Dated

We meet on the river bridge
where we only ever walked together
once, and I mention to you that
lately I've been thinking about
the night we shared with
the cigarettes an the food
trailers out behind the bar
when I had been gone
for a while but was back
in town to teach and you
had just gone on your
first date since we split up.

And when we talk about it
It's funny that you treat it
like history while I treat it
like the reason I am standing
next to you on that bridge at all.

With Heart

When the novelist decides to try her hand at poetry
it is more about articulating her sensitive side, less
about any value she might perceive in the form.

She's been waking up earlier and earlier.
It never seems to matter how much she drinks
the night before. The birds and the kids that exist
only for the sunlight shout down the outside streets,
cloy her, drive her from her bed.

She rises to make coffee,
to put on her mother's pearls and stand
before the mirror a while. To write
letters back to her publisher
as long as the books
that she won't send
where she repeats

that perhaps her anxieties
would fill volumes
but her heart is
not even one hundred
pages long.

It is four or five words,
simple as the materials
that compose it,
small enough to be engraved
on a coin and flipped.

Hate Letter to Spring Semester

Growing up, my father

pinned his best wisdom

to my heart—to never

work inside the offices

that had nearly killed

him

at dinner

you played audience

to that same advice

your eyes seeming 

so much wider after

but how our hands grew slack

enough to drop the hands

they carried

how we took off with

the lesson while leaving

behind the sentiment

I feel we have been

courting supplication.

An unbecoming thing,

not a game we knew

driving to music

with my hands

making a home

in you hair

or on our birthdays

when we were busy

renouncing the advancing world

for the strange honesty of one another

Love Letter to Spring Semester

We were once stubborn together

in palelight mornings waking

with hands clasped

I wanting always the windows

down to smoke, you dreaming

the future as every object

spoke history to me

with shoes off in the coffee houses

with hair down at the bars

with your drink raised to mine

in astonishment

over the inch of static

between lips held close

and the miracle of a pulse

found in body across the bed.

We were not to fall asleep

during our best dreams;

always with hearts kept

crossed, but fingers never.

Behind your back slept

only flowers.