Dear Homeless

I held a smile for you today
at the corner of Park and Araphahoe,
but you hung your head
and couldn't receive it.

I held your hand last night
while your ten-year-old clutched
at the other hand and stared
and muttered while you sobbed
to the brown-robed chaplain,
begging for the mercy of God
from an absent, faceless company chief.

I held you down last week,
with the crunch of tissue paper and squeak of vinyl,
on an exam-room table.
You screamed,
kicking out with your tiny feet,
as a vaccination needle punched
into your vastus lateralis,
first of six syringes.
Twenty minutes later, I awarded you
a sticker.

I held my breath last month
as the rancid stench of you seeped
through my office, your food-stained shirt
and greasy hair all rumpled, and you sighed,
spent, because the teenage son
of your common-law wife
had once again blackened and blued the face
of a crack-dealing
child outside his fifth rehab center.

I held my tears last fall,
while you snarled and called
the family next door "fucking Mexicans"
with your curly-haired toddler looking on.
Did you think his big blue eyes could save you
from our punishment?
I held
you accountable two hours later. You shoved
your stuff into garbage bags,
then yanked him up by his shoulder
and crooned,
"Guess we're sleeping on a park bench tonight,
baby."

I wonder,
My Lord and my love,
Are you holding me?

Four Prayers with the Lion's Paw

I stretch my arms to my Beloved
as a child barefoot in the snow,
and beg to be swung into the air.
He
honeymoon-holds me,
swinging me, singing me into
Delight.

You light my eyes, Beloved,
with the butter-yellow breath
of Easter
and I hope you crack me open
like a painted Easter egg,
spilling gold
on starving land.

Beloved,
You make me like a hefty stone
loged into a riverbed,
wailing silently
in anguish
as the slow persistent tugging
of your love erodes me
grain by grain,
washing me
at last into the sea.

You are holding up a mirror, God,
and showing me two "me"s I might yet be.
I should ask you for the courage
to choose the one who dances to the sun,
release the one who's dragging all the shackles.
But really, God, what I want
is to slap the mirror from your hands
and go running over the jagged broken pieces into your arms.

Alone

Alone is a word
that falls to the floor and clatters.
Alone is cold tea.
Alone is a face
with no lashes,
no lips.

As I Drove Home at Midnight

My headlights blazed a trail
of street sign stars
and mailbox moons,
sun-yellow glare to guide me home,
beneath a hundred million flecks of whitest light,
the stars as cold and far as raw Duluth.

I thought about you then,
the hallowed awe, in which you spread
yourself beneath a milky sky,
the smooth and starless drowse of clouds.

I wanted then to bring you back,
below the black and blue bedazzle of the night,
to spread myself
upon you, like a ball
of sweet-cream butter,
melting on the flushed, astonished
surface of you, love.

I longed to turn my face to God
and howl,
and howl until the stars came pulsing down,
and carried with a breath of you.

Violet's Poise

Violet's vexed
by scars and scrapes;
Violet sashays
on bruised shins.
Violet snags her skirts on her high heels.

Violet is a stranger in her skin;
she batters both her elbows, all ten toes,
into the furniture,
the floor.
Are Violet's shoes a smidge too wide?
Is Violet’s vision crooked?

No.
Violet failed to grow
into her bursting woman's body.
Violet wears adulthood
like a fruited, feathered hat.
Violet wears maturity
like water wears the moon--
scintillating, flimsy,
gravitational.

Changelings

We lurch into a shroud of dewy rain,
distorting Greyhound windows into green
and brown oil-paintings flecked with sheep.
The clotted air, our faces dull as stone
give allusion to an older age;
even the young smell ancient on this isle.

Although we move as one, we're each an isle
within our heads; our thoughts fall soft as rain
and trickle down into a distant age
of Lughnasadh upon the hills of green,
of tribal dances, bonfires, and of stone-
walled castles, each besieged with sheep.

Along the narrow road lie six dead sheep,
their bodies fertilizing dirt. This isle
is but a floating, life-encrusted stone,
and stones push up in graveyards in the rain--
fixed and ashen gardens-- while the green
grass sprouts and fades, age after age.

The rocky shores and fields seem without age,
touched only by the placid drifts of sheep
that snip the narrow tips of blades of green.
Below the sheep, the dirt, the Emerald Isle
lives timelessly, and only drops of rain
will touch the fae that doze beneath the stone.

We study, analyze, and turn to stone
these living sprites and nymphs of ancient age,
while we, the flesh and blood melt into rain,
fade into shades. We're changelings here, and sheep
one day will tread over our wings; the isle
has drawn us all beneath the stone, the green.

