January 30th, 2014


He said, I've been thinking. Maybe if I get a B for the rest of the year, graduate, don't forget,
I'm already 19, and if I have a job, can I take you to dinner? Please? At that restaurant you
like that I saw you coming out of that night in the summer with your friends? And, how
gathered the courage and how gentle the asking, and how do I respond kindly with a door
that is forever closed but still honors, in the closing, that, in this child that would be, and
wishes to be, a man. I smile and say no, and then something about him not even being 21.
He accepts this rebuff, wishes me a good afternoon, and disappears through the front door.
I assume all will be forgotten by fourth period tomorrow. The piercer this afternoon was
better than any other I'd been to, except the one I walked to in a snow storm in college when
I was 20. He was handsome and interesting and right before he pierced me he looked deep
into my eyes and said: This will hurt. You will cry. Do not touch your face. I will wipe away
your tears. It did hurt but I did not cry. He wore checkered pants that looked like they were
from a thrift store and all I could think of was you and how you would never look like
him, and yet how I wanted you all the more for it.

 January 29th, 2014

There are 23 different worlds in this room right now and with each
scratch of pen the rules and characters and precincts of each are marked.
They are writing for seven minutes about anything anything they want.
Start with something you heard today or a song lyric I say Chikara begins
to write down everything she hears in the room, as the students have not
yet settled into silence. But it is silent now and she still writes. Somebody
just got a kick message and that is another world entering and abiding here
with us. When I look around at this room I am amazed we don't explode
at the energy contained within each of them. This is it. Now is the future.
They will burst like seed pods into the world and bring with them all the
songs and stories in every pulse of their brain. Keep writing I say to Nick.
I ran out of thoughts he says. No you didn't.  He writes again. Can we curse
in this? Kashla asks. Of course. She smiles and she keeps writing even when
I call time. Everything is in this, the telling of our stories.

                                                    ****

It could happen you know it really could. And it will, won't it, according
to everything they say. I want to see it. I want to wake up in my house
in Hartford with the sea outside my window. I want to wake to it lapping
at my steps and licking my hand. I would not be frightened. I would name
the starfish who pasted themselves to my walls and welcome the dolphins
and sharks who weaved around my feet on morning walks. You wouldn't
seem so far away at the end of the world. Remember how I used to be
frightened of the San Andreas fault line? I miss your arms and I have dreamed
of you three nights in a row. Last night you sent me a letter which contained
only a line from one of my poems, something about a row of white stones.
Tonight I went home for Joshua's 18th birthday. As I stepped out of the car
I looked up to see Orion. I can't see him in the city. I can see the moon only.
Remember half-moon bay? When it ends Orion will be there too. I always
planned on watching the stars fall with you. Follow the stone path back to me. 

January 28t, 2014

I have almost no memory of this day. It slipped in between many other days. I don't
know how to give voice to its need. It asks for something and I am bare. Surely I
lived a day, went to school, taught, and came home. Surely these things happened.
But now, it seems like a color of a day, an indistinct yellow. It is cold and smelling
of disinfectant. I know I did not sleep. I know I did not dismantle the machine that
is chewing my students in its metal teeth. What record album was it that I found
in the furnace room of my childhood house? There was a stationary exercise bike that
I rode for hours at age 12 and a wood pile and of course the furnace. I used to have a
small studio in that room in which I made art of the wood scraps my father left behind.
There was sawdust and a work bench and tools. This room was in many of my dreams
and in them it was never safe. Under the workbench was a box of old albums. I never
listened to a single one until senior year of high school, but, at 12, sweating from the
stationary exercise bike, I pulled one out that had a picture of a terrible robot eating
human beings. Broken women and men hung from his metal fingers.



January 27th, 2014


It was fourth period when the lights went out. This is it I said.
This is when the apocalypse begins. My students held their breath
and pretended along because they are seniors and pretending is
almost beyond their reach. We have three oranges, one banana and
a half bottle of water I say, these are our rations. Everyone empty
your bags; we must take stock of all of our resources. They smile.
Later, at the college, I discuss math class with a student. When everyone
is screaming different numbers it does something to my head she says.
On the way to the water fountain I see the sunset stratified between the
buildings. I yell her name. She comes running and we stand together
staring so long we forget to speak. It is beauty unutterable and she wishes
she had a camera. The professor on the phone in the hallway next to us
speaks of his divorce. I am a man adrift he says and I want to say, but
look at the sky! He looks at me three times and never lowers his voice.
He wishes to be visible. I want always to know the secrets of things.

