Ephemeroptera

There is a woman across the street playing catch with an old golden lab whose enthusiasm outpaces her tired body

There is noontime light landing on a city that has become a home I wasn't always sure was real

There is some bright blur of meaning tickling the velvet depths of my core, asking me to ask it more

There is a mayfly landing on my hand and she is pausing my pen and then the poem, she is becoming the poem, is the poem, is flying away towards ancient, lofty places

Did you know that most only live a few hours?

What an honor to be touched by her time

Is she aware of her own ephemerality, do you think? That today is the very first and very last day of her life? Or is forever on her mind as she flies?

I do believe in an eternity of sorts

But, one that begs we spend our time here well

Loving, landing, accepting the warmth we are offered, knowing when to part those prismatic, stained glass wings and rise

This now, being our very first and very last life.

How about now?

Until the day it sold for 99 cents at a tag sale on my hot tar driveway on a green and barefoot summer Saturday in July, I saved every sticker I ever owned in a miniature purple marbled binder

I was saving them for a special occasion that never came

As the girl handed me a single bill extracted from her father's willing wallet and I passed her a penny along with all I thought I'd already outgrown, I felt a profound pang of panic

I wanted, no needed, to peel each and every gluey, glittery fish and fairy princess and bedazzled basketball and magic wand off of each and every one of those pages and plaster them to everything — to my cheeks, to my walls, to the ceiling by the glow-in-the-dark stars, to the bed-frame, and my book covers — and I needed to now

Joy asks nothing of occasion

Just like her brother, she doesn't require such notice or ostentation

Joy is a question renewed with each passing moment, always awaiting an answer, and always pressing harder as doors begin to close

You are here, all being and miracle and mystery — one we only know is solved by love. Are you seeing this?

I handed back her dollar and plucked the book back from her hands like springing a leaf from a sapling. I said I was so sorry but it was no longer for sale.

I ran up the steps of the creaky blue porch with the white crossbeams and into the sappy delirium of my summertime bedroom

My book of treasures and I were sitting together, drenched in the maple-torn light casting golden freckles on that awful blue carpet we couldn’t afford to replace, when I peeled the very most special and very most sparkly star from the very first plastic page and poked it to my cheek like a punctuation mark

This was a rebellion. This was a weapon. This was an occasion. This was the occasion.

This is joy.

Finding

I'm waiting for you still, is that wild?

I counted down from ten and then a hundred and then a thousand and ready or not here I am

Tip-toeing down hardwood halls with my back to the wall

Peeking an eye around corners ready to shout "boo!"

This house is too quiet now

I've learned to play the piano that used to make me music with scrolls we would place in its heart

I sit with my back to the front door and the dust still looks like glitter flurrying through the light

The clock unwinds and again I rise with the blush blooming across the sill

One hundred thousand to ready or not, and I am here, but where have you gone?

Weave Me Wilder

I once knew a man who dealt in wildfires

He'd always say that junipers were "the biggest pains in the ass" because as they grow, their trunks braid themselves full of stones

What a plight for a smoke-sodden chainsaw

What a way to protect yourself from man, blade, and flame

What a way to let the tough stuff make you stronger as you grow

What a way to never go down easy.

Chalant

Everyone knows what they want until they start to want me.

I don't know how to be anything other than absolutely everything.

The Fall

The trees in the canyon corners are turning gold.

This morning, I wonder if they are dying of drought or the season is simply changing.

It's About Time

The carnival came around every autumn

I sucked a kernel of caramel corn from between my teeth and spotted the sign

For $17 she took my palm in her own like an aging book she'd been aching to pull from the shelf

After several moments of careful study, she cocked her head at me, all avian elegance

She gently ran her gnarl of purple polished fingernail through the crease of my "love line"

She clucked then, smacking her tongue to her teeth like she'd also been snacking on caramel corn

"Broken. Early on. But... don't lose hope because this next one..."

Her nail bit deeper into my flesh like a pencil demanding its sharp trace be heard by the drafting paper

"Do you see? It goes the whole way, and then some. From this realm to the next. This one, you are here for. You are here for each other and will be again."

I snatched my hand back like her incongruent words had branded me

Fairytales weren't broken stories but I tipped her too much for the feeling brewing in my belly

"You'll see, sweet one, someday," she said with a glimmer of knowing in those beady bird eyes.

I've been thinking about hands a lot

The paint and the skin and the moments they've tried to make something of

I’ve been thinking about sticking around, and maybe seeing, someday.

Sunsets + Smoke

“Isn’t it pretty?” I wanted to say — that and all the rest, like,

Do you cut your apple first or sink your teeth straight into its core?

And why won’t you look me in the eyes for too long?

