Everything changes         Deeper woods    To find wild        More secrets

Parties      In abandoned train cars           Drugs          Exotic birds        Extroverts      Bad tattoos

You left me       on the side of the road          I’m misremembering        I’m lying        A fight

You ditched the motorcycle           You ran       into the woods      We’re not       Kids anymore

I didn’t     Follow you       Asshole sometimes      Black leather jacket 

Me and an acoustic guitar          Can’t you tell I’m sensitive           When it’s convenient

Over-narration and disappearance       Word fumbles       Inarticulate sky inside out blue

Moss stained        with blood drops          Body dragged to       Edge of road      Almost dead

Haunted through and through          Reverential owls         Why owls         Owls      Always watching

Hooting ill-music       You shouldn’t remember      Let it go      It’s gone        Donna we need to talk

Does your shape
have little legs sticking out

appendages going nowhere
a goggled eye or crooked fin

a comb-shaped hairdo
or a bit of a saggy muddle

around the middle
or what?

Let that shape express
itself and relate

to the other shapes
on the canvas 

You can construct the shape
sharpen up its boundaries

build a little bridge
from one shape to another

• 

Thinking in mineral tones
& earth pigments

Yellow ochre dreams of
burning all the others

with her golden eyes
& her milky voice

Unlongingly she puddles
on a plate    She’s just 

sunning

Spin swerve       Gone summer        Dragging bikes  uphill       Downhill     so fast

Legs unable     To keep revolution   Spread out      Rims spinning       The accident

Don’t talk about     Soil becomes      blood         Was that the first time

Death      wasn’t vocabulary    Dumbfounded in dim light       Extended days

You held     My hand       Tears and snot     On your shoulder      Remember how

We hated adults    You and me against         What was it     We were against   

Growing up         Looking stupid     No Faker    Underneath     the Douglas fir   

Skirt of moss      Distant sounds   of swimmers      in the pond    Wasn’t it a lake 

Cold birth        Summer weather     sweating in autumn sweater       leather satchels 

Divided dreams   decoded diary entries    lily stains    Something what   This way comes    

Used to be all forest      Flannel shirts and duck boots       Fancy cafes     Recommended photo spot   

What happen    To our days       off-filter fun        Erased landmarks       You changed

now I wish I’d gone even more pedestrian

photo-flash of morning lightning
their “no, you go” at intersections
my jaywalking on diagonals
hopscotching twigs and worms
movie-set rain (wind through wet trees)
black folding chair facing frat house
gas leak? pervasive petrichor again
ROAD CLOSED sign that lies

instead of always wandering around looking for

the sound behind the sound
the taste behind the taste
the touch under the touch
the sight beyond the vision
the smell beyond the scent
the glow beyond the hill
the face beyond the crescent
the bend beyond the break

Roused out of my swoon
hollow & absent
how could I fight?

I had been carrying
something that looks like a knot
in the wood

It was not a knot
in the wood   It was a thought
but wasn’t no good

Fresh lettuce & oxygenated air
have skinned me terribly    A sunset leans 
exactly in the opposite direction

If I were a moviemaker
I’d set about hunting for 
a bouquet of daisies in the waiting room

*Bibliomanced from random phrases of Julio Cortázar’s A Certain Lucas + one pronoun change (her to my).

Join the microfiber cleaning club? Spic and/or Span a Venn Diagram? Playing the long game of compulsory sports just
to avoid dust-busting the futon is okay if we’re all poets, ‘cause the hard work of poeting is its own taut glowing
turtle mapping zone of fealty to discouragement.

Continuing to misspell “vigilance” = putting down the porn? If so, from now on I’ll need to rent my B&D equipment
from that 99 cent place in Hatley (home of Polish Narnia’s talking military coyotes). After a road trip like that, what
wouldn’t I give for some fast cheap reiki on Zoom?

Five things I would give: 1.) that cucumber-cheddar-Triscuits-mustard snack you invented; 2.) the wet garlicky
flatbread in the “discontinued” aisle by the birdseed; 3.) Henry Ford’s curtain hack; 4.) “Cap’n Crunch’s” “cock”;
5.) perfume that smells like weeping.

