The dirt below your tomb

has bloomed 

with earthworms, and the sun

still keeps time

in lines and lines

of wind-smoothed stones,

elf-cap moss slow tip

toes over me

as I mourn you. 

My lifelong flame,

I sit here with last words.

I close my eyes,

and all my offerings burn,

blue breath curls

into wings, unfurls:

You are still angry with me.

I can still see the lining of your soul,

bright like mother-of-pearl,

crying, lighter than air. 

The post POEM: The Mooring appeared first on Yale Daily News.

I. Your Room is a River

& along the red riverbed I find myself

& you, resting. The day’s toils flock from us, little doves.

                                                                                 (weaving, leaving)

In this sacred palace I meet you each night; you call

it your darkened dorm room.

This flesh-on-flesh rhythm becomes routine, the flowers sprout

like wishes, one touch & they quiver.                                                                 

                                                                                      (white roses,

                                                                                                blood-red stains)

Amendment: it was once, but my mind reels

the scene in a routine. Falling, unfolding, opening, unspooling, softening.

In each quotidian moment you descend to me, haunting my body

with the memory. I don’t know whether it happened, or which parts.

All I know is the world moves on & I do not & in October I still

inhabit July but not its sun, its lint & limbs & latex & lying there, 

I imagine a scream so loud the river-room shakes

& plunges into a story I can never wholly tell. 

But then: the lake deltas like two legs 

yielding to you—I tremble but can’t speak, & so we dance. 

                                                                                 (twin cherubs, 

                                                            we’re spinning round

                                                                                 rising, falling) 

II. Baptism

Cover me in hands, gray sheets,

maybe just

                          darkness. 

Let me into your wrought-iron ribs; I want 

to live inside them.

                                   I asked 

                                   to be submerged but your water 

                                   was not safe. The blood & the burial & the wine 

                                                                                    & our rituals were not 

                                                                                                                   divine.

I read We Are Seven, Wordsworth 

                            & began to cry for that child. Wrap

              your limp fingers around my neck; squeeze

                            until you take one more thing from me:

                  life.

                                                But who can I blame when

                                                I lay there willingly, my yielding flesh       ready

                                                to be maimed.

III. Eden

Wordsworth, I love you for making natural things

your religion. But what if I told you my flowers

line the Styx: petals charred, stalks

strangled?

Your garden may hug you back until

you tear stems & they bleed, they bleed—

pale-throated Narcissus blooms that echo you

Wordsworth, you profess your love to

the lake in which

                    she drowned.

Do you remember the day in the garden?

         (Play-ground, prom night,

                                               pine needles)

You called me something; it became my name.

Your blood tasted like transition metals;

you were a small invention.

You ate the apple;

               I watched but said nothing.

The post POEM: Our Rituals Were Not appeared first on Yale Daily News.

and the feeling filled me like a gas, ballooning

me into a mascot of myself. Last night

at the overpriced Japanese restaurant 

I chewed up little green peaches, handed you

their pits. When I left you for a few days 

I felt you leave me entirely. My brain

was reduced to a pit, its meat gnawed off.

The way you gritted your teeth on the ice skating rink

or blended tangerines with milk and called it sorbet

or flicked your tongue out like a lizard while I held

your enormous, hard head—suddenly these felt essential,

fibrous. When these moments had played in front of me

I found them limp: the way you wouldn’t let yourself fall

on the rink, how you were stabbing the ice to stand.

How you sweeped grocery store after store looking

for the right oranges, how you were so hurt

I hadn’t finished the milky pulp in my bowl.

I wasn’t ready to finish. I am not ready to finish.

The post POEM: Little Green Peaches appeared first on Yale Daily News.

I loved to watch your hands

setting in against the stubborn pan.

Bagels, fried eggs, and home fries—

saddling us with heaped offerings

and hunching straightaway to strip scabs 

of egg from the hissing metal.

Dementia—your mind spilled 

softly, and we didn’t hear.

Now the toaster rings, now

the bread’s grain is scraped

with butter, a plate clangs,

and the quiet settles.

I’ve made you toast.

There was a time—it passed.

The post POETRY: Breakfast at Savta’s appeared first on Yale Daily News.

he wouldn’t admit it even if you asked.

He’s got no deed

dotted with age and spilled tea.

His house is rotten logs bound together

with mud-full mortar,

lumpish, dusty, loved furniture. 

I ran into Coyote once,

when the hunting party lost hours,

dogs lost in looming trees,

lost in fog that coated our lashes.

These sticky lashes, these marvelous curtains,

opened to the clearing,

more open sky than open ground. 

Coyote seemed to be waiting.

Not a man of so much speaking,

his hand— sinewy, tired, coping—

extended to my side,

my hand becoming a child’s, soft and unworked,

in his, rough.

He invited us,

the hunting dog and me,

into the parlor. The old dog,

streaked with grey like Coyote,

cracked stale tea cookie

against his molars.

Crumbs littered a fray-edged rug while

Coyote brewed peppermint tea.

The old dog knew when

Coyote was gone—

rotten logs fell to dust,

furniture unloved,

tea moldy, unfinished in the parlor.

