Cannery

1

All of the sudden, one is missed on the
factory line. It wasn’t my fault, not my fault
the building roof fell in my eyes, I couldn’t see
and I couldn’t have known. There is a girl here that all
the duds at the shipyards swell over, go home get
their old lady’s pregnant over and most days you
don’t mind her none but today I missed one on the
factory line and all her hootin and hollarin asking
you why no one is paying attention to her is getting on my last nerve.

2

There wasn’t much cept maybe a little room to breath in homeless shelter,
I left my husband I left my babies down south. I had a black eye and two broken ribs.
I had a friend she got me the job here. She said he sided with the Nazi’s.
I said, I should have known

The first time I felt his dick I yawned. He was always a bore.
I would yawn or laugh and he would punch me cold in the face
I came to this little town with a black eye and two broken ribs
The thought of it, still makes me laugh.

3

My strength is failing. My resistance small
I old enough now at 42 to want my free ride and it just keeps coming
I am not going to put on any shows. The girls on this line are half my age.
Sometimes I still smile while digging through ashes of I was.
I could’ve been a singer or at least taught lessons but I
guess most people succumb to lessons in humility

4

They’re jealous. Most boys in this town are retards. I just
tease them to see how much I can get away with. Give them just enough.
So no one here really likes me except maybe two. I don’t care.
I’ve had to live being beautiful my whole life. You might think its easy but try
telling an eight year old she prettier than her momma when her father
already told her so.

5

This is a good life. My husband works in the shipyard. I got this job.
Three little ones and another on the way. This is a good life, one day we’ll make it our of this town

My friend, I remember once when we walked to the water. We laughed with the sincerity of children. The sun seemed on our favor and I said to you, this is a good day.
You said to me, “yes, it is.”

Happy Birthday.

1
For your birthday I thought to give you a
Beautiful woman who spoke in broken English
Who spoke while the water lines beneath us
Exploded over a dusty street in India
erasing the chalk outlines of who we ever were
before we ever denied ever being strangers, only

I couldn’t afford, India or the woman or the water beneath our feet
Nor would I want give you anything broken.

2
For your birthday I considered getting you a cookie jar for your house
but gifts like a cookie jars consistently get returned
When the store asks for a reason, it is always: I don’t need one
What people mean is: because it is meaningless
But then I reassessed the situation and decided I would get one anyway
Only not a cookie jar but a coffee maker
Because you need one but I sent this along for meaning
from my cookie jar heart.

3
For your birthday I think I’ll give you a truck
stop blow job and traffic jammed bed sheets and that under each of my fingertips I’ll carry static electricity
when the screaming sirens pass maybe I’ll give you
rest and maybe then I’ll lay cherry blossomed kisses on your dreams
these things make me feel like
I’ve taken non-drowsy cold medicine, btw

4
For your birthday I will not answer my phone should it ring. I will be a long distance runner with stockpiled reasoning. I will ask politely, that the pigeons stay away and carry a bb gun instead of a phone, in my purse.

5
For your birthday I want you to know that I’m glad you’re here, that your hair is too short to ever work as an umbrella that I’ve been growing mine out that I was walking this way and it was eventual and I am glad we crossed paths and that I’m confused that is the middle of October, that it feels like July.

Oh also on your birthday I wanted to remind you, that I really like the gray slightly above your ear. I find it irresistible.

Memory

Remember when my nerves
killed the roses and I ate only prayers
until you called.

“The sun”, you said “would always
come out again” but at the end
of the day I knew it would give up its fight
and surrender to the earth. I knew but
I never told you.

Remember when I bought your lust with love
And we sat naked outside of your window
Gravel sticking to my thigh, my thigh sticking
to you.

I lost everything off of that roof
dropped into the field, eaten by coyotes.

Remember when your life support hands
would sit on my knees and I really
had no idea,
I would miss you one day

Or that missing you would feel like
I couldn’t breathe

I couldn’t

Remember how I was crying again while painting
And tears stung the skin around my eyes like mosquitoes
you told me to look at you but “I can’t, I said,
“I have been drinking since noon”
You sat there quietly for the next four hours, waiting for me to talk

And when I did, I smiled and I asked you where you’d been.

