Head of Lettuce

Imagine:

On a carpet, full head of lettuce, stark mad

and you are holding and crunching.

This image never leaves my mind, when i can't go a day without crying

holding up your mascara by a finger in the elevator

fuck.

I can't remember if it is an image of a short story, a play, or a thing an old professor said

but this head of lettuce

as sustenance

makes me break down

with < $100 in my bank account

thinking you got to get it together

but this is the most adult I've been - an employer contributed HSA, car insurance, 

death and dismemberment plan

But it is still 2 in the morning, you've been indulging passions 

searching for more money on the side

how many times am I allowed to say say fuck.

Fuck. 

 

Lay me down, Bleeding

The day did not struggle, no-
I had ample time - Just a white girl. Slipped shaving drunk in the bathtub
phone dying, dead
on the ledge.

I wiped clean with a white towel - the evidence now
beet red,
so new, so pigmented.\

i bat barely a lash, go to lie on the bed hearing roars
thundering, drums in the closet and he speaks so softly
when mad

i opt for cold shower
to rinse my hair- feeling the grease separate
from water, and how
did this happen how could i move so many miles to stick to bad routines
and let this happen
how could i;
lie here bleeding.

bourbon still just a slithering into my mouth from my hand.

The fans are full speed pushing air from our tall newly painted ceilings and I haven't written in a year and maybe this is why
for now,
for then.

My heart has been breaking since the day we met, I think.
maybe not of you, no. But breaking in different places since I wore a Threadless T shirt to the first day of chemistry lab,
or when you were running and had cold hands/
a different part hurt as you awed at the markings made in my favorite novella
or when I returned a little red book with a balloon cover 2 or 3 years later.

I'm learning to like white wine on hot holidays like this. It feels like a pie starting to weep in the fridge, like getting tangled in icicle lights trying to put up a christmas tree. I remember I had a christmas tree with you and we destroyed it down to the sharp bits that caused me to bleed;to laugh like nothing.

It is true when I think of you, it is mostly fall. But then drips of light hit the months that are the knowing we had the winter, spring and summer and another fall.
another fall.

IF

If
i'm having a son, I'm naming him cattail,
or
wonderbread and he will leave half cups of cold brew coffee to wait for me
in the fridge.
He will watch a spider dizzying up the side of our house, and say wow
cattail wonderbread beatnik will yelp the first time he will burn his tongue on instant oatmeal- he might cry at the sight of the ocean.

Years before cattail took a sip of beer off the table, age young, and said "this tastes like soap" I was driving down a Kentucky highway when it hit me
that this is the moment I'm grown-
Its not glamorous, it's mainly titles and car insurance, realizing I've already left the
city i'm in, planning nexts and firsts and if-thens.

Cattail wonderbread shortcake will never experience
the art of smoking in the car during freezing rain- i hope
anyway

And if we all come back- are born from something else, I know Cattail could be strong, martini in hand saying "yes, I have been midwestful"
I have drowned in valley winds with daffodils then snow
"I can Cattail-wonderbread-thunderpuch my way out of
whatever."""
And then I'm proud,
in a way to say- this is the way of the world-
a create your own adventure
book for the ages

history

Your small honeysuckle necklace, I am so sorry, has it been
over tens of years, since we are theories of fossils, beginning magic spells and worm bodied hieroglyphs spelling the ways our heels burned hot under breaks of razor scooters down Maria hill.'

The creek and crawdads grazing my feet until we walked miles down past schools in the summer, where on a rock he said yes to poetry and i said yes to whatever. The garage, The empty dust on couches and an analog video camera that felt everything was important.

I drunkenly send videos of beautiful music to loved ones, but only sometimes, when i"m thinking of Ohio or Indiana as home though it was more of a place of couches and grilled cheese. I miss it none the less, in the rain alone, knowing they both were eroding bricks holding up stories i would tell later.



   

a good day for a motorcycle

A guy came in to the office and told jokes upon jokes as i felt my face crack until it should have been obvious I was not.having.it.
 But the vacation is ice on the swelling, and I begin nice on the phone, I'm walking outside to smoke and taking my full lunch break as easy as breezes where i think "today is a good day to have a motor cycle"
Hello i am someone who has gone to the beach, who has burned their index finger on cigarette
just tequila and ice water for chainsmoking end of summer, still cold without sweater


It is childhood in a breath-- the air and my own pink flame helmet skating  the highways loud and rumbling, on back on antique kawasaki dreaming of flying that free.

Window boxes

Window boxes, i pass, walking calves stretch passing stoops when the rain asks

but never comes. The ladder to the roof is as steep as panic

one foot falling in front of the other where we wonder and blow smoke toward the shells of city

we are pushed fast and I'm eating a donut waiting for the train at 8am after crawling from the spider web of her bed- I've been poison bitten, and slowly even, by the easy steps from byob to devils den. The afternoon beer soaks in as John Cusack on mute is looking concerned in a motel on tv, the bartender is mouthing 'no dont go yet' but we say yes, there are more window boxes that we must glance past to get where we must go yet.