because we can’t change the world but we can
change our hardware. America breaks my heart
some days and some days it breaks itself in two.
I watched a woman having a breakdown
in the mall today, and when the security guard
tried to help her, what I felt was all of us
peeking from her purse as she threw it
across the floor into Forever 21. And yes,
the walls felt like another way to hold us
and when she finally stopped crying
I heard her say to the fluorescent lighting,
Some days the sky is too bright. And like that
we were her flock in our black coats
and white sweaters, some of us reaching
our wings to her and some of us flying away.
BRAIDED BETWEEN THE BROKEN
Today apologies were falling
from the trees and the apples
were being ignored.
There’s a chapter in our lives
where we tried to shred pages,
where we tried to rewrite the tale.
Let’s call that chapter The Numbness,
or The Boredom, or the place where we forgot
we were alive.
That morning I woke up and wandered outside
onto the backtrail,
past the No Trespassing sign into the arms
of an evergreen or a black bear. It didn’t matter
who held me then; I was the moss, the lichen,
the mushroom growing on the fallen log.
No one expects perfection, except when they do,
which is always.
Even you, king of the quiet,
crash when I talk about my brokenness.
Cover up, your fractures are showing.
In my life I try to apologize for things I haven’t done
yet. Those are the bruised apples of me,
the possible fruit rotting in the field.
Remember when I kept replaying melancholy?
Remember when I opened our melody with a switchblade?
Rip out the carpet. Mow down the dahlias.
Let’s ruin our lives …
It felt good to hurt then—
until it didn’t, until we were left
with bad flooring, a garden
where nothing grew.
You’re asking about the next chapter
and the one after that. You’re asking
what time I’ll be home and handing me
a cloth to buff my halo.
Let’s put a comma here.
Let’s put in a semicolon and think about
the next sentence.
I dream of erasers. I dream of wite-out.
I dream of the song where the pharmacist
doesn’t judge me for not being able to make it through
the day without some sort of pill.
UNSUSTAINABLE
When you broke my recycle bin, I
started calling you Fresh Kills.
I want to keep you in my plastic
Happy Meal heart, but what snaps open
stays on Earth forever, my center floating
down a canal until it’s swallowed by a seal.
Who cares our plastic drifts as a tagalong
to the sunset, an autobiography of artificial,
a dead whale washed up in the Philippines,
eighty-eight pounds of plastic in its gut?
Damn the turtles! Customers at McDonald’s
want their straws! And we could be practical
lovers if we remembered to bring
our reusable totes into the store—you said
the cashier gave me the stink eye for forgetting,
but I was lost in my own head thinking
about my grandmother in hospice, leaving
the store with a casket of even more plastic bags.
It hurts to say my convenience is more important
than the sea. I write a postcard to Earth
—I love you, but watch me navigate your landfills
in stilettos, let me kill your buzz. And you know
I’m talking about the bees now. My hands in the dirt—
if you want to gather honey, don’t kick over every hive.
I DON’T OWN ANXIETY, BUT I BORROW IT REGULARLY
Once I believed the saint I carried could keep me
safe. He lived in a rain jacket I wore
to keep out the weather and by weather,
I mean danger. Tell me a story
where no one dies. That story begins in heaven,
ends in heaven, and includes chapters
on heaven, heaven, and heaven.
It’s not really a story but a wish, or a concern.
Sometimes I wonder if there’s one moment
when no one is dying, where we all exist
on this planet without loss—
but there are too many of us
doing foolish things, someone is always sipping
the arsenic, someone is always spinning
a gun. And then
add old age, misfortune, a tree that’s leaned too long
in the forest and a family of five
headed off for a hike.
We cannot predict our tragedies.
We cannot plan a party for the apocalypse
because friends of the apocalypse know
the apocalypse always shows up
uninvited with a half-eaten bag of chips.
This is why some of us wake up
in the middle of the night looking for a saint—
and maybe your saint is a streetlight
or maybe the sea, or maybe
it’s the moment you walk out the door