love is all

A small text from my father tonight,

Was enough to make me cry to the point of hiccuping exhaustion:

 “Life is fleeting.  Love is all.”

Now, in bed,

 I am taking everyone I love

And letting them get shot in the street,

 In my mind,

Until that part of my brain is rubbed raw,

And my chest aches from momentarily believing it’s true.

Sometimes I have to picture everything gone

So I know that it’s there. 

LIFE UNDERWATER
I started wearing a heart rate monitor
All the time
I got it originally to figure out my threshold on the bike
I haven’t gotten around to doing that yet
When I first put it on
I guess it hadn’t made proper contact
 I looked down at the watch
It blipped a tiny radiating pulse like a submarine Doppler
Searching for a beat
My friend pulled my shirt up licked the sensor and stuck it back to the place just beneath my breast
I laughed
There it was

Now when I walk
I look at my wrist obsessively
Dick Tracy waiting for a secret message

I am thirty now
And I worry, nightly; I will be too old too soon
To be a mother
I worry that I am a child

I interpreted an ultrasound
For a deaf person
A communication with the beyond
The doctor searched for the right spot
Made contact
And I heard the muffled, galloping sound
Of someone trying to survive underwater
I opened and closed my fist to show her the rhythm of a pulse

 I have no god
And I don’t want one
But what I do want is a sign
That I am alright

Tonight I sit on top of a closed toilet and watch water fill the bath
The best part of the day
A reentry to the womb
Right before I get in
I remember myself
I unhook the monitor from my ribs
And get in
Submerged, I listen for the galloping
But hear only neighbors
Shifting furniture downstairs

When I’m done I can’t help the compulsion
To put it back on
And when I do I get the message

tea stain

picked up and dunked horizontally
steeped a darker brown
on the elbow and the knee
dumbfounded

one side numb
one side wondering what the other has become

braided bones

I was strong
before I met you
now it all hurts
Including
the bits that are sublime
Because, even then, I am in turmoil

I feel joy,
which is passion,
which is drama,
Which is turmoil.

and the pieces of me between my ribs
which are bones
are the pieces that hurt
all the time

grown up friends

On just getting married: “Now that we’re married, nothing has changed. We are still the same people and everything. Well… I guess it is a little different now. In that whatever happens, it happens to us. If she loses her wallet, we lose our wallet. People had told me that would happen, but I never believed it would be so completely true.”

On having a baby: “You are with someone for so long, you think you know everything about them. And then a baby comes, and they really surprise you. I’m learning things about him that I never knew”.

On childbirth: “I never ever knew just how much of a badass I am. I mean, I am fucking strong.”

i bet art got in the way of a lot of love.

"A Little Cage Music"

I know why the caged bird sings...

It's because there's a cat out there
and he's purring and preening for me

there's opera on the radio
there's pasta on the stove

he works on a thorn in his paw
i fight for his attention

but i am awkward and have forgotten
all my best dances

i compete with the am/fm
and sing a perfect fifth alongside the soprano

now i've got him

i sing my best song

he forgets his pain
his gaze sustains
he doesn't see the cage.