her heart beats on

i squeezed you tightly

hair covering eyes

arms adjusting

for length

suffocating my neck

trying to absorb

your internal bleeding,

mopping up wet red

with a used paper towel,

wanting with eyes

squinty shut,

to make you

better.

his hands find length

with ease

rearranging the lines

of dissent into some sort

of sentence of some sort

of death.

her heart beat on.

we sit cross legged now

backs find floors,

eyes find lids,

and tears sometimes won’t find cheeks,

and other times just won’t leave.

i prefer a daily dose of rage

to a sadness that lingers,

so let’s explore,

and find a volcano.

i want it

in me,

a mystic energy,

a life force of molten liquid,

fire in my belly,

and red hot hands.

something to keep my heart pounding

alongside hers,

and all the other hers

whose skin slipped off

into greedy, senseless hands.

dls

driving in the dark

the light blinded my eyelashes as i walked down--

making the dark black ends

extemporaneously white.

my feet kept marching,

each one

a bit lower than the other.

with every step,

the light splashed more in every direction,

parallel, limitless lines moving behind me,

until i fell out of their plane and

it became dark.

--

we sat silently in the car today,

until his hand rubbed my shoulder,

as he told me that rape would always happen-

no matter what i do.

long exhale or loud sigh

with eyes squeezed shut.

how helpful of you to point out, dad.

--

their shouts echo through my sleep, you know,

the words haunted my dreams with an unbearable reality

in the free time in between ferocious tears and a letter to the editor.

i made my face public. i spoke-

about misogyny and hate speech

and free speech and rape and anger and let's make this

better and

group mentality is really

hard so let's

not blame the voices.

language, we said,

is difficult.

--

i'm tired now.

exhausted, rather.

out of words.

and even though my mouth goes on speaking,

and my eyes go on blinking,

and my hands go on shaking,

i'm stuck here;

stuck in this locomotive, automatic, reactive

vehicle.

(the temporary displacement

of fury and mourning

did not disappear

because it's the day after

the yesterday

of my nightmare.)

instead of an engine fueling my steps with

anger,

i feel docile and empty,

out of gas.

i'm lost in this darkness,

unsure of my sadness,

or next step,

looking for one that goes up.

dls

Despair

Dear Cora and Emily,

I am very sorry

that I

missed

our

movie date

tonight.

I do hope

that you will (find it in your hearts to) forgive me.

-Me,

Most apologetically

the great migration

love

is like a little bird fluttering in the sky

with urgent, fast moving wings

(for it did not flutter so, how could it fly!),

but slow movements

on its long migration

to Florida.

similarly,

love migrates each winter

to Florida.

today i woke up,

flustered, as always,

fluttering my non-wings

on my way north,

or more accurately,

nowhere,

or at least nowhere i'll remember

tomorrow.

i promise my morning brain

this morning,

that i believe

in love.

and birds.

but who doesn't believe in

birds?

they are so easy to believe in;

their flight bearing a miracle a minute

unlike santa's elusive sleigh,

or love's invisible

annual migration to Florida.

like the birds,

love flies in a flock.

to Florida.

after trying to stick to young people's

suntan lotion on rocky beaches

over the fleeting

new england summer.

its many contradictory dimensions

synch strokes of feathers

fluttering in small and urgent

flutters

back home

to a state full of certain someones.

i only know this love

that i do believe in

from Florida,

where Sally and Mabon

held wrinkly, indistinguishable, hands,

(for it would have been stranger had they not),

walking up stone steps

for Sunday church.

(for where else would they have been,

but going to church

in Florida

on a Sunday

with birds flying all around

and love unfluttering their

hands,

just slowly swaying them

together as one,

after a long migration

south).

DLS

So Much, So Many

I am nothing

more than a pad

of post-it-note-

labels and

ideas in

two funny coats.

There's an un

expected tin of

zinnias, the

sudden desire to

spiral to the

floor.

