The New and The Eternal (Alix)

On wild fire leaves, I find myself. 
Blazing across soil tilled by words,
paragraphs planted there to grow into conviction
and one day, maybe, blossom into action. 
The leaves have drifted from a tree that none can not-remember, and I,
smooth and young as I may be,
lay atop it's epithelial blanket. 
I find myself, in Us, here. 
The Us that has and always will be
growing and flowering and fading to grow again
reborn with the carousel seasons,
kaleidoscope years painting pictures in our lives. 
The paragraphs you planted there
that grew into an Us
and fell with winter's first embraces
into You and Me again. 

You from Me (Alix)

Here there are no midnight calls-
floor meets flesh and bones divorce, 
voices flying through the pitch
writhing with adrenaline shakes. 
I sleep soundly, here. 

There is no sadness thick on my chest. 
Your face is stranger to me, now
no sadness is expected,
and I can wear my joy with pride. 

Here, I'm pulled after my heart. 
My mind is often left behind
pleasantly unhampered by
the love and fear I felt for you. 

Your screams have turned to whispers, slowly
as distance and learned deafness grow:
oceans carefully fostered
to drown them out. 

And there?
Your world isn't colder?
Your cries are just as loud, and answered?
Now there is no crying back. 
Heart meets mind and mind prevails. 
Sadness doesn't soak you through 
to mend the bones you broke for me. 

I'll never miss the heart-attack nights,
the pleas for help piercing my dreams,
but I'm not needed like I was
to rescue you from yourself. 
Now I've rescued you from me. 

And me?
Who will rescue me?

Gesture (Meghan)

Gesture

I know the strand of darker hair

that falls in front of my ear,

the one you noticed when I

leaned into your willing chest.

Your gentle fingers slowly tucked

and smoothed, then raked a row from

temple to nape.  I couldn’t see your eyes,

but I felt them seeing golden, flax, and sand

in trinity and bending to your will.

I felt you seeing fingers and hair

but maybe also a woman and the colors

of her soul as they look to you now,

the meta-cognition that they’re changing

every instant, the momentary question

what does she feel about my fingers in her hair

or the words I haven’t said but may have thought?

I felt you seeing the painted husk of me, but tender all the same.

My sigh might have been a gasp,

an unbelieving wish

to remember.

Blueprints (Davina)

I've got seeds in my pocket,

a tape measure in my hands,

and plans rolled up tight on tracing paper

in my backpack—all these for when 

I end up where I'm headed, and it comes 

the time to build.

In the land that will be mine,

I'll first find where the little creek flows, and

plant the maple with the crooked branch 

that leans over the water, for fishing.

Then, the old oak with its plastic red swing

and the big mango tree, for climbing,

and tall hemlocks next to wide-limbed spruces,

for the children to hide beneath and play. 

I'm bringing my sister's quiet street

to settle around the house, a long loop

wide enough for four to walk side-by-side,

barefoot on greying asphalt still leaking 

the sun's warmth in late afternoon.

I'll make a garden, too, filled up with 

vegetables and flowers alike, and

bordered by my mother's old butterfly bushes.

She and I will sit out there in summer,

reading the books she never 

found the time to read, and with new eyes

she'll laugh at fine print with me.

Inside the house there will be a special closet, 

for memories that only need remembering 

once in a while. 

My father's father will keep 

his wheelchair in this closet, while he plays 

Chinese shuttlecock out in the courtyard,

and my friends will leave

their hospital gowns—faded, worn,

smelling faintly of death—

folded neatly on the shadowed shelves. 

