The Words To Say

Grave Diggers For Richard Siken When we met I became aware of the hole I’d been digging for decades, a ditch of sorts, a burial plot for my feelings, my secrets, all the ugly bits. Twenty four hours later I stood in the shower thinking of you, the way your left hand gripped your coffee cup, how your eyes looked quickly at me before they nervously looked away. You said, in other words, you said, yo...

June Rolls in all sweet and salty. Our twin seductress, her early morning gloom gives way to afternoons that scorch the most foolish of earthworms; waiting soil but inches from their drying bodies. Kids stay up late, giggles echoing down the hall; live the waking hours with popsicle stains across the front of every shirt. Filling driveways with pastel castles and hopscotch mazes, begging for snack...

Love’s Teeth Sink in soft to the flesh, incisors through fresh baked marshmallow. Always biting off more than can be chewed at once — an enduring bifurcation of foolish optimism and a voracious appetite to be continually consumed. The feast begins at the mouth, delighting first in the sweetest of pleasures. Then working their way down to the bones, to the tender marrow, to the beating heart, until...

Curiosity May have killed the cat but it was only one of his lives, so I’d argue the juice may have been worth the squeeze. After all, what is there to live for if not the wonder of discovery — the jolt of acidic tartness on a willing tongue; toes on the ledge, dipping themselves toward infinity as a heart pounds against its slender ribcage; eyes meeting eyes for the first time, wondering what sec...

Observing Atoms Writing from sadness is easy. It’s catharsis, a leavening of self. Writing from joy is far more complicated. The writer is not seeking alleviation and so the act of writing it, in all its transient splendor, becomes ominous. Do I dare speak of the way her body nestles neatly as she sneaks under my covers, her flesh born from inside mine — or of my soul’s wholeness upon her existenc...

Women Friends Are so much easier to find when you can pass them notes in the hallway about boys you’re obsessing over, and when sleepovers are commonplace for lady bonding. But as they marry and move away, you are forced to cry into a cell phone on your hardest days, instead of cuddling on the couch, intermittently berating your boyfriends between commercials of The Hills. In the longing void of t...

A Secret Garden For Rainer Maria Rilke How many lives did we almost lead before the ones we’re living found us. How many loves were lost in the chaos of the growing of ourselves, holes forming in the toes of socks we once danced together down the hallway in. A constant knitting together and pulling apart of the tiniest details of our daily rituals. It hurts to be alive as the seasons change — reme...

The Suncatcher’s Sonata We’re all born to this earth, sturdy prisms of possibility. Unaware of ourselves, our facets unencumbered by pretense. Then we meet people. We meet love and want, heartache and harmony. Each a beam of light, bending as it encounters our edges, dispersing truths in vivid arrays of varying hues. Every soul a different wavelength, allowing an alternate aspect of our identity t...

Kids No one told me how funny it would be to have them point at my freshly showered body parts and repeat “what’s that?” as their dad gives each part a silly name and we all laugh uncontrollably. Or how suddenly the topic of how babies are born can come up, and how easy it would be to tell the plain truth, only to have her shrug and move on to a new topic. No one told me how frustrating it is to s...

Time is Not a Thief Stop saying that. It’s not a clock with hands ticktocking away as it steals your freedom. It doesn’t come at night to gather your valuables and vanish into the darkness. Time is now. It says I guarantee you this moment, and nothing more. While you toil over sins and sadness of the past, or longings for the future, I’m here. Offering you something you won’t ever find elsewhere.

Jazz Is As the ocean to the shore; always touching, but the ebb and flow keep a mystery alive between the two. The universe expands like the lungs of a newborn, gasping for air for the first time. From nowhere it began and is now indefinitely in motion. To know the theory gifts a sense of security, but to feel the rhythm in your bones is to be free. His fingers play sadness and it creeps under her...

Growing Pains It pulls in the pit of the stomach like taffy, stretching at the edges in rhythmic motion — a constant discomfort for the common good. Enlightenment is heavy. Not a weight on the shoulders to be lifted, but an encasement — a place to grow wings under uniform pressure. Rest your hand on a mirror and gaze at the eternal distance between the palms. No mighty will can change it. Same goe...

When The Poet is Still In the midst of the happening there’s no creation. A seed sown, possibly, but no more. As he silently sobs at the top of a casket and she welcomes new life from inside herself, there’s a stillness that must be present — it quiets the mind of it’s musings, and opens the heart to quiver or quake or break into pieces. Experience is not the moment for clarity, but an electrifica...

Universal Attraction Two galaxies, passing through time, the shimmer of a billion suns briefly reflect in each other’s eyes. A common bond is shared in knowing the weight of gravity holding the other together. Every burning twinkle, the cornerstone of its own planetary system, orbiting relentlessly. The pull toward one another is nuclear — strength that eats light for breakfast. A collision of thi...

Bare To be seen in early morning light, as the sun begins greeting its subjects one by one. Once revealed, it can’t be undone — Strokes of ink on a white page, delicate scribblings of truth, each loopy letter reaching gracefully for the next. Petals of a rose unfurling perfectly slow, exposing a tender center filled with promise. One can never survey the full depths of the ocean floor, too many be...