is this tattoo on my left wrist,
transformed
from a ragged scar that once was
a wound that bled for years and years.
Poetry is making heartbreak beautiful again.
Tag: poet
Love Letter
Turn the light off, let’s fold
our bodies like pages
of a love letter written
decades ago; slow
kissing each word from
my dearest all the way
down to forever yours.
Untitled
Like a moth to a flame,
I, too, mistook you for a star.
A Story in 20 Words – 3
Seven Year Itch
The therapist says we should go back
to the orange groves in Florida again.
A Story in 20 Words – 2
Standing at the Altar
He steals a glance at her.
She sits in the back, fighting tears.
The bride marches in, smiling, holding peonies.
He said
I want to read the story
that you would have written
if you weren’t afraid, he said,
tell me where you have been,
the nameless cliff that you
fell from, turn it to words,
and keep writing until
it has lost its power
to hurt you.
Heirloom
Now I have the same
look in my eyes as
my mother once had
the ancient sadness
that I never thought
would become mine.
Unwoven
When I was young, I once found
a loose thread
on a brand new sweater.
Not knowing what it did, I pulled on it,
and I kept on pulling,
and pulling,
until I found out.
Every time your fingers dance on my skin, kindling
every fiber of my body into a wildfire,
I think about that loose thread and what it did.
I think about how that beautiful sweater
slowly shrivelled into nothing,
a pile of messy yarn.
sometimes
her lover makes her feel
like a schoolgirl
on fire drill days.
excited, heart pounding, running
through emergency exit, skipping down
countless flights of stairs, breathless, intoxicated, a rush, so much
fear and despair, and then
she turns around and walks back
into the building, safely in one piece,
no smoke, no burn, no damage. love
does not hurt, her lover says, but
sometimes
very late at night she
secretly wishes to be engulfed
in a real fire.
Drunk Dialing
You call him on a Saturday night, after leaving a
lousy party. Your head hurts from the cheap tequila.
You want to tell him everything you couldn’t say that day
when he stormed out of the house into the pouring rain.
You tell him that you blame him for everything, and that
you hate him for what he’s become. You swear to
God that you are clearly and completely over him.
You scream again and again that you deserve so much better.
But the funny thing about drunk dialing is
that the callers never say what they mean, and two
minutes after hanging up, they suddenly burst
into tears. And those tears are the unspoken truth.
You know, the truth that you have pushed
all the way down inside you, so deep that
no amount of tequila can give you enough
courage to bring it back up and just admit
that all you want is to hear him say,
– like he’d said a thousand times before –
Baby, I miss you too.
SW Altair 