Are we still stalking the womb of you know whom? Or celebrating the parallel spectacles of fascism in Nazi Germany
and present-day America? Either way, I think I’ve stopped experiencing the contradictions of the swamp master
of the microfiber cleaning club, which I haven’t joined yet because of that weird loud Polish talking coyote

rustling in the underbrush. 

our pink and chocolate field

mushroom of a boyfriend 

saw the bear crossing 

plainfield    bluebells too 

long underwater to un 

scraggle    my lobes still

practically floating

I have stopped experiencing

the contract of days 

the cosmos this season 

chest finely threaded 

the wasp having

already   I’ll keep fingering

the ferns still 

in their paper  wobble 

my legs enough

to activate wilderness

why is this particular 

headwater so much

more iridescent? whatever

we mounted was in dreams–

where is the swamp master

of this unincorporated 

village? right where I left

them, sluice

in hand–

To be forgotten     But he said,          I haven’t forgotten      A stretch of wood

The low-lying ferns         Various greens       absorbed light         Sun through rhododendrons 

That day     Sun on slate         Slow trickle    of wanna-be     waterfall      Four feet moving 

Through    leaf waste       Do you        remember         Fading car       sounds      Wood depth 

Rustling        in the underbrush        Someone         else’s foot pattern       approaching    

A menacing voice         A disproportioned beard            Distortion inside itself   

A lesson         about cells         Show me     yours        I’ll show you      mine

Whispering     side-eye is an ignored        side-eye         How about a wink     More akin     to aura

How about       this hole         it’s home       How about        this branch       it’s a hold  

Just ask      the leaf       No reply       Replay the ask       The sky answers       With silence 

I haven’t forgotten       Two knees       A slight touch    How it began        The story

Who’s story       Is this       The beginning           Touching knees     Is a deceit closer

The midway       Hesitant   narrative            Something flutter     A voice floating    in and out 

Harmony ears      Nature kids     doing natural things       This part      The story  keeps to itself

Feeling shy      Lusting secrets        I haven’t forgotten    Heaven’s nonsense    Patient light 

Flat back        The sky undoes       itself in blue      Outside    any good song       the melody

 is lonely          Outside any good boy        A guitar riffs into heaven       An April day

I haven’t forgotten         Friendly keyboard trinkle          Forgot    the windchimes 

You and your clarinet         An April afternoon       Cars       Fading away 

Something moving         in the underbrush         Untouching knees        Secrets lusting 

For more secrets         Shushed-up trees          You don’t have to remember   I haven’t forgotten

Not with the cats wanting first and second breakfast, 
          then to be let out to the sunroom and back in almost 
immediately to see what I’m getting into and if their 
          wet food is ready yet. Not with you getting up just as 
I’m sitting down to write, you talking to the cats, 
          praising them in that silly human way and asking them 
nonsense questions as I try to hear words in my head.
          And that’s when I say “Can everyone please leave me 
alone?” in the voice I use to sometimes reply to the 
          questions you pose to the cats, impersonating or I 
guess im-cat-ating them. I had a hot plan to dig into 
          some abandonment wounds, but instead I find myself 
swarmed. Yesterday I was enraptured by a graphic called 
          “Baby Season Rules: When to Help. When to Walk Away.” 
“No such thing as abandoned” when it comes to Turtle, 
          it said. Turtle is “independent from hatch.” Sound of you 
climbing the stairs, staccato music to my ears, though 
          by afternoon I’ll probably be wondering where you are,
then scanning your face for the teeniest of twitches.
          Is “Baby Season Rules” a message from my spirit guides 
who visited me after I received the reiki attunements 
          and let me know they’d been there since my own baby 
season? No such thing as abandoned! How presumptuous 
          to become a healer! Though I’ve always identified with 
Chiron. How presumptuous to identify with Chiron! 
          Sylvia sits serenely next to me on the arm of the couch 
unlike her little brother who’s eyeing up the mirror 
          to see if he can still squeeze behind it even though he’s 
not a kitten anymore. Oh Earl, the mirror stage is over, 
          it’s time you entered the symbolic order. At the very least 
please stop pawing and crying at the bedroom door at dawn. 
          Whenever I put my cats’ needs before my own I wonder if 
I’m doing what my sister does with her kids, making myself 
          always available in an effort to break the cycle of intergen-
erational trauma as the Instagram graphics urge. Turtle 
          is the name of my sister’s dog, I suddenly remember. 
Like Turtle I was independent from the hatch at a 
          young age, closing the door, writing in my notebooks 
while my sisters played and fought in the rooms beyond. 
          Hurt people hurt people; hurt people heal people. 
First an inheritance, then a choice. Like Turtle, 
          I have many homes, and I’ve carried them all along.