POETRY | portfolio

EVERYTHING GRIEVES

An ant crawls slowly along the dirt
barely leaving an impression—
a faint line
soon to be swept away with the winds.

In the hot air
there are no sounds.
The birds hum no gentle songs,
the leaves don’t tickle each other when the wind whispers to them,
the tall grass doesn’t bend and lean over itself.
All that exists
is the sickening silence of the air.

I sit and dangle my feet
in the ice cold creek
which, like the birds and the leaves and the grass, is lackluster
quiet
dead.
The creek doesn’t roll and tumble and crash.
It doesn’t heave over the rocks or carve into the muddy banks.
It inches along,
and if I listen closely
I can hear it weeping.

Weeping.
Just as I am
just as I have been since you left,
since you were secretly stashed
and pilfered from this earth,
whisked into the clouds.

We all followed after the car,
in a line just like ants, marching
with our heads bowed and hands stuffed into pockets.
There were lots of us, but everybody looked the same
because at a funeral
there is no room for cacophonies of
vibrant colors or raucous laughter.
Because at a funeral
everyone tries their hardest to go unnoticed
hidden behind
the black veil
of anonymity and uniformity,
alone together with their grief.

The men wore black coats

and their wives wore black dresses
and together they remembered
all that you taught them,
all the love that you showed them.
Everyone walked, silently,
even the children
who lacked regret,
too young to understand
the chasm your departure leaves.

Ants can carry
50 times their weight
even though their bodies
suggest otherwise.
And we all must now act in the same way
and carry grief
500,000 times our body weight.
I can tell you that my shoulders
are not strong enough
to carry that much.

I used to look at the stars
and I used to think of you and your eyes.
Looking at the enormity of the night sky
I should’ve understood beauty and romance
passion
but instead it made me hollow
insignificantly small
to be so aware of
the unsettling amount of space
between me and the stars
me and the planets
me and you.
I am but an ant
in the eyes of the multitude of celestial beings
a hiccup in time.
I am fractured by enormous emptiness.
And now, the stars have no meaning
merely only impressions of deceased balls of light
millions of miles away.

As far away as you feel

Hear me,
grant my wishes.
Shrink me, minimize me,

let me become the ant
so I don’t have to think about things so indescribably large
like emptiness
and mortality
remind me of my insignificance
and the insignificance of your death
because people die all of the time
and the heavens just don’t care.
Let me become an ant
so that I only have to focus
on making my small impression
on this earth.
So that I only have to carry
the weight
of a crumb
instead of the weight of this grief.

published in the 2018 edition of the green blotter

Piece by Piece

a collection

He loves me, he loves me not

You and me,

we were flowers in a field--

beautiful and radiant in the warm sun,

bright against that paradisiacal blue sky.

The sweetness of our scents caught in the wind and drifted on its waves.

We were passionate and red,

in a sea of white daisies,

whose desire and lust were small by contrast.

We gave the world our beauty,

our happiness became the bees that pollinated everything around us.

People grew into flowers because of us.

But flowers are by nature

temporary, transient,

destined to last only for a short while.

When the first whispers of autumn came,

we quickly began to fade, wilting in the setting of our sun.

When the biting frost of winter came, we were lifeless--

a heap of thorns and crunchy leaves

on the dewy grass.

Looking back, I thought we would never be plucked,

we would never fade,

and the brilliance of our red would burn far into the dark night

a beacon for all of the other lovers, bored with routine and the same predictable sex, night after night.

I thought life was better in the past:

love was purer, days were warmer, happiness was more permanent.

But this is only true of some things,

not everything.

Fighting a Cold Front

I lie in almost complete darkness.

Around me, the room feels desolate and cold.

The kind of cold that comes and settles, buries itself

into the carpet and seeps into the walls,

the kind of cold that comes with sadness.

And though I lie swaddled

in a gray comforter, stuffed with fake goose feathers,

and bundled in a sheepskin blanket,

I cannot fight the cold.

I turn over onto my back, the old wooden frame groaning,

awakened from a deep sleep.

I stare at the ceiling, haunted by the bright green numbers

that flash time at me like a drum beat: steady, unwavering

2:37 a.m.

2:38 a.m.

Kept awake by the memory of you.

With my hand I reach out,

poking from underneath the comforter like some sort of prisoner

reaching for food, for freedom, for a lifeline.

The cold has seeped into my iPod, and when I lift it up

it burns.

I need the music to speak louder than the voice in my head,

to replace

He told me he loved me

with he didn’t love me.

Loneliness is chilling and I cannot fight the cold.

I am the Hoover Dam

Strong

able to hold back the dark water,

that hides beneath a stony exterior.

Around you, I have to be the Hoover Dam,

because to let you see even one droplet of water

would be to give you a hammer and chisel.

The finality of the contact of chisel on cement

pierces into my wall and freezes me in cold fear.

You have the power to deliver the final strike,

to see me crumble

and I cannot fight you.

I cannot fight the cold

that lingers at the memory of your touch.

I select the song, the clicks of the buttons barely audible,

like knocking on a door in the distance,

my nightly routine.

Taylor Swift’s melancholy melody starts to play

Last Kiss

and the wall that I have built

c r u m

b

l

e

s

Piece by piece.

And tears like waves

crash and roll down my face, soaking the pillow

stuffed with fake goose feathers.