Remember

Well one day I was sitting in a bath reading when I
decided I had loved you too long, then I forgave myself
for doing so.

I lifted my wine glass in the air and whispered “salud”

And on another day I realized I had not cried
in a very very long time, cept when I saw that old lady’s
thin hands on the muni, because they
like her were so very beautiful
so I rented some of those heart-wrenching movies
to ignite a response and ended up laughing
at myself for my inability to cry.

I used to hope to run into you so you could see how well I
was doing. I wanted to show you I wasn’t afraid that I wouldn’t crumble
at the sight of you but instead of you I ran into unapologetic groping
by a strange man wearing a wife beater in the middle of winter
I reacted like I had a razor hidden in my hair and he left running
I realized I wasn’t’ afraid I would crumble in front of you or anyone else
Now I know seeing you would only remind me of far I fell
and Id’ rather not be reminded
my memory is good enough

Randoms 09/18/08

Its okay, I suppose for some,
To fall off the tracks
And come right back
Stamping my skin with frustrated bruises
Smoking too many cigarettes
Hurting your throat as I kiss you
It doesn’t work for me, so casually
I am dry and dead and reading Camus and falling asleep by eight
Dreaming of the flowers you planted in my breast
When you told me I hurt you because I did not love you in the two weeks.
You are sweet and naïve and silly and by far a greater con-man than I can ever be
I am quiet, with my cards to my chest
Just bring me back to the day you unfolded my limbs and I didn’t worry about hurting you
Or hurting me
Our clothing is amours so let’s disrobe.
Get me drunk so at least I have my excuses
for staying here
Again and again...

Assembled with Rumi

One day you assembled me with Rumi and yet, you- not the lover- nor the sage
had ever heard of him. That day, I felt

tapping from the inside of my ribcage. I was a shot of jagermeister and a Malibu-pine. Sweet and ridicules. You took a straw and drank

from my spine. “206 bones” you said were in my body. I pushed my mandible to yours, 412 bones I thought. Now, here, with you

I hadn’t expected this. One day you wrapped up persistence. Soft hands. A deer that had escaped a hunter. I like surprises and mornings

with you. Since that day we first slept in. woke. Since that day I’ve seen you wear less than a t-shirt. You had washed your sheets and were dreaming you boarded a train that took you on a direct route to Memphis. To take photo’s of pregnant Mexican women.

I thought of Texas and San Diego and Calexico. But not Memphis. These are only small ways we are different. I thought of deserts and guns. I thought I could do something but did nothing besides think. But she, she and her baby they made it

to Monday morning work days. Are the most difficult. And this weekend was mostly beautiful . As you, are- mostly, beautiful.

One day you tried to unbutton my nerves. You furrowed your brow with the dramatics of the season actor. Looked at me like I was crazy. When cornered like this I think we’re competing for sanity and I refuse to loose. I think I might have cried for a moment but still I don’t think I let you-unbutton my nerves “let’s play darts” I said. You refused, you said that I always won and it wasn’t fun. So I

I tied myself to the fire escape so I wouldn’t fall off. I smoked a cigarette and accidentally started a fire. You cut the rope. We ran pass a herd of horses. It was the most striking thing I had ever seen. You said it was the most striking thing you have ever seen. This is a small way we are alike.

That day you asked if that was the day I was to take my red shoes and red dress and my mascara and used books home from your house. If that was the day I was leaving you.

No, I stayed. That day I told you, I said, “you assembled me with Rumi, have you read him?” you hadn’t but you had.

. . . . . . . . . . . .



Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn't make any sense.

~ Jelaluddin Rumi

it is still beating

Close my eyes held my breath; I am on life support, surviving on invisible tubes
in order to get anywhere far far from me.

Stop.

Stop.

Holding my breath.
Eyes closed
Listen,
Listen,
to my heart beat drumming in accordance to the tintinnabulation of the raindrops hitting an aluminum trashcan outside my childhood home.

Summer is over, and fall, and it is winter and I am still selfish.

But selfish is only one of my truths, and you are one of my truths and I alone am one.

Denying/defining that spring when my spirit wasn’t my own and what that attachment cost me. Cost me my life, my life. I lived on life support, an oxygen tank now there’s a suture where the breathing goes,

Open it up, pull it out and you’ll see it is still beating.

