Testing the Twitter/ Blog connection.

The woman in the elevator shares your face,
shades her make-up the same way, maybe,
safe-guards your eyes. A nuance
unidentified, which I opt not to pinpoint,
plays my memory for a fool, strums some
chord similar to a familiar tune: You
reenter a room explicitly departed,
reopen lips, which – chapped a final time –
forged all but shut. What breath, forced
through that cranny, avowedly your last,
spun back to animate her face? To dislocate
logic, to replace a woman in her thirties
with one whose ashes we’d entrusted
to the air?

The elevator operates through balance.
We do not term it fair.

As poets, we require this:
The skull of his girlfriend
boiling in a cast iron pot,
the coed stuffed like insulation
in a classroom wall. We need
bodies, bruises apparent enough
to express what’s left obscured.

Tired, we bury each other young.
Surprise fails us. Nevertheless,
- although we note the priest’s
split lip, the mark of deodarant
against the mourners’ black,
the child who (during the eulogy)
sheds her buckled shoes -
you could not call ours empty grief.

Rather, we save our words like limbs,
which – later – will catch fire.
We live in darkness,
make ammends in elegy.
Striking a match, we whisper,
I give you to the light.

Again: my mouth
finds the thumb’s false milk.
My shoulders recall a blanket’s arms
are always empty, ready, free.
Swaddle me–  Remember.
The silence has pitch.
Dig far enough; you’ll find a lullaby.

Like, anywhere I return at night
I can call home.

Even empty warmth, recognized,
is termed familiar.

When I was starving,
I’d spoon tea into my mouth
and call it soup.

Betray me.
Continue counting the calories in your margarita.
Carefully pull back the transparent wrap
covering your plastic tray. Its contents:
all organic, all whole-grain. Clean.

Stand before your mirror’s smeared glass,
smack your stomach into place,
pull in your ass. Carve an image
who bears her secrets privately.
Be that girl who only blinks on cue.

I’ll slip, slap you hard, hoping for a bruise.
I’ll imply, without meaning to,
the way spectres of wasted bodies
half their normal weights, still haunt
the hallways of my brain,
holding closed their paper gowns.

You’ll join them,
in your campaign to trade
carbon for oxygen, to be pure air, –
you’ll be that memory that always
weighs me down.

We keep injecting the distance
between June and December.
Wait long enough, I won’t remember
I’m not calling you

                                                I do
dial the phone, dig at the scab.
When you don’t answer,
I can wait another month, –
three, maybe. I can keep at bay
the way your heartbeat played
an s.o.s. against my chest, forget
the CPR I never learned.

Leaving remains the privilege
I prefer unearned. I hook
your pinky finger into mine,
but look away.

You and I sustain ourselves in silence,
more easily remembered than renewed.

You do not mean to betray me.
Yet, you continue
counting the calories in your margarita.
Carefully, you pull back the transparent wrap
covering your plastic tray. Its contents:
all organic, all whole-grain. Clean.

Standing before the mirror’s smeared glass,
you smack your stomach into place,
pull in your ass, try to carve an image
who bears every last secret privately.
Try to be that girl who only blinks on cue.

I unconsciously betray my memories,
when I slip, slap you hard, hoping for a bruise.
I imply, without meaning to,
the way spectres of wasted bodies
half their normal weights, still haunt
the hallways of my brain,
holding closed their paper gowns.

Once, we tried transcending body.
Trading carbon for oxygen,
we’d be pure air, — a memory
which always weighs me down.

You could nickname cancer,
write letters to it in your diary,
wrap elaborately-drawn hearts around
your blended names. Nothing would change.
You could introduce it to your parents,
invite it to your prom, buy it a ring,
without changing anything,
without making it one molecule less
a tumor, its malignant weight resting
against your pulse.

Or else,
you could call me, snot-clogged sinuses
dripping, gut-ripping screams stifled
by sobs like pillows, saying
“I’m sick,” calling it
what it is.

That semester when we shared textbooks
I learned you better than I had in over
a year of breakfasts, lunches, dinners
together, forced ends to awkward silences.
“How are you?”  All those times I asked,
you answered best in other people’s words.
Raymond Carver:  Don’t complain, don’t explain.
I don’t have to be drunk to say what I think.

Another time:  I spent my whole life
looking for anything I recognized.

A braver friend would have underlined
herself, an offering returned.  Plenty
of places I wanted but none where I was
supposed to be.  Sherman Alexie.
Or Grace Paley:  I wanted the world
to explain itself to me.

Maybe it’s always difficult,
in someone else’s language, to be brave.