CVP

Oct 6

Half awake I murmured good morning I love you because we'd fought like the Russians and Americans did which is to say we built up our defenses and counted warheads but only ever sent letters and spoke on red telephones and made spy movies
And it frightens me when I can't remember the in-between times when I can't account for how moments are spent
So we made our way to hear the judges and the feminists speaking at the forum she wore a corset and had stumps for feet he made her write him essays
Today the trees were under my feet reflected in puddles that were actually mirrors for all the greenness it seemed like the days were getting warmer and everything was growing brighter and healthier and then it came back to me that it's autumn not spring and you can't just forget the direction of things like waking from this nap and thinking it was tomorrow or waking this morning and having it be five years ago and I'm deciding to pick up and leave home like some kind of runaway
These days I pack light,
carry one suitcase to the train station

CDL

let us rejoice while we are young

the beats from the years when I tried
to fix you
rang back,
blurry echoes pinging back and forth
between panther and little moose,
skimming the water like a startled loon,
flapping webbed toes against the
still water.

it never worked.
we wake up in cranky beds with light hearts
and stumble on a museum of her heartbreak
and its present tense in the kitchen,
even with its newly stripped walls,
as her hands rub each other frantically
over and over,
her long fingers lingering together.

three ferns still
sit framed in between four candles
on our long table.
unrecognizable dogs
lick feet and chase each other
beneath our toasts, graces
and the stories of her sisters,
and junrite and senrite kindergarden
she tells us.
over and over,
these days.

we slip down to the dock
after these circular tales
harmonize the
ice cream scooping, ping pong playing,
and living room laughing.
the silence then becomes quite loud,
the volume of sound filled with
vestiges of what was, and the uncertainty
of what will be.

as the darkness catches my tears,
i listen to the echoes of coldplay’s forgotten chords;
i gaze at us, sitting in the car,
pulled over
like tourists looking to feed the deer,
your face in your hands.

it’s slower now.
she strokes her own hands,
sometimes touches the headband,
as if to make sure that after fifty plus years
of resilience,
it won’t suddenly disappear,
like he did.

the turquoise and forest green pastel
remain rich and immortalized on our walls
even as she drifts away
stroking those hands,
i wrote as a middle school scholar.
today, i wonder
where she is now.

DLS

Tryst

The last time things came easily
was in the tall grass by the dock in June,
near where we used to pick raspberries
with their sour juice, little hairs, and black thorns.
Sometimes we took handfuls back home
to cut the tartness with scoops of ice cream,
but more often we couldn’t wait
and ate them standing in the tangled brush.

That night he wore his father’s jacket, hung about
until the others had gone into the house,
then tugged me down beside the canoe.
He held himself the way they do sometimes,
as though you’re something easily ruined.
I would’ve liked to be a branch, I said,
on a birch tree where nothing with petals grows
or a hollow carved deep into the trunk of the tree
with a hunting knife or tomahawk.
But these things are coarse.

CDL

Breakfast Oct 1

He said that fictional imagination is timid and the world is bolder and I would agree except that I have been living timidly in the world and perhaps that is why I prefer journalism it allows you to seek out the bold people

They discovered a new planet and we celebrated we put stars on our ceiling and beckoned in our alien-like friends and I missed most of it but they had champagne where I was too and also people who wished me luck in sincere ways and who I'll miss I know very shortly it's just I haven't quite decided why yet. Perhaps the dancing and the way the writing was always accidental like winning the lottery or breaking a vase

At least now I can hide between tree needles sneak into caves and huddle like a boulder hunched and confident in my shape, talk generalities and pass me a beer and would you like to go for a run. Go to a place where everyone knows you and nobody is speaking to you in that worst way or not at all are you sure you exist

I remember stomping our feet and blaring the words shouting there is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so. After all timidity is the easiest thing to unlearn all you have to do is at breakfast like Frank did recite oh god it's wonderful to get out of bed and drink too much coffee and smoke too many cigarettes and love you so much

CDL