I fell off the 30/30 train but here’s the last poem I wrote.

Love Poem to a Broken Mug

You bit two red moonslivers
into my hand
the thumb and pointer finger knuckles

I had been reaching into you
with the yellow sponge,
forgot your chipped edges
in wanting to fill you
with warm suds

Even now,
blood leaking lazily
into the water,
I only think
I was not gentle enough.
I was too reckless;
I did not care for you properly.

I still do not ask myself
why I kept you

I suppose I admired
your sharpness,
believed, somehow,
you could choose
how it would touch someone
else’s soft skin.
I loved your smoothness,
the parts of you I could run
my hands over
and over.
I thought you were whole
enough.

I left you on the counter,
half-rinsed,
as if someone else
would make the choice
for me.

I learned to write on my own,
but I learned poetry from my mother.
She will share with me a moment
most people would overlook –
three deer in the backyard
of her parents’ house –
and still insist
she does not know the difference
between my poems
and Emily Dickinson’s.

She does not know the language
but she recognizes the luminosity
of moments;
how our grandmother
was always saying, “look –
a deer in the garden!”
to whomever was in the kitchen,
her grandchildren,her three daughters.
How, as the three of them,
packing up the vacant house,
were all there to see
those three does,
staring back at them
through the kitchen window.

I used to list all the things
I felt she could not talk to me about
in words I could understand –
now, when I call,
I barely say ten words
and she asks if I am crying.
When I tell her why,
I know she is, too.
Some poets do not write.
I carry her heartbeat
like pebbles in children’s pockets.
I marvel at what she takes out
to show me.

No

No matter how gently
she places her hand
on his chest,
his skin cries
that he has been slapped.
For a while,
she did not feel
her own welts
as deeply as the wounds
she imagined beneath
his surface – fishooks
left carelessly inside him.
For a while,
she only felt safe
pulling him closer,
wondering how safe
was so painful.

No is a circle
you draw around yourself.
It is the lonely pupil
in an unblinking eye.
She is surprised
at how dark it is,
and how calm,
behind the thinnest sheen
of still air.

He looks distant,
but clearer. She wonders
if she looks different
to him, more like
someone else. A girl
in a melancholy song.
A name in past tense.

She was never safe
from what she feared the most.
No is mapping the borders
around your heart,
choosing to see
when someone
has left it.

She is waiting,
hoping he will recognize her
hand lingering in space –

not grasping for,
but welcoming,
touch.

First Love

You glorious heartfuckerupper,
you manic-depressive 6-year fever,
you tornado trail across my heart –

you fucker –

the thought of you
makes me hiccup with laughter
while I am heaving my grief
over other men.
When I am violently emptying myself
into pages, watching
my brain firings manifest
in desperate crooked scribblings,
I am tickled, elated even,
that your name is not among them.
Years and lovers later,
I am still shocked silly
to feel so deeply about someone
who is not you.

You Heartbreak Original
among very convincing knockoffs –
you existential attachment crisis calibration,
you, the first person
I would never stop loving,

you – the space carved in me
that can hold him now,
the scar who reminds me
of my homemade sutures,

you – the reminder
of what I can heal myself from.

Thank Goodness

For the dark,
for the cold damp breath
when I open the door,
for the heroism I feel
just stepping outside
into the emptied streets;

after months of brazen
light and activity,
finally –
permission to retreat
into myself,
the necessity of becoming
a sanctuary.