nomadic verse
Feminism, poeticism, sass and college life.
all writing is original unless otherwise noted
all writing is original unless otherwise noted
Tell me the heart I
left between your pillows is
in good hands, the farewell
to San Francisco hidden in
the nowhere of your intersection
was found.
Tell me why we fought.
Tell me that I cried by
the parking meter to
bring back the storm of our
beginnings, that you scowled
over French toast with good reason.
Tell me it was worth the plane ticket.
Tell me that, when I threw my
empty self onto my empty mattress
you felt my ribs compress on
West coast time.
Tell me you didn’t drink that night.
Tell me the grass wasn’t blue and
the bridge didn’t sing, that the
espresso was weak and your
car was out of gas.
Tell me you decided you were
less alone. Tell me we were
happy.
I have friends who are victims of this mindset and it makes them much less whole, happy and healthy.
I bit the ivy
from your halls.
I swanned my neck
against the rock of
your belltower.
It’s time to spit at the
streetlamp’s empty threat:
I’m lit much brighter, and
you’re no dimwit.
You’re on the cusp of
keeping me, but I don’t believe
in absolutes. I learned that
from Socrates. I
learned that from the pregnant oaks
split with cancer. I learned that from whiskey,
from sparkling like a thousand brilliant essays.
Back home—
do they hear the percussion
of our trembling?
To us, it seems, they’d be blind
if they didn’t.
Once I was a princess.
Once: tulle skirts,
demure pigeons toes.
The pigeon grappled from
The sky by a hawk
barreled down
like lost thunder and
bombed your baseball dugout.
On rooftops,
thunderstorms saudered halos
around our lightning rods,
our hearts flashed and banged.
How to graft purple hollows
To where they belong—the eyelid.
God looks down at
ovoid lichens on your
sleeping face.
I rise in the night
to gulp water from the sink and
witness your youth everywhere.
I could kiss those dreamy photographs.
Not his jawbone unbreakable,
His serious thoughts—
I can’t quite recall.
Not how he snuck past
My father in the dog night
And shuddered at the ease of closing distance.
I talked less because
I cared about me—my
effigy soon burned on his altar.
He wanted a victory garden wife—I
could not be sure.
I said a strong woman,
he asked me to clarify.
I said if I’m yours,
how can I be mine?
On the scummy subway that only I
had the strength to ride,
he shied from our tilted reflection
rubbing shoulder with
the sin of streetlight and human sound.
I stepped off
between harsh moving doors:
on or off, in or out—
and now I’m sure.
I ruv kate bush. I don’t know why I wasn’t obsessed with her before!
I dare you
to be absolved.
Leave your horrors
at the threshold,
fall to the gravity
of another body
puzzled to fit yours
and allow the commotion
of your hearing and seeing
to steep in evening’s boquet.
I found in myself
a love of sea creatures,
wise-eyed in their briney havens.
you and I could dream up fins
and chase each other
indefinitely, silently,
lost in a world ambitious and wide
as human thought.
I dare you
to slip into the harbor here,
sunlight wobbling the surface
like blue candle flames,
even if you are afraid,
even if you cannot yet swim
jump in with me.
It’s the year of the protest.
Introducing “Us,”
cavorters on standard issue beds,
dance floor lunatics
flailing under ecstatic strobes.
Our senses are doused in chemicals.
It’s the year of the protest—
fists raised in Tunisia, in Oakland
and New York,
and we float on beneath our glossy fall foliage,
swooners to Oxford stone,
we perch on a shrinking pedestal
in the cold of the night
and swallow blush champagne
while Venus watches over us.
We mangle our words for love
and revert to sign language—
my hands in your hair,
the quiet of my head on your shoulder:
it’s a true moment of humility
to be at rest on your nerve endings.
We argue the meaning of relationship,
weep and come back hands up,
“no definition will suffice.”
in the wreckage of empty beer cans
and laundry that needs doing,
we hold peace conferences.
We are archaeologists palming the relics
of our pasts—your dark haired ex girlfriend
is horribly pretty and you
are dangerously forgiving.
It’s the year of the protest—
I spent eighteen chanting battle cries
against dependence,
that softening in the mouth and eyes,
dewy kisses fossilizing in a lover’s bed.
But you and I are carried to shelter
by our own inertia—
somewhere quiet enough for us
to hear our bodies and souls raised up in song.
