COMMON REMEDIES
1.
Breath against blue. Sky, sigh — silence, the soil
From which sound springs. Not a violent
Word, spring. Misleadingly elastic, a promise
Of better days ahead. Nevermind the blossoms,
Shooting through branches. Nevermind the stem, piercing
The dirt. A needle and the softest part of an ear —
Can you hear? Something is always being broken.
2.
Prescribed tablets of despair. That’s not what doctors
Call them. The point is to stomach the sadness.
Welcome to my body — a mid-latitude ritual, a forest
Through which all seasons pass. The pills are not for healing,
Only weathering the storms. The doctors do not wonder
Why they’re getting worse.
3.
A compass sinks to the bottom of a lake, as out of reach
As tomorrow. Downward, our earthly fate.
The surface of misery, smooth as the head of a drum.
Who dares break through? When trees carve wind,
It howls in pain. No one to the rescue.
In one hand is what you know. In the other is what you want.
How terrible to be a creature of habit.
4.
One day, I was a dandelion.
The sun left bruises on the clouds. All grown up,
I ran away from myself. Scattered
As ashes. Maybe it was for the best — to be rocked
In the arms of the air. Far away
From what happened, I listen for my cries in the distance.
SETBACK
December 31
It is not quiet that follows
the storm of my own
making. They are not lost,
the clouds
that fall away
from clouds.
After all these years,
I am sad to be myself.
To be of the earth
and like the earth,
headed nowhere except
in circles.
When the planet winds
up where she started,
it is a cause
for celebration.
I am trying to be so generous
with my despair,
so hopeful.
ODE TO FRIENDSHIP
after Noor Hindi
How many children believe the moon
follows them, down the highway,
like a nocturnal guardian angel?
Face stamped against the glass,
you, too, point to rubble.
It’s Friday night, and Providence
wells up in the horizon
like grief. A skyline
of abandoned buildings:
ruin and possibility. Unlike the moon,
we’re more than collateral damage.
Sure, we collided in Spanish
class, two Latinas with American
shame, but it is not gravity
that holds us together.
Rather than a science,
our orbit is art: full of choices
and mistakes. Like the time I ghosted
you all summer, or, our first kiss.
We are back to where we started:
our cemetery city, which unfurls
from the river like scroll paper.
We danced salsa at the gay
club on Richmond, sipped
lattes at the cafe-bookstore-bar.
We fought in an 1800s mall,
made up, a year later, over ramen.
Returning is like reading aloud lines
of a draft, for hints of where it might go next.
As if our past could tell the future.
But I don’t think it’s that simple:
I choose desire over destiny.
You, over the moon.