The transformation now, from grey to green
is etched upon our faces, chiseled stone.
And when our ashen bodies fly the isle,
our spirits, far beneath, will cease to age.
Although we leave the ocean, leave the sheep,
at Lughnasadh we'll dance in Irish rain.

And still the Emerald Isle, veiled in green,
washes her fae with rain beneath the stone,
till changelings rule the age... along with sheep.

Ode to an Old Book

The words are wearing
from your spine
in sober gradient,
resolutely raven at the opening “S,”
but trailing to a barely-brown
just fifteen letters later.
Still, your hardy spine supports
six-hundred pages,
yellowing and smelling of vanilla,
dust, and antique sweat.
I thrust my nose
and lips and cheeks
into the lusty center of you,
gasping like I might inhale
the very punctuation
set upon your grainy paper.

Violet Fades

Violet wears pajama pants
her mother bought,
Pooh Bear and honey pots
bunched into his torpid palms.
Her arm disentangles
to tap the remote,
digital chatter to drown
out the scuffle
of fabric and flesh.
Green-white light washes
out his face, as he leans,
more than friends,
over Violet's sighing mouth.
This isn't what she wanted.
So, as her body—
feral, fickle— yields,
Violet fades away.

Later, Violet builds herself
a memory,
shiny, with the scent of new plastic.
Violet rested just her head
upon his lap,
and his cool, broad hands stroked
just her hair.
And when the movie ended,
he leaned, her friend,
over her smiling mouth,
to brush
just a butterfly kiss
between her eyes.

Christmas Memories

On your knees,
you blew
brown-yellow chowder
onto my parents' front porch
where it froze,
vomit sorbet,
into the snow.

My father, armed
with the same metal
shovel used to scoop
puppy shit,
hacked,
chipped and scraped for hours
at the Picasso puke splatter
until the blade bent.
Still, your frozen fucking upchuck
stuck,
and the dogs lapped at it
like a holiday treat.

I have hacked,
chipped and scraped for hours
at the putrid memory of you
until my eyes burn
and my chest throbs.
Still,
you stick.

Ruin

As my knees
plunged to kiss
grimy carpet,
and my chest heaved
with strangled sobs,
the barren air buried us,
Trouble and I,
and his long, wet
teeth penetrated my
flesh.

They dug me out
with pressure and pills,
chemicals scraping away
at the dense, ashy layer
of nothing,
until I burst,
grains of loneliness lodged
in the corners of my eyes,
into the light.

They found a few traces,
but Trouble had fled.

Still,
there is a twinge
below my ribcage,
a nauseous little roiling
in my gut.
Something grows there
with tentacles,
blind eyes, and long, wet
baby teeth,
which no white pill
will swallow up.

A Yellow Tulip

With weary grace
you lean,
green, like
the dying sigh of spring,
over the bottle's glass lip.
Three long leaves enfold your slender stem:
two, the dainty swell of rabbit's ears,
lightly creased from root to tip,
one, a flat, exhausted tongue of
rubber husk,
tasting the tabletop.
Your hollow yellow blossom
thin, like finespun silk, but
crisp as dewy cabbage
tilts its wide mouth earthward as though
huffing out its candle.

Am I in Trouble?

She bends,
knobby knees splayed,
to pull Tinker Bell boots
from a locker
twice her size.
The school halls spread,
cavernous, and
pigtails with pink ties graze
soft young cheeks
that tilt up toward a teacher's voice.
“What are you doing
in here
by yourself?”
the old man asks,
and her hummingbird heart
flutters, Am I
in trouble?
“They said I
need my boots to
go out
on the playground.”
He shuffles up behind her,
beer gut pushing
into her back,
and his fat pale hands creep
over her shoulders,
down her flat chest and stop
to cradle her unripe privates.
His hot breath
moistens her ear
as he bends
to whisper
threatening gibberish.
She stands, blank-faced,
as he walks away,
and her hummingbird heart
trips

Shuck and Swallow

Men with tie-dyed sweat stains shove
barnacled shells across a grill
crusted black
with God-knows-what.
“The Virtue of Shellfishness,”
a banner reads.
Tyler and I navigate
streets sprinkled
with long-haired hobos
and glistening tourists
to the hiss of saltwater steam
and the incense of seaweed and weed.
We seek
the perfect oyster.

Butter-and-bacon,
blackberry sake,
Po Boys, skewers,
all of them fresh;
an oyster mosaic
streams through the square.
Tyler buys two big slimy
treats,
slathered with garlic and
garnished with gills.
The brown shell scrapes my upturned palm
but cradles its tenant in pearl.

I thumb the gob of flesh
into my throat,
butter and brine dribbling.
Seawater fills my mouth and I
gag, not daring to touch this
gritty nugget with my tongue.
Tyler laughs
and buys another.