The food is getting cold.

Predisposition

On a Tuesday, a little girl waits, head pressed against
a glass pane, sighing for the dramatics.
It begins to rain. What other weather is there?
She chases a droplet with her finger.
The droplet wins the imaginary race,
sitting in the crack of the window sill,
her hand now resting under her chin.

There is nothing glamorous about being ten.
especially when you’ve been doing it for twice that long.
Your reflection in any and all water gets uglier,
Narcissus’s cure is at the fountain of aging ungracefully.

The little girl hits her head against the glass
just to hear a sound. No one ever talks to her.
Eventually, a raven comes and sits on the ledge.
She pulls out a book to read to the intellectual bird.
It picks up a berry and flies off. It has better things to do.
She reads to herself until dark.

Originally published in the 2023 FACETS at the Butler County Community College.

Meeting Myself in the Chesapeake Bay

I did leave something in the estuary last Friday.
It wasn’t a wrinkled dollar bill,
miserably wet in my swimsuit pocket. It wasn’t
a soggy pizza crust, now departed.

The ugly brown water took from me,
a section of sadness
that it later will turn into salt.
My tears making a transition
into ocean, and I
into invincible—
imagining myself as a child
for a single moment
doggy-paddling towards
the sun tucked into the water beside me,
resembling a breakfast hash brown.
I will get there, I think.
The water can’t take me,
but I can take myself.

Originally published in the 2022 Poetry Marathon Anthology.

Thirty-one Whacks
After Amanda Palmer

A notch in my thigh for
every year I’m alive. This year,
I’m counting to twenty-nine.
I can’t admit what I don’t know.
How many hits can a person take
and stay whole?

A girl like me at fifteen, sure as shit that I knew everything,
wiser men be damned, wiser men charm me
out of my queerness and into…
therapy. I’d have melted myself down
to a puddle of blood and fury
to prove to you that I was never
worth saving. I am the upside of a mandatory report.

December is a coat I wear all year.
On the tenth day, I confront my nature
and prepare for my annual near-death experience.

As the brute holds the haft, the axe’s head
nearing me for the last marking of my twenties.
So long, farewell.
The weaponist tries to kiss me instead, but
I beg for tradition.
As I endure what it is that other people do
gracefully, I think,
“Please, these are death to a delicate girl,”

I release the axeman from their contract,
and start to tend to the wounds of three decades,
relieved, yet somehow sad
that there won’t be thirty-one whacks.

Originally published in 2022 by Coin Operated Press.

understudy of sea

I hear no sea, I think water gets lost on me.
I’ve never swallowed enough of it,
nor taken in its plainness to my veins.
I keep my pond filled, dream of fish,
a red and blue one like the one I had
when I was nine. It had a friendly voice
that answered my prayers.

The closest I have been to an ocean
was only through love, vicarious—
but I have this little pond
with its fish memory, its potential,
no shells nor gulls, but a leaf,
falls into it every once and a while,
and a cat or two will use it to sip,
the wind will knock a plastic bag
into it, and it floats,
I hear no sea, just the small water
reacting as I pretend
a thank you bag is a fish.

The Cardinal

I am overcome by this life’s featherlessness,
the morning’s worm and my shock and awe
to sort it on the sidewalk with my little talons.
Still, I take less.

Tree to tree, I have a heartbeat at best,
so do we, so do we.
I am the wide-eyed
four-year-old with a trembling finger
who must tell the neighbor of the red bird
and quickly house the cat.

She names me,
but I will never know how sweetly
she will remember that name
as she grows and forgets to lay out any seed.
I’m so sure of my feathers and
their flight, I hope someday I fly too high
so I may forget little girls and their surprise,
so I may forget seeing them on the day of the funeral and
knowing that I must come back to the oleander
on that same day every year because I promised God I would.

I am hoping God forgets my promise as I fly into the sun.
I am a symbol of unforgotten things,
her notebook still knows my name but
I have been as nameless as I have been still.
My feet take another branch as home.
Another season, too.

The funerals come in May and I am back
until she is no longer there to see out the window.
Maybe she grew too tall.
Maybe she forgot to wonder.
Maybe she aged out of awe and saw that
I am only a cardinal
and that it means nothing more than that.