As if lost on purpose, 

the dog, greyer, greyer, greyer,

returned to watch guard

as the house became

home to beetle and bug.

And still, he lay there in grieving

until a goodbye to both

built a sooty altar of bones

where Coyote’s place once was.

The post A Hunter’s Eulogy for Coyote appeared first on Yale Daily News.

The post Sonnet appeared first on Yale Daily News.

It is the right thing to do in most cases.

It pushes spots together like a cross-eyed boy.

When you drive, your toes are the edge of the world,

your eyes a periscopic angle of the rest of your life.

You whir past things, okay?

You grumble clear of woven lakes, better

than their fishes and frogs.

You trample things, opossum and squirrel,

which fight like hell the urge to wait their turn,

use a crosswalk, behave like normal—

no, the vermin jaywalk

then freeze.

Here you may stop to feel their shapes

beneath the chassis,

but then you must start again. Okay?

Look, though, you can play this quiet kit!

Crush these pedals like thirsty leaves beneath you

or tease them apart like the hairs of a handsome boy.

The lights are the same, either

all too much or nothing at all:

a giant bullet streaking through the yellow stripe,

what fun!

And if you play it just right,

the best machine cocks its mirrors

and shows what you’ve left behind—

this is my favorite part.

Driving is a tired boy

who snaps a dry apology. He is confounding

and dangerous, I think.

Nobody knows him like you, I think.

He gives lazy gifts, never what you want,

but he is fit and smooth and every button caves to your fingers.

He purrs when you press.

He blinks like the real thing.

When you drive, you get where you’re going.

For every hour spent peering over wheels, panting at the heels

of a thousand custom-license-plates,

of accidents-waiting-to-happen,

you are saving yourself

the filthy exhaust pipe of feeling

these moments as they—jesus,

feel it now, how you gulp at breath

like the fishes and lakes, fuck,

There is more to life than this, man!

Driving is safe.

It is missing your exit, clucking your tongue.

You flick your blinker and drift across the lane like a family dog.

You’ll take the next one, you think, and

All at once you do.

The post The Real Thing appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Did some Googling:

The crickets we hate are two hundred million years older than we are 

and they invented music

By “we” I mean everyone who ever lived after crickets

             which is everyone who ever lived

When we can’t sleep at night, that’s because crickets are singing, and by singing 

I mean fucking, 

I mean, they’re doing both, or what 

I mean is the singing precedes the fucking and by fucking 

I mean fucking a lot, because crickets are polygamous

which means they get more action than we do, and by “we” 

I mean me 

because it is rude to drag everyone who ever lived

into one’s personal problems

There are hundreds of cricket species on each continent                                         except Antarctica

                           sorry Antarctica

and some of them are extinct

                    sorry crickets

Sometimes crickets pretend to be other things, like leaves

which I do too

I mean, pretend in a general sense, not pretend to be a leaf

Sometimes crickets pretend to be dead

which I do not do anymore

If I were a cricket I would always be able to say what I mean 

as there wouldn’t be much to say

                     Sorry crickets

Two hundred million years of singing and leaves 

and sometimes going extinct

When I can’t sleep at night it is because I forgot to respect my elders

When I can’t sleep at night it is because crickets are dragging me into their personal problems

When I can’t sleep at night it is because I wish that I were alone on a planet of bugs

that I had also invented music

             and could not speak

    that I had never heard of everyone 

                                                  who ever lived

The post POETRY: Crickets appeared first on Yale Daily News.

with two rubber bands on my wrist, 

extras for you in case 

yours break and you go back to 

picking away at yourself.

You drive us to the next town. 

You pack no bags. 

Erica Road is lined with foliage, 

the kind you don’t see on the east 

coast this time of year. As the 

clouds part over the bay, we sing 

like God is coming 

home with us. 

You bump the car too hard 

into the curb 

in a fit of frustration. 

The front-right wheel well 

skitters on the pavement. 

My anger is just enamel. 

You keep scraping me. 

You tell me you want seven children;

that I am special, if not important;

that everything is God; 

that I am a safe love, 

a good love, 

if not a great one. 

I paint your sentences onto smaller birds,

the migrating kind.

Still, I keep house:

I think of buying yellow tulips and

sending mail back home.

I walk the slow, careful paths around your

neighborhood until I grow so sick of them

I cannot speak.

Two nights, we go out to dinner.

You wear both of your good 

dress shirts. One is bright red.

I wear all white. 

I’ve planned on doing so. 

This way, when I retell the story

I might seem sacrificial, prepared —

innocuous.

We drive to the airport.

It’s the first rainy day 

since I’ve been here, 

six days beyond my welcome. 

My hand cramps when you grasp it,

a softness withering in my lap. 

I won’t move away. 

From the car, you watch me

try to leave you.

I waste four minutes at 

a broken ticket machine. 

Only when I relent,

turning back to your negative,

do you sit up in the 

driver’s seat and recede into 

the foggy line of piecemeal natives. 

Once, in the spring, 

it rained all day and you 

held me as I shivered and 

I wished more than anything 

to fit into you 

for as long as I could.

The post POETRY: Erica Road appeared first on Yale Daily News.