 January 26th, 2014

Three minutes to bed time and really wasn't my bedtime hours ago
and don't I have to get up in five and one half hours to keep doing    this
this living     this thinking      this striving   yes    yes but there is more than
that     all of that is a struggle almost false that distracts from what's
really going on which has something to do with learning how to walk
and then walking    learning how to speak and then speaking     learning
how to love and then selecting and I am very very tired but in my blood
there is a whispering    something is coming    not soon but definitely
coming    and as long as that is sure    and it is   there is a resilience like
metal in the bones   like mettle in the bones and I keep walking even
on the dirtiest of streets
                                      There is a place in hartford that is desolate
  the wasteland    a desert of parking lots and municipal buildings    when
I walk there I am in a different world     one where all that is good isn't
     it is an end and in the absence of thing I know more of what is.

 January 25th, 2014

My head feels as if there are worms drilling through the skull and burrowing
in the brain. It pulses with a kind of angry light, like I imagine the sun will
before it goes out. I like to think of that somehow-- it reminds me of a time
when scaring myself with the probable eventuality of the end was the largest
fright I had. Now I am afraid of every day and I feel very much like the walls
I hide within are just waiting to shiver and shift and evaporate and leave me
exposed. I left the party last night to buy firewood. Firewood was a pretense.
I left the party last night to test my wobbly legs and vacillating knees against
a pavement of salt and ice. I left the party last night to be sure of my flesh in both
its fragility and fortitude against the 12 degree night.  This morning I walked
to the park and hid amongst the trees, as if God were looking for me and I did
not want to be found. But He was there too and when the wind wrapped around
me and touched every place, I walked further into the trees, but when the frozen water
under the footbridge caught the light, I knew that by going further in I would only find more.

January 24th, 2014

And I have forgotten that I made coffee so it's a surprise when I
wander down to the kitchen and find the pot still hot and the smell
of coffee all over everything. And our landlord is beautiful and kind
and didn't even yell about the pipes freezing and the tub overflowing
and the seams of the ceiling darkening with water. And earlier while
I washed dishes, Brett swept the floor and we talked about men and
what I want or don't want. And this was a gentle conversation of love
and respect and he is both a brother and a friend, and there is a kind
of knitting together that keeps each thread distinct. And I am still sick,
but not so sick that I cannot move and so the day is open and I have many
things with which to fill it. And when Genna comes home from her day it
is like a reunion and we talk about what it means to be a person in the world,
only neither of us say in word that that is what we are talking about. And the
sun has not yet set but when it does there are many candles to be lit.



January 23rd, 2014


There are days that get swept under things and this was one of them.
But now, even though it was yesterday, as I reach under the thing it
was swept beneath, I feel its angles and lines and pull it out and dust
it off. It is a day that is a little bit limp and cut off from other days, but
this is because not many days have been limp. And it is okay to have a
day in which no revelation beyond the sureness of your bed is received.
It is okay to have a day in which you melt into the clothes you wear. I
slept and stayed under the covers all day and when they came home,
pouring into the house like orange juice into a glass on a Sunday morning,
I was glad to put on other clothes and a smile and join them in the kitchen.
Genna and I sat against the heater and my aching head and neck warmed
and ached less, and we ate every seed from half of a pomegranate and Josh
played music and we named things without knowing the power of this and
when it got darker still, I went back to my room and the sureness of my bed. 



January 22nd, 2014

I like your boots he says. Also, I like your hair. You don't see girls with hair like
that many times. He speaks with a heavy accent. What is your name? He asks. We
are in an elevator. His name is Miguel. His friend's name is Mike. I like that they
have the same name, and they laugh at this as the elevator opens to my floor. Once,
in the same elevator, a student looked around and said I have gathered you all here
to discuss our economy. Thank you for coming. The other adjunct night instructors
shifted strangely but I threw my head back and laughed and laughed and watched
the student smile in the mirrored ceiling. Tonight in class we get to know each other.
One man does not know if he even needs the class, you see he passed the other class
and might just go on to 101, but he sits at the edge of his seat, and when I ask them
to write, he writes and writes, and I feel his joy in this. I have stolen a dry-erase marker
from another classroom, but there are tricks of survival, and this is one. I look out over
Hartford and wonder if I will always look out over Hartford. I think I will not. But the
purple light that plays on the facades tonight seems to say There is something here. Be in it.

