Category: Poetry

you are the greatest distance I’ve ever traveled you are the cool, dry north in the midst of summer and the wet, cold east in winter you are western waters I never thought to see and you are southern home you are cramped planes and double-decker busses you are overstuffed luggage, weighed, emptied, and repacked…

it’s the potential of dollar store composition books and pocket-sized Piccadilly journals of bookstore discount sketchbooks and overpriced Moleskines it’s the beauty of the embossed leather-bound diary (though I don’t really do leather) or canvas or cartoon covers basic black I have an unreasonable love of blank books for someone whose hand cramps trying to…

my lips have been so dry they hurt when I lie down for sleep and when I wake at 3am for no reason my body knows the balm which heals the pain, if not the skin my lips forget, time and again that they are dry, cracked my lips forget their discomfort when, reaching out…

I laughed on hearing they asked if I’d let you do that. I fell in love with the fire you were feeding. How could I not fan your flames?

my eyes float the waterways from your ankles to your hips midnight dark beneath pale skin marking twisting bayous wide rivers and a lake from time to time built by human hands where I gripped your flesh too tightly pulling myself into you

in the absence of touch we find new shorthand in stickers and emojis trying to say to one another what a passing kiss or brushing hands have said for so many years my own words fall short sent from screen to screen but this silly comic… “it us”

I want my touch to leave sentences on your skin said in languages unable to be uttered verses untranslatable only ever rendered in our coming together

“I need these. For reasons,” I said. “I really do.” And so we left with the dice (for direction for discerning and divining, though I declined to say that to you) you took me by surprise not you, but me-with-you my not knowing what to do and I thought I could divine not you, but…

the taste of milk from a goat who tried to butt me the day before the juice of a tomato I picked (from a garden I had to clear of rocks) running down my arm But when I say I miss the country I mean… no home grown fruit was ever as sweet as muscadines…

I sat in the backseat, a child, watching clouds break apart. A line of cars, headlights on, pavement drying below us. At the cemetery my aunt said the rain stopped and clouds moved to make room for big papaw to get through to heaven. I sat in the living room, an adult, the same place…