Maybe she knows that eventually
you lose your aunts to funerals and your hummingbirds, too,
or maybe you never had a hummingbird, only a cardinal and
you were too busy being small to name everything—
loving one thing at a time.

What a feathered thing, that love.

In Arrears

I am indebted to sleep.
It nibbles on my edges
like a small, scaly thing and
a sentence with too many adjectives.

A slew of beggars can nod off
for half the price,
carrying their pennies like peacefulness,
sorting it with their bruises and their socks.
We ask for a different relief.

I carry a tab—
forty winks on the pillow
for my head on the slab.
I give myself these bloody moments
as my soul seeks its sleep
because to pay for it in full—
I’ve had to kill all my counted sheep.

Originally published in the 2022 FACETS at the Butler County Community College.

Cost Analysis

What happens if I don’t make it?
Does my phone stop ringing?
I don’t think anyone has ever called. Although,
I’ve answered.
Will you remember to turn off the stove for me?
I don’t think it’s ever been on. Although,
the water has boiled.
I have some things to wrap up.
A Christmas present,
a deposit so this check doesn’t bounce.
Can you walk my dog tomorrow?
I get one Zoom call in the afterlife.
Hello, are you there? Please, tell me how Grey’s Anatomy ends.

Where will my aches land? I’m serious, what happens?
If I find myself gone, where do you end up?
If my pain redistributes, who gets the most of it?
Hands up! Any volunteers?
What happens if I don’t make it?
Will I finally put my phone down
and stop checking my Twitter?
Will someone tell Amanda?
Will you update my away message on AOL Instant Messenger?
Do I get to bring my straight A report cards to heaven or wherever I end up?
What do they amount to there? Can I buy something with them?
Maybe it’s like an arcade,
the afterlife.
You trade in some of what you have for the chance to win something else, but none of it’s real.
Not the money. Not the prize.
Twenty dollars for a rubber ball, one hundred tickets for a stuffed giraffe.
I will take both. Spin again. Throw a dart.
I may end up with something beautiful
that is never worth the cost.

Originally published in the “Poems for the Ride” Anthology and in “Blake.”

Making a List Before a Party

I set out disposable plates,
not the smooth, Styrofoam ones from
elementary school parties but the
ones with ridges.
You usually need two.
I hand you another.
Every detail matters
when details are all
that’s left of something.

I write down the number of plates
57. The number of guests
32. The number of appetizers
4. The number of times
I thought I should die
before anyone gets here

Right click, save as.

Originally published in 2022 by Coin Operated Press.

Sugarwood
The living room door
in my aunt Margaret’s house
had the face of Jesus in the grain.
When I would fall asleep
with its eyes watching me
I thought I would wake up healed—
salvation on the other side
of sugarwood.

When I was three, I remember
my mother carrying me
because our street had flooded
and I said
“I thought you told me
God would never flood the earth again?”
Turns out, my town wasn’t the whole world.

I took up my grievance
with the door.
With my little hands, I unscrewed
the hinges and offered
it to Noah for an arc.

Originally published in the 2021 Poetry Marathon Anthology and in “Blake.”

A Recipe for a Birthday

1. An age, reluctantly announced
2. Several friends, but not enough
3. A cake, that you’ll eventually throw up
4. A necklace, you’ll never wear
5. A laugh, in unison

Choose a room, one larger than the number of people you know.

Assort your people based upon how well you know them.

Serve them cake for about 20 minutes (at least one person will decline.)

Quietly tell them they should have left their diet at home.

Open a gift, pretend you don’t already have it,

shuffle your friends and hope that the joker lands on top.

Somebody cheers!

They are aware that you survived something.

Take several photos, at least one with a smile.

Post them one day later.

Accept birthday wishes for the next five business days.

Contemplate all of the birthday cards relatives forgot

to send you twelve years ago

and where those cards went when they died.

Everybody sings

or something.

Originally published in the 2020 Poetry Marathon Anthology.

The Modern Truce

We must divide the world between us,
I’ll keep this town and the next one over,
but you can have the rest of them.

I’ll take the birds and dogs,
You can have the felines,
I’ll take board games, the Uno cards,
and all of the poets.

You can have beaches and vehicles,
I want the internet, and a backpack,
I want some cereal and bowls,
but you can take the forks.

We will have to divide our friends
in half, if they let us,
give me one half that listens
and a quarter that loves.

