A Nice Girl’s Temptation
She met him on the way to Sunday school,
his hair unruly and his shoes untied,
fresh face of a boy, eyes of the man who’ll
never give in, nor bend, neither abide
She met him on the way to Sunday school,
his hair unruly and his shoes untied,
fresh face of a boy, eyes of the man who’ll
never give in, nor bend, neither abide
We went out seeking eagles.
We found two ravens and a gull
and strands of bull kelp left ashore
in fraying shawls the driftwood wore.
We found bones.
A seal had washed up in the stones;
As if drought could ever empty it
the well of grief glimmers full
topped up like a bitter drink
we never ordered.
You asked me
to meet you by the pronoun tracks
where extravagant weeds growing through the rails
joked with beauty
Continue reading… "Nameless Sea"Shadow is what they see,
but not really. How can one see
hiding? Because that’s what shadow does:
blankets an object with the absence of light.
Before they put me in a grave or an oven
to be taken up by the power of elements
chewing or burning away my decaying flesh,
I’m putting words down that won’t last
through the drying of one or two shed tears,
when night presses down
and muffles all sound
when your wings are weary
and you would be chained
Toes up—will I be ready to ascend?
The world of dirt and roots is at my back,
and though I feel my shoulders twist and bend
as if I have to carry it, in fact
I know I’ll reach a day to step away.
Face up, a shrug will loosen all these straps,
reversing all their gravity. I’ll pray
for levity, to dump all my perhaps.
When I rehearse this passage late at night,
face down beneath the blanket of my fate,
I wrestle with the darkness in the dive.
But mercy rolls me over, up towards light,
laid out like this and rinsed of all that weight,
when I’ll be hearsed, so ready to go live.
With no new information, only time,
I shuffle memories with a few old photographs.
The camera that we rarely took along—
or someone’s—caught us, here and there.
They wait in the fridge with sprouting garlic
and baggies of curry leaves, a season
trapped beneath their skin like a jinn.
No one eats them, yet we keep stocking up