We Are the Only Poets, and Everyone Else is Prose
Today’s prayer is my body pressed
against your body. Emily Dickinson
on the nightstand, still talking to Susan.
Occasionally, I’m the ghost who places
coldness into the left ventricle
of your heart, but I’m also your positive
prognosis even as doctors smoke
cigarettes and scientists say,
They should have sent a poet.
And when I sonnet my body
onto your page and you try to leave
me, I emdash you—see
the beauty in that fine thin line
—a bridge grows between us.
Hold me as the ghost I am—it’s impossible
not to love you—in soft focus, knowing
I’ll be there like that foggy night you
stumbled on the sidewalk, understanding
there is always one streetlight on your way
home that will continue to shine.
Note: Title is from a line from a letter Emily Dickinson wrote to Susan Gilbert. They should have sent a poet is a line from the 1997 movie Contact.
Accidental Devotion Where the Universe is On Your Side
Because there was fluttering when you expected
floodwater, a guardian angel with her hand on your hip
while you spun anxiety satellites in your mind until
the universe went full tilt, planets pinballing.
The secret is the world loves you—how you smile
at sticky children, hold the door open for people
you've never met. Some days it’s almost too easy to be
helpful, to make a million friends because
you don't spray pesticides across your lawn
—the grasshoppers and cocoons thank you. We're hanging
in there, knowing love is love is love and also temporary,
like us. And while you sometimes worry, wear highwater
jeans, you aim to unwind with hibiscus, hollyhocks,
anything to give you a little buzz. Remind how you adore
honeybees, alive and humming in sync with the cliffswallows
who returned with the pair of goldeneyes floating across
the lake—they're still together another year, seasonal
monogamy. Like all of us that summer when everything
fluttered. All those lifetimes, the monarchs landed
in your hair.
I Took the Love Language Test and One of My Languages is Stop Interrupting
Today you tried to override my anxiety
with words, calm me down, not let me
speak. I looked down at my Merlin app
recording the sounds of birds around us:
cedar waxing, rock pigeon, Costa’s
hummingbird, raven, robin. My screen
flashed yellow again and again
—the house finch kept drowning
out the song sparrow. And I see us then,
on the chirping patio as avian equivalents—
Rosario’s caretaker and Nervōsus’ poet, both
with wings ruffled, attempting to be heard.
