nightmare on….morning streets.

The parking structure across the street keeps its lights on all night. I know this because at four in the morning, trees making noises like rats under beds, I wait for the sun to come up.

To calm myself, I whisper poems under my breath. Though I have books of poetry gifted by friends that have left long ago, I make it up as I go along. In my silence-studded sentences, there is some sort of thinking. But as soon as they’re said, they’re gone, only briefly stopping to watch, curiously.

Tell me why I hate to turn down the lane. It’s not because I see the trees as they were in warmer weather, in thinner air, in months long past. It’s not even that the people are all that harsh (though behind doors they talk in louder voices). Maybe it’s because the words of the poems stay in the air. Here, on the lane, the sun comes up with the encouragement of failed sentiments, of feelings that died before they had a chance to be watered, and a parking garage that stays lit all night long — just in case someone left themselves behind.

 

gone are the days of filling the words.

“Are you sure?” asks my father. “You always take on a weird tone when you talk about it.”
“Don’t lie to me.”

Lying by omission is lying without the guilt, free of danger.
But it doesn’t make me any less exhausted.

 

if only it would stick.

like sweater vests and my hair in humid weather,

we are out of style, again.

 

like a stranger on a foreign shore.

She wants to know why it’s okay
to speak this way, with the moon
language
white and pulsing under her earlobes.
She lays her head beneath
her pillows (the best way to hear
the world like a seashell, telling secrets)
and listens.
She thinks about that time
when she used to be young:
dancing
to softly strumming music
thudding gently
in her darkened room.
She waits
to hear her answer–

quiet now. It’s time for sleep.

 

dreams are like little trips. or warnings.

Today, I dreamed.

For those three stolen hours, I dreamed that I needed to find the room with the girls that didn’t know I was coming. I called it “the room of surprises,” in my head, and I smiled. Surprises, like unannounced knocks on odd-numbered doors, should be pleasing — that’s what I was depending on. I forgot that behind the door can be a stranger, wondering why you came to visit when you so very clearly are not wanted.

I went back to the green walls and there was a man in my old room. He clearly owned it, covered it with himself as none of us could do before. I wanted to yell at him about the initials in the closet, the tape under the light, and the streak of blue just above the sink. He glared at me, telling me that I was very clearly not wanted there.

Then I thought “I’ll surprise some old friends! They do live next door.”
So I knocked, holding my surprise in my hands like leftover flour, waiting for something to rise, something to happen. The door opened, and the shock beat out the surprise, the blank beat out the greeting, the eyes beat out the smile. For the second before my feet moved, I knew I was very clearly not wanted there.

But the room — the room I needed to get to! It was upstairs, it faced a city out of place and out of water. Much like the people who live there, I suppose. But as I went to knock, the door opened, and someone walked out. And she kept going.

And, not for the first time, I realized that though I had come a very long way, with surprise clenching my fingers together and my mouth too sticky to talk, I was still very clearly not wanted there.

 

yet it’s not up to par.

Closing my eyes is like shutting the door, though in the dark my roommate always forgets to use the lock. She speaks in clotted tongues to her kin, like last year, and I sit and wait for someone who was at the very least born in the continental states. It’s terrible to be so xenophobic, but pardon me for being proud of my sleeping schedules.

Your playful boasting about how good you’re doing is old and worn like my red sweater, and just like that sweater you’re tucked away in a drawer I tell myself never to open but do anyway. I wonder how you’re doing, how he’s doing, and what consequential nothingness you’re filling yourself up on today. We have the same shirt now, but you wouldn’t know. It has a painted sparrow on it, and I look terrible while wearing it. Revenge comes in the form of ill-fitting clothes, God’s little joke at the expense of our fragile vanities.

I didn’t get dressed up for Halloween this year. With a hastily made toga to beat and no desire to change, I wore a jersey and jeans. It’s as fancy as I’m going to get, I’m afraid. Maybe next year I’ll go as someone tolerant.

 

i know, mate.

“But it’s now or never, isn’t it?”

 

tell me a story, and i’ll tell you a tale.

I miss you like last December’s sickness–
harsh, heady, but you brought me soup after work.
The letters on the brown pills
spelled out what the doctor said
in confident tones.

“Oui,” he says, and I hear an acknowledgement
of what we are. He remembers
the fences that kept him in the yard, his neighbors
wishing for rain to water their hydrangeas
lining the path.

The difference between the here and the now
is me, sleeping with my eyes open
and my lips like old books, too cracked
to tell the words that fall like psalms
into your open ears.

 

to keep from speaking out loud.

“I am suddenly consumed by nostalgia for the little girl who was me, who loved the fields and believed in God, who spent winter days home sick from school reading Nancy Drew and sucking menthol cough drops, who could keep a secret.”

-  Audrey Niffenegger  (The Time Traveler’s Wife)

 

wounded.

My heart is stuck in window reflections, pumping blood down the sides of skyscrapers.
I plant my seeds in this boy’s insides, as red as his roots, and wait for sleep to take us from this rusted dawn.
When we wake up, the floor is wet with fresh-pressed juice. We drink, we smile (through stained lips).
We part ways.