 January 21st, 2014

 Isn't that the point of unconditional things? Brett asks. Eventually we
are all burned by the spirit he says. So let me understand something
about religion because this is a thing I'm unclear about. Me as a person -
how bout you not as a person says Kelly, laughing - living a good
life, having a moral center and living as if I do, presume I die tomorrow,
what happens to me then? These are hard questions to answer, the ones
Brett asks sitting in the same booth in the cafe that I have been sitting
in for the last three days. But I think in the asking is the center of the
answer. I wiggle in the booth nervously, having had too much coffee
and my stomach growing sour.  Later I would drink too much and say
words I didn't mean that burned as they left my mouth. The law of the 
Lord is perfect, restoring the soul. Day to day pours forth speech and
night to night reveals knowledge. I want always to be a soft word in Your
language and an open eye to Your beauty. Here are my lips. I wait for coal. 

January 20th, 2014

You are an apex predator he says as he sucks on his cigarette. He flicks it away
as I ask what that is. You're the top. You're the best. When I met you you were 
scared and pale and you didn't know what you carried. Now you do. Now you 
know. You will never be the same again. It turned out to be true, what he said,
but not in the way he thought it would. When I walked away from all of that I
walked away also from the lies that wove themselves between and through every
lover's lips. My lips are my own now and they burn with languages I haven't yet
learned to speak. Maybe my spiritual gift is my sexuality I said to myself once as
a joke. That's not funny, He says. It is. Your purity is what you carry and what you
always  have carried. He stills me and writes the word "clean" on my forehead
with a kiss. When I stand before Him I can only ever see his neck and beard and
lips, but never the rest of his face, and the straining in my bones and the burning
at the center of my muscles is the beginning of a fire that will change my limbs
to weapons and my body to a field in which He can sow the love that ever grows.

January 19th, 2014

You will not always be a teacher Kelly says. And it will not always be winter.
Yes. This is true. But it is hard to carry such a truth when the days are slivers
of their former selves and I have gained 15 pounds of winter weight and it's
only the middle of January and my bed is always too far away. He says: Remember
the woods you lived in alone for a day and night? Remember the trees and the very
old sadness that was not your own but belonged to the dirt of that place? Remember
the ache and groan you heard in the scratching of the branches and the running
of the brook? Remember the sunset you watched as a girl from Yellow Mountain
with Julia and how you had to walk along a two-foot ledge in the growing dark
to get home? Remember how you cupped running water to your lips and drank
in the rain even though it was downstream? Yes. I do.Where was I then? You were
there, as you are now. Then what do you doubt? I doubt the minutes and miles
between then and now and now and eventuality. He says: I am the God of the
space between things. When you look back, look back only to find My face.



January 18th, 2014

The air in my room is cold and I have spilled candle wax on my pillow.
This is the kind of cold that shakes me down to my sinews. And in the still
of night and cold and tangled blankets, in the quiet of the full moon and the
orange lights from the street that never turn off, I dream things I don't understand.
A woman falls into the frozen river and when I bend to pull her out by her hair,
her head, sunken in and blue, comes off of her body and I lift it in horror. It is too
late. I turn back to look at her lover who stands behind me, his mouth open and
his breath freezing on his lips. I'm sorry I couldn't save her I want to say. I'm sorry
this has happened I want to say. Oh well I tried is what I do say. My grandfather
is angry or disoriented and I'm not sure what to say to get him to calm so I say
nothing and push past him into the family house. The room I am to stay in has a
missing panel where the wall meets the floor and the dark opens into a crawl space
in which a demon who looks like a baby angrily paces on all fours. I roll my eyes
because I have already killed this monster a thousand times. But I'll do it again.

 January 17, 2014

Now back one way, time knows years. These are the words most
frequently used in this project so far and I find the way they fit
together comforting, like I have been writing secret messages
to myself and slipping them under the door to find later. Tonight
I walked home from school after dark, through the hole in the fence
around the track field to the cobbled sidewalks of clemmings place
out to Sisson. Scattered across the patio of the Half Door, hiding
in the plants and the shadows, I saw all the other girls I have been,
drunk and crying with Chris, drunk and in love on Rich's lap, drunk
and sad with everyone. Each girl draped herself across a lie. Each
girl moved slowly like dust in the sun as I walked by stirring the air.
This is not what it was, I say to them. You will not be here forever,
I say to them. Your feet are stone masons now, He says to me. Where
you walk is a new road. Nothing is as it's been, nor will it ever be again.