Is there something there you’re afraid you might see?

What was the bravest moment of your life and why was it worthy of facing your fears?

And, speaking of, what are your fears?

I know you said spiders, but how about the weight of your huge heart?

Do you ever worry you might crack beneath its yoke?

Would you let me shoulder the other side when it becomes too heavy?

There are so many queries but here you are, all salted stone and brine and maybe a little alpine lakeside

The sap of conifers clinging to the mists, which cling to the rainclouds, which maybe once fed these wildflowers I walk through

The leather you don’t wear and the tobacco you don’t chew, but may have a lifetime or two ago

The one I somehow know and don’t and need to know all of

So, can I ask you something?

I Know Your Name

The last time was the first and only time, yet.

Someplace verdant and good and wretchedly wild, someplace ageless and hushed and hallowed, I chose to hide it.

Tangles of honeysuckle and trailing ivy keep secrets so well and no one ever needed or wanted to know, anyhow.

With bleeding kneecaps, in the too-brilliant gauze of a blinding mountain morning, I made a castle of towering canyon pines — eerily alike the play-pretend homes I once forged from acorns and evergreen boughs and whatever else the woods would offer me. I heaved the hinges shut; the sound of a dreamer's death blow, dealt. I bore a dragon from my fury and fear and locked her inside with one command only: Guard this, until, if ever, and most especially, if not.

I grew the outline of a life in the garden there. I plucked rosy words from the trellis to crown the lonely lapels that looked the most or the least like love. I drank only tepid water from a stream that could not scorch me. I swam in its shallows for so long my arms ached. I began to drown in shoals I could all but stand in.

They say that the universe will continue to teach you the same lesson until it is learned. Is that why I am back here? In this old soul of a home where I have lived thrice now, precisely three years apart, and always in August, always in dire need of something deeper: Apartments 57, 7, 75. They stitch a lovely-looking palindrome and a story strange enough to try and write, at the very least.

When you arrive, I give you the well-rehearsed tour reserved for visitors; all proper begonias and ever-expanding meadowfuls of milkweed for monarchs. Now, I sit with you in the sweetgrass and raise a glass of something superfluously sugared and too expensive to taste so bad, and almost forget what you are referring to when it spills onto the soil, your palm raising to point. You ask me what sleeps within that timber fortress — the most sacred space that no one else could even see. You ask me what utters such sad sounds — this fire that no one else could even feel.

An utterly safe and feeble fabrication leaps to my lips but your eyes on mine are safer still, and all at once, I am not sure that I've truly known how this feels before, even perhaps when I thought I did.

So I take your hand and lace your fingers through mine, careful and tight as the first shoe strings you ever tied.

"That's where I keep what matters most," I say, my sparkling eyes dancing with the light in your own.

"What matters most?" you ask, as it begins to rain like I haven't seen in years.

"This time."

Dancing in the Moonlight

Tonight, there are poems in my brain begging to be born

I plead with them, patience, but no, of course,

They are the cirrostratus hands hiding the giggling mouth of the moon and she's all pink and paper and strawberry and harvest and crescent and full

She pulls the tides in tight and whispers through a smile that time just isn't mine to tell

Good Enough

Here I am and the sand beneath my soles is a runway I’ll never fly from, but I keep my arms flung wide like the gulls wheeling dizzily above my head, just in case

Here I am in the summertime when I should be sleeping, and there is a song in my ears that makes me understand a bit too well what the teacher means when she says we are made of “matter” — like maybe being born with a glass slipper for a heart isn’t quite the curse I’d been made to believe

Here I am with a lemon square melting on my tongue, and it tastes a lot like what I always though love might, or should, or maybe if I am finally good enough, someday could

Here I am being told to slow down, but the song is a harmony to the wild inside of me and I love letting her lick me clean until I’m left empty and overflowing and wondering why anyone in their right mind would find a metronome to be anything other than a tin cup tap on jailhouse bars

Here I am and he asks me in a way that places an ending heavy in my hands, and he’ll take it back, but only “if” and so I let him call it love when I know it is not and I cry into my poster of John Lennon whose glasses look a whole lot like Harry Potter’s but magic isn’t real anymore

Here I am and my body is breaking but the doctors say I am okay and so I must just not be trying hard enough and how can that be because I am so tired and my light is his love, is a fire, is fading beneath my shaking palms

Here I am and she has a nickname for him like I never did and her letters are far less pretty but far more doting and I am a new sort of sad that moonlights as fury

Here I am and I don’t want to know her name, but she is here, here she is, and he loves her, and not me now, and all that truth is on my tongue and it is melting but it does not taste like love today, and maybe, did it ever?

