Big Picture Girl

I need to look closer. I’m a big picture girl,

fingerprints the size and texture of dead planets.

By touch alone I tell your home from your car and,

when the lights plunge out, your lock and key, kitchen.

Your bedroom door glints green and silver in the dark.

I don’t carry candles, I burn like UV light

and leave only dust in your skeleton closet

fine and soft, swept neatly into piles in the corners.

It’s hard to explain, but imagine a shadow

colonizing yours, inflating the passing cloud

to eclipse the sun and wither all the green things

growing in the ground. Imagine endless spring

regrowing but never bursting into summer

cursed to a runaway chain reaction that throws

Higgs bosons bigger than my ass. I saw a kid

the other day, my nipples pinched with milk. Why do

we associate children with summer? When all

they’ll have left is sand and salt pillars. Do you

often think of the end of the world, asks

my psychiatrist. Honestly, what I think of

most is ends: how the cursive loop infinity

is trig’s intuitive cousin, how this poem

may be dying alongside its brothers, sisters,

mother canaries in the cobalt mines and yet

I cannot stop unless I know. Greed, hubris

aren’t scalpel blades, they’re drugstore knives you got for

collecting fifty stickers on beans and rice or

at the thrift shop. All old paintings are fruitless

bowls, rimed with dust, the sagging dinette, the regret

of buying too-small pairs of pretty shoes, blisters.

Score the insoles with a sharp edge, burn the toe in,

but still I won’t dance nicely. Femininity

is a game we play, the same as any sport, love,

there’s rules and limits until the buzzer unmasks

us, sweat-drowned, brow beaten, club-fisted. We make do

with the weapons we’re given. Mine is urban sprawl,

and what happens when a river splits in two

as it’s dying, the melt under the trash can lid

filled with a pair of dead crows and mosquitoes

but not yet the virgin tick, lone star newcomer

to the place spring never left. Once I wore a ring.

Once I was his, or hers, or ours. These kinds of things

are more common, now, strangeness and charm overcrowd

up and down, and I, the cat, rubbing to and fro

in a closed system, a wooden box. The mourners

I hired with our last months’ security deposit.

Mind the stained carpet, the chipped formite,

because I’m taking what’s mine with me on this ark

into my new life, your knife my found religion,

navigation by constellation and fixed star

dots of hot words in my mouth. Since this began its

end was planned, Venus in her shell, pink and seed-pearled.

Last Seen Running Sunday Errands 

I eat a slice of carrot cake in the car,

left on the wheel, right angles of streets planed

down to chip-seal concrete, soft around

my edges: like I might invite you in, 

share a funny if pithy lesson we never 

learned in school, remarkable only years later,

in retrospect, stopped at a red light,

glimpsed through cracked glass mirror splintering

sun and the shake of bass rattling the roof.

I don’t see you watching me lick the 

icing from my fingers. But you remember how I 

bite back like gravel playground falls.

Paradox: in recovery on a wedding day

It has to be a choice.

If that sounds oxymoronic it’s only because

love makes morons of the best of us. Steps

in our way, a chronic nagger with gentling voice

when our escapist urges see us root in crowded glove

boxes, scouring the dust for forgotten keys to triplexes

where exes’ hearts beat bloody beneath floorboards.

It watches us, says face it, we both know backwards is

an option—disavow your growth, your goals,

the complex winding streets you repeat like mantras,

except the changing courage it takes to trust the sun

will rise one day at a time. Live for yourself, why not?

Pick this moment’s happiness over the next’s,

That is of course

a choice.

But this? This life is choosing forever. That’s clean

for the rest of every daylight. That’s swallowing down the pill

of pride, choosing to let some petty aggression pass in the hall as

a sullen cat, back arched, eyes narrowed. Never again chasing

fleeting joys like fireflies but those you find in the night’s

eyes when she laughs instead of smiles, close-eyed. To choose

Forever is illogical; choice says you have options, but forever

means no more, no leaving, running, no more hits like cigarettes

burning bright orange in the night. This is

precisely why love is a choice. Impossible, impractical.

You wake every morning to another day and choose to say

Yes, I do. Yes, I still choose you.