Battle Skills

I don’t remember you

your funny smells

your frog smile

the air in your laughter

a slow hissing tire

the face in the mirror 
blank

my memory as free as a

debt unpaid

I saw it

isn’t that enough?

The Ache in the Neck

Here we recite our reasons for

walking

for talking

with our mouths closed

Here Again

Far out of your orbit

spinning in slow motion

trying to shout louder

than a kitten’s mewling

will the planets find me

all my silent crying

now I can feel nothing

only my plates shifting

into old arrangements

nothing ever changes

nothing at all

The Fall

the place you fell down from

                                                was the air so pure up there

                                that before you could warn me I

might find you

                                     in the rustling of the trees  

you lost your breath

                and I was trapped

                under this avalanche of dreams

          

The Coming Storm

I avoided Bryan all Saturday.  He bore silent witness to this until Sunday morning, when he joined me in the kitchen.  “I just got off the phone with Bob,” he said.  “I have some bad news.  He and Shelly broke up.”

The apple I’d been holding landed with a thud on the cutting board.  “You’re kidding me!”

“I’m afraid not.”

“But why?”

“You know how Shelly has been in Chicago for the past couple of months?”

“Yeah.  For work, right?”

“Not quite.  She’s been seeing someone else there.”

“You mean another guy?” I gasped.  At Bryan's nod I said, “Is Bob sure about that?  Maybe he’s just being paranoid, because of Cathy.”  

“Well, considering the fact that Shelly was the one to tell him, he’s pretty damn certain.”

“She told him?”

“She had to.  She and this other guy just moved in together.”

“Oh, no…”  I sank against the counter.  First Cathy, and now Shelly.  The nightmare never ended.  “Is he okay?”   

“Not at all, so I invited him over for dinner—I didn’t think you would mind.  He could use some cheering up.”

“That’s fine with me,” I answered, but it was going to take a lot more than dinner with sympathetic friends to right what Shelly had wronged.  Bob was a disaster.  Not even Cathy dumping him for a stinky old college professor had hurt him this much, I guess because he’d blamed it on his drinking.  Now that he was sober, and working his program with such earnestness, maybe his worldview had changed.  Maybe he had thought to himself, this time things will be different.  I couldn’t say.  All I did know was that seeing Bob slumped in the dining room chair, appearing aged and defeated, made me hate Shelly more than I’d ever hated anyone in my life.  “There will be someone else,” I told him.  “Someone who will treasure all of the wonderful things about you.”

Bob smiled a little.  He clearly did not believe me. 

“It’s true,” I insisted, but as his puppy dog brown eyes brimmed with tears I could have sworn I heard his heart breaking.  “I appreciate what you’re trying to say, Rachel,” Bob answered.  “I really do.  But my whole life I’ve been taken advantage of by the people I most want to trust.  And the scariest thing is, I don’t know what to do about it.  I don’t know how to change.”

1953

Yes, the water is cold

January sea freeze makes even the sand shudder

no warm-weather month in sight

                my molecules for so long racing

                colliding

                begging

                for the slowing

the midnight water is cold for me

this is the time

Some fisherman embracing this

icy body

he will find me

by my blue silence he will know

                lost interest in breathing

                this air so full of riddles and

rhymes

Fear of damnation gave way to fear of life

                always the smoke from my fingertips

                as the flames gutted me inside

cleansed my faith in waiting

hope extinguished with

the coming tide

Because the water is cold here

and hesitation’s wounds were bone dry

                turn my head to the black sky fading

                to the moon deserting what must die

even God in his kingdom

must forgive those who

gasp for breath as

they cry

because the water is cold enough

this once

and I must

                swallow it

                swallow it

fill the thirsting void

tonight

No more debating

when there is nothing for saying

                                I will be all right

Then

to remember is to fall

memory the betrayal of

what decorates the 

hall

a collection of explosions

kept

in an open jar