The cold and tears meet in a fatal collision,

the same way you and I first met.

When we felt the cold but we called it heat, called it passion even,

lost in the idea that love could warm us like a fire.

But now you have left, and I am on my own, buried beneath my blanket.

I cannot fight the cold.

3:15 a.m.

3:16 a.m.

I’m tired now

Deflated.

No more tears, no more music

The dam has emptied for the night

and the cold is encroaching.

I cannot fight the cold.

The battle is over; I give up

until tomorrow. It

is finished.

Grand Canyon, Summer 2015

I stand on the edge of the world, the edge of life

and I almost think I could take a rock and throw it over

into the depths of the canyon,

and hear it clink as it pings off of the distant rocks below.

I'm reminded of how fragile the human body is,

and how easily I could fall into the endless abyss.

My heart starts to race

I can feel

the stagnant heat around me

and it's trapping me, weighing heavy on my chest.

I can feel

my dad next to me

and I can hear

him panting

but I can't even breathe.

We stand together at the edge of life

peering over the edge.

He stands, hands on hips, strong.

Like the walls of the canyon,

painted red,

he is

power--fierce against

the brutality of the winds and erosion:

sand against rock, particle against particle,

time against man.

He is strength and he is here,

next to me, looking with a kind of wonderful fascination

at the edge of life, the edge of the world.

So I take a pebble, and I throw it over,

just because

Hurricane Season

You are a hurricane, what scientists dub a tropical cyclone.

74 miles per hour

is the maximum speed a storm’s winds can reach

until it’s finally considered a hurricane

and baby, you came through even faster

You didn’t whisper to the trees like a gentle breeze

You screamed in their ears in fury; you tore them up

by their

roots.

Saffir and Simpson developed a scale that rates the

ferocity of winds

from 1 to 5

some damage → catastrophic damage

and baby, you were beyond catastrophic.

Fatal--

a 7 on the scale.

You de-shingled roofs and crushed cars and ripped up light poles.

It’s ironic that I met you on the very first day in June

the beginning of hurricane season

the beginning of the demolition.

Hurricanes have no fronts--

no boundaries separating two air masses,

so what was to keep us apart?

We were two forces, colliding and

chasing each other around in a perpetual ring.

But a hurricane dies when it loses heat, when its contact with humanity reduces the

friction.

And baby, when we made contact, we lost the heat

Your severity dropped to a 6 on the scale--still destructive

but then you dissipated.

That’s the thing about love, and that's the thing about a hurricane,

it ends.

Astronomy

I watched the lunar eclipse last night

and it looked like God bought a sticker book

to make the night sky

He flipped past the pages of ice cream cones and the smiley faces,

for though they were cute, they weren’t quite what he wanted

His head resting in his left hand, and a dribble of drool inching down his lip,

God sighed

nothing was right

But alas, he searched, turning the pages with careful attention

and found, in between a hamburger and a chocolate shake,

a wheel of cheese.

So he tenderly peeled it from the page

and he put it

all the way over here!

But it was too visible for God to be pleased,

too bright against the dark canvas and he knew the cheese

would not want so much attention

and it was just too lonely.

By day 4, however, God had used all of his stickers,

placing the rivers in the valleys

and the trees in the garden

and had no stickers left to put next to the cheese.

So God bought a roll of white inventory labels--

he shrunk them down a size or two

and he put them

He called it the Big Dipper--

this constellation of white stickers--

because sometimes even God wants to dip His hands down

just before dawn

and gather handfuls of stars to wish upon.

When you lie on the beach

at 5:00 a.m.

before God has placed the basketball sticker in the sky

and calls it the sun,

you imagine such things--

sometimes you just have to.

Here and here

And here

Over here

Here too even down here

Willy Wonka

Sweet Charlie, so full of innocence,

so full of wonder.

A chocolate river,

a golden egg,

an everlasting and infamous gobstopper.

A world of pure imagination.

A world that would have never been experienced

if not for the

Golden Ticket.

You are Charlie, dear reader:

you cannot experience the magic and wonder of this collection

without the Golden Ticket.

It is a sentence, strung together by the last line

of each poem.

Even this one.

Go back and see for yourself.

You see, even Charlie thought it was over,

when he reached the end of the tour,

and got caught for drinking the fizzy lifting drink.

But he didn't know that

not everything is finished

just because it ends,

sometimes you just have to

take a closer look.

Trail Mix

I used to sneak into the kitchen--

after you fell asleep, when your breathing would slow

and your chest would rise and fall--

and I used to pick out all of the M & Ms

from your trail mix.

You must’ve known,

but you never said anything,

either because you never cared

for the chocolate in the first place,

or because you cared

about me too much.

Now, I lie in bed

at 12:28 a.m. and I still think of sneaking downstairs--

but there’s no more trail mix in the pantry,

only shitty, day old popcorn and oily peanut butter

and a cold, hollow, empty half of the mattress.

I dreamt last night

that you were here next to me

and I reached out to touch your face,

to twirl my fingers into your blonde hair--

but I suppose in my slumber I was reaching

for an apparition--

a cluster of cells and a beating heart

and I only felt the pillows,

your spot unoccupied.

I don’t know

I guess I wish I could make sense of it all

to somehow justify your absence

and the lack of M & M’s.

But that’s the thing about love

sometimes

it ends.