Category: Poetry

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The Calculator

How would you choose to measure your life?
Tell me, not in coffee spoons, please.
Measure your life in lightning bugs at twilight,
in the brush of fingertips across a brow.
Count up all the moth kisses and giggles that broke through a bad morning.
Don’t forget every golden afternoon tangled up in white sheets,
each grin and grunt, and all those living room dance parties.
Tally each ghost found in a graveyard on winter nights.
Number all the mushrooms that emerged, seen and unseen,
in the forest of your backyard.
Every fairy for whom you built a home, each twig and flower petal you gathered up
to wither and decay, a place of love and growing.
All the sunrises and sunsets, birdsong beckoning for you to
please, pay attention.

How could you presume to measure your life,
to enter in each number as if they had equal weight.
Imagine if all you had to present at the end of your life was a slide deck, a dashboard,
an impressive compendium of data points
each more meaningless than the next.
Give me your gasps, your cries, give me each strangled sigh and fierce pulse of hands held together in shared strength. I will tabulate them for you and in the end
I will tell you what you have amounted to, and my darling,
it will have been enough.

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To Make Much of Time

Here having sat
so many times
she says:
“But oh –“

A pause, a place to put my head
“Wait, and what –“

Another moment gone,
another thought lost:
and what beauty
oh what horror
passing through.

If she could add them up,

but then why should she
flicking beads by
just to pass the time
into eternity.

“Here — no, here,”
she points,
a space in time
carved into crystal ball

“you were born in fire
and made of water
and those will last
long after you are dust.”

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The Alien

I dreamt of you at age 9,
but you were terrifying then.
You moved in the dark,
invisible limbs seething out of the mirrored closet.
I crept into my mother’s bedroom,
sliding under her sheets,
eyes tight, closed,
praying that you weren’t real.

I didn’t really dream of you,
at least, it wasn’t really you,
because you were never a dream I had,
or would allow myself to have.

Before you were here breathing, you were an ache.
We took you up to the mountains, and I couldn’t breathe,
thinking my chest would burst.
I slept for days in the desert.

Then, there were the months during which
you incubated inside of me,
a growth,
a grainy image on a screen.
We didn’t give you a name.

Until we did.

You grew in phases, the first
spent mostly asleep.
The second on fire with wanting.
The third, locked up during a plague
that half the world denied,
a constant thrum of fear.

Two weeks late, early in the morning,
you slipped out of me.
My voice was raw for days from the screaming.

You tugged at me for weeks after,
kept me sedated during long nights
of unreality.

Now as the sun comes through the windows
of our early mornings,
you smile at me.
I realize you are the nightmare
I never knew I longed for.