Here I am and here he is, and his eyes are something holy I’ve forgotten how to pray to and so I stand in my kitchen and make lemon squares alone at midnight, and I beg the bag of sugar to tell me again, slowly this time.

What do you want?

I want to be a part of the people that make meaning, not the thing that's made. I want to do the imagining, I don't want to be the idea.

Well, I'll Be

I’m impatient and petulant and impulsive

I’m brave and important and maybe something a little like autumn light on leaves or river water dappling

The first kitchen drawer I open has a single piece of paper inside, detailing the fire restoration

I read something recently that I think I knew but did not quite remember then: the world grows flowers first following flame

Is it funny then, or perhaps too on-the-nose, that the first to dwell here again is me?

Named for petals I’m nothing like and perhaps more astutely after the big rig the Polish truck driver across the street drove home the week before my birth?

Probably too on-the-nose, too poetic, too sugary sweet for any properly cultured mouth to consider worthy of savor

Still, I’ll try my best to bloom here.

The Walk to the Well

There is a stone I hold beneath my tongue to keep the thirst at bay

It tastes of iron earth and things that were never mine to hold

I spit it into my palm like an apology and begin the slow wander towards water instead.

I've Learned to Love Contradictions

For instance,

How eyes locking can be the key.

Quiet Hour Advice

You wouldn’t walk into a burning house just

because you are cold.

Welcome Home

She hands me my keys and wrings a little lemon from that mean tilt of a mouth.

She tells me unblinking that "the third time is the charm."

I want to argue her unkindness only because it is that and cruelty lives farthest from the truth.

I want to tell her that of course it is, but only because all time is a charm,

We are just lucky enough to become beneath its spell.

The In-Betweens & Afters

I want you wild

Your mind as undone as my hair

I want to taste your shame and be the first to call it sweet

Shatter me until you touch where light lives

“Do you remember this?” we will say when we showcase our scars

You’ll find the postcard to match the mishap and we’ll laugh at what once hurt

Landslide

I pray best with no roof over my head

Here I am, in one of those such spaces that underlie it all

My glance grazing the balance struck by weather-worn stone

I wonder at how no intelligent being could ever conceive such a meticulous miracle

What has become here was born of relentless, slow scatter — an end, a beginning, and the circles they form

But here it is. Here you are. Here I am.

Maybe that is the god I still reach for

Try as we might, intention is infinitely incapable of such clever creation

Maybe we are trying our lives on inside-out

Perhaps our whole journey hinges here:

Maybe the accidents we dedicate our lives to precluding are actually the entire point?

Maybe we spend our entire energy missing the entire point?

What if the accidents are really the whole of becoming and being and bedrock?

Perhaps they are just and all and only that:

Evidence that we are both soft enough to shape and strong enough to stay

¡Ay, qué linda!

Aleida Yolanda Feijoso Garcia died on a sticky summer night at the end of June

Shouted her sister's name in surprise and then gargled on the humid sweat of a penultimate breath

I was driving too fast with the windows wide the first time I heard my old man cry

He told me that she was gone and I told him that she was only everywhere and everything for always now

He used the bite of whiskey to bite back at something bigger in those days

That night we poured what remained of the bottle into porcelain cups of cafecito, their handles so carelessly fragile in our fingertips

We stitched a vigil from stories and scotch until her body bled all its borrowed warmth back into the world

I let all that love tattoo its teeth on me

When it was my turn for courage to call me over, her friable palms were parchment paper in my own

I wanted to press them to my eyes and see straight through her skin; hoping maybe this was what the medicine woman meant when she said that some of us stand closer to the veil

My daddy’s umber eyes were as glassy as the pond he showed me how to skate on when grief broke its back on him

His voice cracked loud as a burning pine knot the moment he realized her cheek was now just as cold

At the funeral, all the tias scolded my tears and let strength peck rouge stains in their stead

The verses were all read in words from two places and I thought that maybe this is all that separates us from here and there; a barrier of understanding

We buried her bulb in the ground; our white gloves clinging to the coffin like beggars

Give us one more raucous crow of joy or orderly pile of twigs plucked from the yard brushed hard as wet hair, just one more swaying spoonful of flan to melt slow and sweet in our mouths

The only place we had left then was the woods

I watched my papa wade his way upstream to where our waterfall rained copper coins on moss; the things that make stone soft and still the only wealth I've really cared to know

My father knelt like a wounded knight in the rush that parses here and there and I wondered

Maybe this was what the medicine woman meant when she said only love can reach across the veil we all belong beyond

I sat enchanted in the soil and studied him, soaked through to the bone with reverence, as something so much more than brook water washed all that weariness away

His umber eyes were clear when they again met mine.