January 16th, 2014

I started writing a poem this morning while I was still asleep.
It was an all important metaphor, only I can't remember for what
just now. This is one of those times when I have nothing to say
and I want to go to sleep but I must write to prove that I am
capable of doing something beyond what I feel like doing.
Seems everything is coming to a head. I keep crying about loss.
I keep seeing their faces when I sleep. There are more ways than
one to be dead. But I am still alive. I've got two feet of papers
to grade to prove that and a whole lot of poems elbowing
each other to get out of my mind. I slept funny last night and
all day I couldn't turn my head. A shooting pain would take me
if I even slightly twisted to look back. Now that's a metaphor
if ever I've heard one. He says: Watch the road. Don't look back.
You are not Orpheus. You are not meant to be a pillar of salt.

January 15th, 2014

Tonight there are two very old and very small people
at the cafe. They lean together and share one bowl of soup.
Their coats hang on the empty chairs opposite them
as if their younger selves had been sitting there earlier.
They are gentle with the bowl, the spoon, and each other.
I think of the way their bones are closer to the surface now
and how this is what love has become, and how this is not
a reduction. This has become everything, these lines, the years
contained therein.  Brett's eyes wrinkle with admiration
and as Joe leaves the table for the bathroom he glances
over his shoulder and smiles. My wine is done and I
only wanted one glass anyway. Earlier, as Genna and I
walked through Elizabeth park, the water reflected both
the sky and the riverbank, our breath like fog over everything.

 January 14th, 2014

This morning I walked in the long way, through many doors and gates.
Walking over the cobbled sidewalks, almost twisting my booted ankle,
weaving through the fog -- the sun not yet even touching any of us, the
cobbles, the fog, or me -- I sighed the kind of sigh that comes after many years
of bending over a loom, after many years of walking down a road that never
even curves, after many years of counting stars. I am tired but not so tired that
I choose the easy route. It's like this: I have nothing to say today. This is just
a Rorschach of blood as I open my wounds onto this page. What shape do
you see? It looked like a castle to me, and then a tiger, and then a huge ship
passing out of view. Say it in as few words as possible so this opening can close.  
I never loved you. I only loved myself. I stopped to adjust my bag in front of your
first apartment and as I looked over my shoulder I saw 19 year old you in the
window, breathing on the glass and tracing the word "help". I averted my eyes,
shouldered my bad, straightened my spine, and walked on, avoiding the cracks. 

January 13th, 2014

In the first vision I was on the floor and refusing to get up, though I wanted to.
He reached his hand out and I looked up without moving, as if He weren't there
at all. There was a bird cage. The door is open, He said. You are already free,
He said. In the next vision He walked to me while I was on my knees with my
head bowed and handed me a loaf of bread. In the third vision I was in a park
dancing with a ribbon, my head thrown back laughing. In the fourth He said:
justice. your heart is aligned to mine. Somewhere these things are happening.
Somewhere I have already walked through the next door and behind it there is
a well and it is clean. Today I walked up to my principal and handed him a
letter in a gold envelope that shimmered in the neon hallway light. His face
rippled from a smooth surface to a complicated depth and he moved his mouth
without words. What he doesn't know yet is that when we are poured out there
is room to carry more. Drink deeply, I said, without saying anything, and he bowed
his head in thanks and there were streams of water at my ankles as I moved away.

January 12th, 2014


did you know that they can make a diamond out of your body after you die?
someone says. No. I did not know this and it strikes me as remarkable, as in,
I would like to mark it in my mind and then mark it again in writing, and so
I do. In our insurance papers pregnancy is considered an illness, someone else
says. I also did not know this. Earlier when I walked to Tisane to meet Maura
the air was warm and mist rose from the snow. The trees shook, nervously or
excitedly, over the sidewalk and the orange streetlights swelled in the haze.
I made jokes to myself as I walked that I can't remember now, and I narrated too
much saying things like "she was a storm walker because she liked to walk
through storms rather than avoid them", only when he called today and I froze
and stared at the phone in something I would have to describe as fear, I realized
my narrations had been lies. It's been this way since you. What did happen to that
half-finished ring? I didn't want it but I didn't not want it. I wanted time. The sidewalks
in the rain last night did not look like diamonds but like cellophane, and that has its uses too.

