Start with a Word

My boyfriend and I are driving to dinner. I am thinking about a poem and baked lasagna. My forehead is hot. I look out the window, whisper in fragments, say the words sweating in my head. Drench. Drench. Mozzarella. Curlicues of blue. Drench. Islanded by billboards. He looks at me through the corners of his tiny crow’s feet. I want to shrink myself microscopic and butterfly through his rivers of skin. His hand nests on my thigh. The poem is breaching and I am driving 55 mph down East Market Street on a Tuesday evening. I can’t control when words come. They surface only when they are ready. Until then, they tussle around my gut. Sometimes there are no words for the words. I tell my boyfriend that he better get a pen and paper from my purse. I will dictate. There is something. Something about blue. About the way blue frames itself. No. The way billboards island me…No. No. I am thinking about a time when…Are you getting all this? He is writing on the back of my checkbook. He repeats, I am thinking about a time when…. I slam on my brakes at a green light. No. That’s not the poem part. He stops writing, looks at me like I am crazy. This is not unusual. That shit about blue? If that’s a poem then I guess I’m a poet too. He places the pen in his mouth for a second then says, Lightning. Pink. He pauses. His thick rimmed glasses paint him intellectual. Pink lightning. Crashes. Yellow barstool. I give him a dirty look. He thinks that I am a fraud. A pink ball of sunset skims the Akron sky above us while a little red checkered tablecloth waits.

                    *Title is excerpted from Kate Greenstreet

The Grief Essay

after Anne Carson

I.

I straggle through the letters of van Gogh.

Outside my window, ducks

beg for bread.

The creek is really a sewer

where two beavers

make their home. Grass tufts

hang from their mouths.

My toxic walruses.

A bottle of sleeping pills

sits on the dresser.

The dog is curled in the crook

of my arm, wet nose to wrist.

Every few snores, he raises one eye,

makes sure I’m still awake.

S left us last February. I loved him most

when he would feed the ducks.

Tomorrow I will sort through

the things he left behind.

II.

Vincent didn’t like to eat much.

Just bits of bread.

But he loved to drink coffee.

I know what it is like

to have a hollow stomach

or thirst for the mouth of a man

who cannot feed me. I know what it is like

to dump hope at the foot of an empty bed.

Grief yellows the words on the page, gathers

in the heart like water in a turbid pool,

life guttered by swirls of bad choice.

There were days in the asylum                                                                 

when Vincent ate paint.

Sometimes we are hungry

for things we do not understand.

What meat is it, Vincent, we need?

                        *Grief…gathered in the heart like water in a turbid pool is excerpted from a letter by Vincent van Gogh. What meat is it, we need is excerpted from Anne Carson.

Strawberries for Telemachus

He chuffs along. Tiny snorts, a mix

between a pig and a dirty phone call,

announce his entrance into each room

of the apartment.

His dreams are simple: a dollop

of sun on carpet. A thick paste

of gravy on a wedge of ham.

Only child—chubby prince

of a lonely queen—he is a poet

of his own sorts, loves

words like hungry and no.

Last summer he ate all of the flowers.

Plump dahlias, little pumpkins of yellow,

swallowed in a sneaky snap. Patch

of pink impatiens inhaled, stems

swaying in the windless air.

This year there are only strawberry plants

lined against patio planks. Each morning

after his breakfast, he dawdles to his plants,

noses among the pleats of fleshy leaves,

searches for red berries, settles for green ones.