Now when the ghost from a past knocks offering a gift, giving me its time, I look ahead, move on, for every time I held its hand.

Open it up, pull it out and you’ll see it is still beating.

Remember that time I was sprawled out on the floor like an unassembled puzzle?

Open it up, pull it out and you’ll see it is still beating.

I am not crawling, or crying, I am a bore.

Open it up, pull it out and you’ll see it is still beating:

since then,
I have fallen asleep early and watched the evening news, 4 times.

Last night I laughed
And recently, again.

When watching a breakdown from the distance,
its easy to call in kind words,
a kind smile putting it all down so carefully,
wiping it all off gently…
and when its our turn to break
really really break to the point of progressing
it finally makes sense.

Open it up, pull it out and you’ll see it is still beating.

Finally I am able to tune it out. Tune into want feels right for me.

But it’s for the moments, when I denied
that the me that exists today
ever mattered.
Its for those times, those the times I thought I shouldn’t have come here.
At every corner that I bent smiling and every alley I handed my wallet over without a fight.
For every promise I really believed in and every time I cursed the God that my faith asked me to hang on to. For the time I didn’t stop reading for four days because I needed a distraction and the time I got upset at a guilty man, preaching.

Remember that time you fell and I ran back to help you up and I ended up losing?

For the way I washed remnants of an old lover’s footsteps away with my tears and called out with my voice sounding like a death threat.

For the panties barely put in my purse before going home two days later.

And the time I lied.
And the time I left.
And the time I ran
And the time I hid.
For the winter and the way it seems to mourn the death of the past year.
For the winter and the way it looks like the morning of the year to come.
For the horrible angry, badly written poetry- I can’t help but write out.
And the way I rephrase things in hopes of being heard.
For the way I treat her like I am sight-see-her and she is vacation.
For every time I ever thought something would cost me too much.
For every time I thought too hard.
Or stayed too long
For everytime I’ve closed my eyes, held my breath.

Please, open it up, pull it out and you’ll see it is still beating.

bones

+

1
“Do we build houses with cards that eventually fall to say that we tried? Why me, or why not me?” It was something I read- handwritten on a bottle of Carlo Rossi one night and I lifted a smile and gaily said cheers to the freedom from entitlement I felt at that moment. I had nothing to gain, or lose or give and so I made believe this was really, really, really what I wanted. Until it really was what I wanted.

but, what I really wanted was…

2
No one calls past midnight and my phone has been busted for over two months…I know that I am not always a very good friend I know I can be better and I know I will be.

When you drove off I thought I would see you later.

3
Later I found the heaviest weights only gets heavier by not apologizing for what I should of and instead apologizing for getting bumped into, or for loving someone too long, or for needing alone time to think about what I should really be fu ckin g sorry about.

4
For a long time I sat on the edge of a thirty-seven floor future and holding good old stories out the window letting them fall as I realized they really were only older now.
Not necessarily afraid but comfortable with nothing left to loose. The only thing I had was mine and mine alone and they were my junkyard-rust-heavy-memories.
I thought of how cruel my mother seemed for raising me with faith and how innocent she was…I thought eventually how in a way she way right and I thought,
“thank God that’s over.”
Only I didn’t capitalize the “G” in the word God because it’s mostly vague from where I stand. Sometime soon, I got up and found shadows to smile in. I smiled and smiled.

I thought about how life is really mush simpler than we make it out to be, and then I found you. Or you me? I don’t really know since we were drinking.

5
You were miles away before and I forgot how to sleep so I watched your rib cage, hold your lungs and watched your lungs boast and then cower. I watched you for hours until I couldn’t take it much longer and I woke you, I woke you and asked if you knew,
“how many bones are in our bodies” and then I said
“well, but really, “I love you.”
(Ignore the questions about the bones; I only wanted to tell you the second part)

6

I have never been so gentle, so careful. Last night I dreamt of many pairs of socks that I never got around to trying on. When I woke up I noticed you had put a straw in my spine and you were drunk. So I showed you where there was a suture. I told you to open it up, pull it out and you’ll see it is still beating.

I didn’t mean to startle you,
only meant to thank you.

+