We can decide how much
they are allowed to love us
and on which days of the week
when we break them apart
into increments of time
and things to laugh about.

You can keep Walmart,
I guess I’ll take Amazon,
I want the bank, and my body back,
but you can have the hospital.

You can have the tattoo artists and
the bars,
I’ll take Amanda Palmer.
I’ll take musicals and
Chinese, but you can have the seafood.

I guess you can keep your own mother,
she is already divided enough,
I want English class and high school graduations
but you can keep your favorite teachers
and some of the morning announcements.

Our schools are mine.
So are the lawyers,
but you can have at least one judge,
all of the bodies of water and
the movie theater, too.
There is not much left.
We’ve halved it all –
the video games included,
the food, too,
the oversized hoodies and
whose trauma is whose.

You have Twilight,
I have Dr. Seuss.

Once I’m done cutting
my life into a fraction to give myself a break,
I hope you know,
at last, you must
“get off my side of the state”.

zombie Madonna

once upon a time
i stood on stage
with the band that saved
my life
at a younger age

suddenly, a decade of
memories played
through my head like
a bad video tape

in washington d.c.
halloween,
the dolls and me

dressed as a zombie
but never more sure
i was alive

Originally published in 2021 by Coin Operated Press.

quarantine-contemplation

there were county fairs and musicals.
there were meals shared with friends,
there was embracing and card decks and
holding hands. there was air.
there were dresses, swimming pools,
friend’s houses and thrift stores.
there were gyms in the morning
and June Pride Parades, and
sometimes even what seemed like balance.

now, there are lit screens,
bad art, eighteen-hour periods of sleep,
and too many apps in my phone.
there are microwave dinners,
pajama bottoms and the illusion that yesterday
was three months ago and last year
was only several minutes long.
the air is different.
there was peace and panic all at once.
a reassortment of obligations.
a little ease, with a rush of distrust,
everyone carefully announcing that they
don’t really believe in dying
and that they would simply not be dying
if it meant they could not go outside.

it was a three-month conversation between
ourselves and the world about what
the outside really is and why we have
passionately convinced ourselves that
everything must be external.

you’ll laugh with friends and believe in death again
and know what a week feels like again and maybe
next year, dinner will still be cold in the middle,
naps will be shorter and you’ll take hugs for granted.
there will be the outside then.

A Different Haunting

It was weeks before Halloween and I’m still in my house,
I fell asleep again while watching “Get Out”.
There are no decorations, no special scare.
This year has left my October miserably bare.
In my room, I’ve collected some depression snacks
and last year’s trauma, which I’ve yet to unpack.
It’s pretty obvious now, there’s a slight sort of haunt,
it’s the Ghost of Halloween—she thinks we forgot.
She wants to remind us of holidays past
with parties and costumes and friendships intact
but this year, the killer is not a work of fiction—
there is no man in a mask slowly pacing your kitchen.

It was weeks before Halloween, everything is scary,
I fell asleep again, this time while watching “Carrie”.
I made some more popcorn, then decorated a sign,
that said “Sorry Kids, No Candy This Time,”
I put the sign high, but I hung it with shame,
I turned off lights. Nothing is the same.
They said: “stay indoors, it’ll be over by fall,”
while some had listened, others, not at all.
It’s pretty obvious now: the warnings ignored.
Despite all this haunting, the ghost is still bored.

Unbelievable

I was such an unbelievable girl,
the way I imagined things
and demanded them into realness
with my little fingers. The world
I created that housed things only
evil and glorious to me
was that word: unbelievable.
If I dreamt of an animal,
it existed, if I said things were
hideous and dark, they were, if
I said I invited Death to a tea party,
and he came, he did, if I said
I would only eat croutons, I meant it.
As I grew and my imagination
did, too, I continued to build
a separate world around me.
It wasn’t until I was twenty-four
that my mysterious case of
unbelievable
had a diagnosis.
I knew that maybe no one would
believe me, they said that
women have to do over half of the work
to only half-convince the doctors, but I did it.
The tall man in the dress shirt and tie
asked me if I had any friends
and when I said my best friends live
in my television, he signed the paper
and gave me freedom:
the diagnosis that explained
all things unbelievable about me.

Originally published in 2020 by Coin Operated Press.