To My Sister as I Leave (Alix)

To My Sister as I Leave

"I can't believe my baby sister's growing up!"
I grew up years ago
seeing you surrender to the world. 
Who will you miss?
The wide-eyed child of yesterday
with untied shoes and smudged cheeks
whose cherub smile was swallowed up
by life's disappointment?
Or this inwardly collapsing girl
who never sings anymore,
but cautiously observes the world
as you dance, oblivious, without a song?
This baby girls is grown. 
The borrowed love that built our home
wore down with worry, years ago. 
Anxious termites desperate
to scatter us without a hope. 
Baby sister left us then
I missed her, too, my childhood self
the warmth and shine of innocence 
a heart as light as laughter.
But I can't mourn tenderness loss
now that I know what I know,
undone as I have been by borrowed fear.
Who is there to miss?
Oh, I believe it's better now
there is no baby sister left. 

Sleeper (Meghan)

Sleeper

On Christmas day, I fell asleep

on the rug I can’t remember.

It was pneumonia, I was small, and

no one knew how to play the piano yet,

to wake me with carols

I’d suffer to sing.

In our shared bed, she begged for stories.

Schools of fish in multicolor  mixing across

human prejudice.  Reenactments of

movie musicals boiled and

thickened into memory.

Moving cars were cradles:

An engine’s hum beneath my short legs,

head unhinged bouncing between

cold glass and the near-noose of seatbelt nylon.

At the exit, I stirred but pretended sleep,

hoping Dad might carry me inside.

It was tenderness, not ease.

I wonder why I never simply asked.

The floors were hardwood, so

I did crunches on the soft bed,

listened to the old slats fall

and gazed at the ceiling fan.

We didn’t call them boom boxes anymore,

but it was busy drowning out

the story in my head, the one about

a teenager named Natalie who wanted to be

beautiful and smart at the same time.

Her room was ten steps away, but

there were nights when we’d rather not sleep

alone.  She couldn’t tell me who I was.

The stranger she’d kissed on the dance floor

couldn’t give her health insurance.

My long body and hers compact running on,

two un-indented paragraphs sidling close

hunching toward meaning.

We slammed the futon into the center of the studio,

collapsed in Indian Summer.

I wished the windows had screens.

He was drunk when he told me he loved me.

I got high on believing him,

on the way my hair looked wild in the morning

after turning over, a rabbit on a spit,

in the suffocating heat of my city cell, under

the weight of Grendel’s arm across my waist.

He admired the blue-gray of my bedroom,

imagined the tension in my arms as they pressed

pigment into what must have been Builders’ beige,

completing the work alone because it hurts to think

another slept where he sometimes sleeps.

When the parasites invaded,

I slept with the lights and all my clothes on.

Insects aren’t that smart, but the ears, eyes, and nose

are pathways to the brain.

When they were dead, I asked

the God I don’t believe in

How long before I rest?

You slept; I didn’t.

So I noticed when your leg seized mine at 2am

and wondered what magazines would say

about the way couples sleep.

Pirate leg means possession?

We’d laugh and call it luck.

In the semi-conscious space of the snooze button,

you reached for my body, which introduced my brain,

and we rested there for nine minutes.

I think that we are more than bodies and brains,

but not just now.

Placeholding (Meghan)

Placeholding

I cried on the white hotel sheets,

thinking of strangers’ blood and bleach

while you slept loud and hot, unbothered,

and woke to walk the sand in silence.

When you took my hand, I wondered why

furniture matters like the objects we collect

in curios and drawer compartments,

the art we hang on our painted walls.

We drove back with the windows open

so we didn’t have to talk too much.

My hair lashed my tan cheeks,

got stuck between my eyelashes, but

still I could see the tension lining your frown

with premature years.  I smiled again,

what I’d learned to do when you can’t,

but I was thinking of the souls of varnished floorboards,

the tyranny of carpets changed with the tenantry.

I can make the locks turn, but does that make them mine?

In the final miles, you brightened, remembering

my new place was just across town,

that soon we’d be drinking red wine on the balcony

like we did when we still admired every word.

You’re almost home, you said.

I’m homeless, I replied.

Perhaps if I could live in the bookshelf

Grandpa made and drink from the pewter cup

etched with the date of my birth.

Perhaps if you loved me,

and you tried and so did I,

but this space is a museum, and I?

a curator for now.