January 11th, 2014

I massage my scalp hoping this will encourage my hair to grow faster.
I have no way of knowing if it will, but action is a small addiction
comparatively and one I am trying to foster. The slate sidewalks were
slick with ice this morning and I felt the thrill of losing control as I
stepped over the threshold of the house and into the world. There aren't
very many ways to say this, but one is that when the rain hit me I believed
in you in a way that holds all languages, but cannot be expressed in any.
I am sure this won't hurt for very much longer and when it stops I will wear
a yellow dress and drive across all these states and smile, really smile,
into the eyes of strangers. I will write home letters that don't say much
about what I am doing but everything about what you are, and the dry earth
will part its lips to reveal roots rising even now. And God, even if the fig tree
doesn't gather its leaves and raise them to you, even if it doesn't unwither,
I will not hide beneath the plant, but walk into the city with my hands open.

January 10th, 2014

I took a walk during lunch. Snow had fallen and everything reflected
what sun there was and I kept my eyes down so I didn't slip on the ice
beneath the snow. On Hawthorn a garbage truck pulled over and the
driver jumped out. excuse me! he yelled through the music in my ears.
I took out an earbud. He was old enough to be my father. Yes? Has anyone
told you yet today you are gorgeous? he smiled. No. Well, there you go.
I smiled. Thank you. I wish it had stopped there, and here in this world,
it can. So it did. We wished each other a good day and moved off in opposite
directions. Later on I would drink very little and play darts very poorly,
leave before closing time and fall asleep and dream of an ex. In the dream
we exchange three messages and none of his are honest. It's strange to wake.
But I always do wake. I wake alone to a morning that is mine, smiling
into my pillow, which smells like laundry detergent and jasmine, and
everything, even absolution, is always, in that moment, about to begin. 

 January 9th. 2014


The tub is clean now and so showers are white and lovely
in a way that only clean porcelain can provide. Today I looked
up and noticed that the grapefruit body wash was gone and
in its place a yellow soap that looked like vanilla, lemon, or
honeysuckle. I never actually read the label. As I sat on the floor
of the newly cleaned porcelain shaving my legs, I thought of how
it is to say goodbye to things and what we learn of this from people
we love. Brett and his grapefruit body wash of which he has
written at least two poems, and the way I am sad that he has had
to replace this scent with another. Next year at this time
we three will most likely not be living together. Two years this time
maybe none of us will be in this state, and anything could happen
to anyone tomorrow. I saw my father's face today and it stirred an
emotion that looked like smoke rising from a just-snuffed candle. 

January 8th, 2014

I fell asleep writing this poem in my head. The walk I took
home at lunch to get student work I had left on the
desk I never use, the way, when I got home from the day,
I had an electric energy I had never felt before and took
out all the trash everywhere, cleaned the bathtub, cleaned
my room, and read Philippians, the martini I had on the way
home that warmed my veins only slightly and didn't dull
my brain, the poetry I read and the plans I made and the
thoughts I had about my students until tears came to my eyes
and I lay on my back in my bedroom with my feet on the bed
sobbing for things I have no right to hurt over, the exercising
and finally the bathing, the rising from the tub, the gathering
of the laundry from the dryer: water from a rock. Healing: 
nights thick with sleep that sheenes my skin in the morning. 

January 7th, 2014

"She left me a list of things NOT to do" he says "what?"
says the girl he walks next to in the hall "after she dies"
he says. their tone is light. They laugh. It isn't that I'm
glad my father is gone, I want to tell them, but rather
that with him went the burden I've been dragging for seven
years now. We read Hughes' "A Dream Deferred" and when
I tell them my dream of taking over the U.S. department of Education,
they clap and chear and I am happy until I go home exhausted
and fall asleep in the darkening afternoon and wake to a
memory of my father making apple turnovers while we
watch Little House on The Prairie or The Bible or
A Christmas Carol. How he laughed at Scrooge and repeated
the line "An intelligent boy! A remarkable boy!" over and over again
until tears ran and we in our nightgowns giggled and sighed. 
.

January 6th, 2014

We didn't actually bake cranberry nut bread yesterday
but this is no longer about what we didn't do. Tonight
after gathering my pain and offering it to someone I
barely know, I writhed a little bit in my own foolishness
and wanted to take everything back. Kelly came over
and we thought and prayed and laughed and cried and
God said "I am your God" and she said "He is the only
one who is safe and good" and safe and good became
larger and better words than I had imagined they could
be and truer too. And there were visions and there was
intimacy and longing and filling and when it was all done
we sealed it with a baptism of oil and milk and honey and
wine. The oil for anointing,  the milk and honey for
purification, and the wine for both the blood and the cup of joy.

