(Oh boy I start this month of a poem a day with no confidence, trying to get everything ready for our trip to San Francisco tomorrow while holding a boy who seems to not feel well, he hasn’t slept all day and he spits up a lot of what I feed him. But no one said it had to be a good poem. So I worked on this mostly while watching Rosie’s water polo game while Henry sat angelically on Steve’s lap. That setting might explain the water. Yikes I feel naked.)

Sight

A boy and water,
I thought I would know what he looked like.

Swish, swish swish.

He’s out forever. Eyelids pressed to milk skin.

In a room of babies I don’t know if I’d recognize myself.
The lights were bright.

Photographs don’t tell what I see:
this looking into a white sky.

See, it’s better to be out because you can see.
There is no such thing as ecstasy,
but out, out. I was gone for an hour,

emptied as snow tilted in the snow globe of my head.

The echo of our lungs in here. My throat hoarse, my baby.

I don’t know which boy is mine.
Too much love makes form unclear.

Our lives near-sighted,
unswelling, eyelids closing again.

April 1st, 2010 | Category: written | Leave a comment

30 poems in 30 days for April, national poetry month.

March 25th, 2010 | Category: written | Leave a comment

The flower on the base of the nipple light.
His belly button filled with lint.
The nipple cracked like glass.
From which point hang the crystals.
Every piece of the chandelier.
The hot pink cat collar and its encircling spikes of blue-black.
Plastic white pearl lid.
Polyethylene blue with water inside.
Now no water inside.
Fuchsia pattern, tiny on the bedspread.
Black and brown dog dirt on the fitted sheet like fleas.
Black outline and black mobius of two hair bands.
The dog nose painted on the nightlight.
The dog nose holes.
All the pewter ones and one gold stamen porcelain drawer knob.
The brushed nickel doorknob.
Ugly white plastic curtain rings along the curtain rod.
Beat brown leather dog collar
around a dog neck, thick.
The fan encasing like tree rings.
A diamond.
A new boy asleep on the dirty fitted sheet,
eyes closed: two ohs, ohs.

March 13th, 2010 | Category: written | Leave a comment

March 8th, 2010 | Category: written | Leave a comment

(In the homeless writing workshop today, I gave the prompt of Super Vision based on a gorgeous book I brought in — it shows the world that exists that we can only see with microscopes and other new technology. The goal: to try to see beyond what we initially see, and because writing asks us to do that anyway.)

.

I wake and scrape sweat off my chest: the dog has slunk up into bed where the baby will be.

Fur under a microscope has a gasoline rainbow inside.

Fur patterns on the sheets: fractals, snowflake articulations. Superfur.

A core sample of his body, down past the fur a layer of muscle, sinew, bugs, coral bones.

He arranges himself around his ribs, his coat of arms.

His blood a tattoo, blue river patterns.

Rice in his intestines. Bugs along his eyelashes.

On the mattress: dirt particles.

A spine shield, it protects my body from the window.

At night the husband mutters, takes a pillow and with sinew hands slams

the mattress, slams the mattress.

Dirt fur patterns scatter, reassemble on the floor,

dirt residue like cinnamon like fleas left behind. White sheets.

Or gray-white sheets.

The dog spine curves, folds, S1 S2 S3 pushes against me.

Each spine pearl, each rubber muscle, no ice cubes.

The down quilt: dead feathers coagulate heat,

dead feathers washed and clumped, falling out of some crack in the quilt,

stuck in the northwest corner of the bedroom,

and down into my lungs and the dog lungs,

down our windpipes, quiet flutes at night.

The baby is partially comprised of dog fur and down.

I swallow dust and the baby digests, becomes us.

I don’t want the dog off the bed.

December 8th, 2009 | Category: pet, written | Leave a comment

Love with its scaffold of preservation:
She waits. Not yet. He might be blind.
Are his eyes supposed to be that foggy.
He puts his chin on her knee at the dinner table
and she only mistakes it for love once.
People give up their dogs, and babies die.
All four legs are twigs but they have yet to shatter.
Her hair is spun in two bundles, disassembling at night
so that later, when she is pregnant,
she will not feel love until the human makes a shadow,
the dog spinning fur fractals beside her,
white lily petals falling into the bowels of the fruit bowl below.

July 27th, 2009 | Category: written | Leave a comment

June 22nd, 2009 | Category: happening, inward, written | Leave a comment

I was remembering today how much pain I was in after the surgery two weeks ago. The most vulnerable part of my body was punctured with a needle and it left me huddled for days. It felt like my lower stomach had been punched one hundred times but from the inside. I remember resting on Steve’s lap as we watched a movie and telling him If I die, don’t do anything stupid like in that movie Seven Pounds.

April 27th, 2009 | Category: happening, written | Leave a comment

There’s a woman who came to my homeless writing workshop last week who talked me five minutes’ late for class. She talked about how she wrote this poem some time ago and since then she hasn’t been able to write it better. It always comes out choppy. She has tried so many times, and each time it doesn’t “flow” — she kept using that word. Around and Around the Leaves / chase in the wind is how it begins. She spent the twenty-minute writing time transcribing the “choppy” version that was still in her mind. When she went to share, she explained that she’s been writing this poem since second grade. Second grade. She got it right the first time, but not again since. What an effort, somehow honorable, to keep trying to perfect the same 14 lines for forty years.

April 27th, 2009 | Category: happening, written | Leave a comment