January 5th, 2014

My mother hasn't baked in 6 years and right now
she is thoughtfully staring into the bowl as the mixer hums
a song I've heard before but can't place. And while she
takes out the Christmas cookies she explains to me the
concept of "tyranny of the urgent" and how it relates to
procrasination and how "it's really just poor thinking and
you must figure it out and fix it" and before the butterflies
of everything I haven't yet done but must still rise
I help her make cranberry nut bread for our extended family
because she has strained both her wrists snowblowing and
because she is my mother. My little sister drifts by and eats
the ugly cookies and my father's coat, which I had worn earlier
to shovel the driveway, hangs over a chair, and our lives thaw
and begin to move again in a way like water through the garden.

January 4th, 2014

It is Saturday and I have come back to the family house to check
in with myself, all my smaller and younger selves that have lived
here over time, because the self I am currently has become dislocated
and confused. My mother is researching the value of a china set from
the 30's which is spread across the dining room table. It is white with
hand-painted gold and it bears the flag of my great-grandfather's yacht.
Eventually, she moves upstairs to clean off her desk. I follow her.
My mother says: every time I clean out paperwork my heart
goes bump bump bump bump. Everything is emotional - it's
either my mother, or my father, or my ex-husband - who is dead
now too, I say, yes she says, but, when I read these papers, I am back there
when he was alive and when this was our life.  Do you want
me to burn down the house so we don't have to deal with it? I say.
Not until we find out the value of your great grandfather's china, she smiles.

January 3rd, 2014
And now I can hold the life I have up to the light
like the crystals my father’s mother used to hang
in her living room so they would cast rainbows
over the seat covers and knitted doilies and ceramic
butterflies and cats, and see all the angles,
however sharp, bend light and here are where
the colors are, and here is where the excitement is
and here is where I’ve fallen off and gotten lost,
trying to arrange the glass in a linear fashion
when all the pieces fit together in a fractal and
breaking them apart and lining them up was never
productive anyway. every love touches every other love
every loss touches every other loss and, when you
hang it where the light comes in, the fractures blossom.


January 2nd, 2014 (this is what I wrote in my sleep, having forgotten to write before falling asleep)

we lived in a house that was very large and long
and was somehow both my mother’s mother’s house
and my childhood friend’s house and I had been there
before in other dreams and it was always falling apart.
we three lived there, but other people did as well and we
didn’t know because the house was so fractured and cavernous
that there were rooms within rooms, worlds within worlds.
Our landlords in real life were our landlords in this house,
only they were 100 years older than they are now
and I promised them I would pay the rent before they finished showing
the secret rooms we didn’t know about. Then it was night and the sea
at low tide came up the house and we crossed it into a land called
“the outer limits” and we walked along a path that looked like any other
but we had crossed into a different world and could never get back.


January 1st, 2014 (I first wrote 1014 and had the thrill of time travel for a moment)

Last night: all the lights collected in the corner of my eyes
and though I wasn’t drunk, everything blurred to gold
every door we walked through was Pluto’s Gate
and every man who reached for us was too old
or too young or too Russian or too American
and everyone, the girls with their sharp heels
and sparkling shirts, the bartenders with their sharp
tongues and quick hands, was too aggressive.
the feeling of otherness settled around me and i could
not meet anyone’s eye. bad kisses at midnight and champagne
dripping down everyones chin. When he said
“you’re gorgeous by the way, may I call you sometime?”
i finally found the voice to say, “thank you, no” and with that,
the lights flickered and the year became mine.


December 31st, 2013.

it’s colder than i wanted it to be tonight
and I’ve not showered yet and the grading
hangs over me still like the way the depression from
this year was a suffocating blanket, and it is not even warming.
I hate this project already and I hate all the shadows trying to hold
me to old ways and I hate that I must go out tonight
and smile and believe I am beautiful and free
while I feel ugly and ancient and sad and like a failure
and yet, yet, yet, that from which I was spared is
much worse, much much worse. If only I could
see it, stare into its eyes and refuse to choose it again
I did once, but that was not enough. The nails I used
for the coffin were only thumbtacks and one by one
they have fallen out as the wood swells with rain (it is as yet unburied)