Kindergarten Lesson Plan

You do not have to have a handmade heart
to put on every desk in February.
You do not have to subject yourself
to something less than empty
when you look on your desk to find
a single box of chalky fake writing hearts
or nothing at all.

You do not have to invite thirty people
into your small house on your birthday.
Your guilt will not be louder
than their voices bouncing through
your sanctuary, their careless footsteps.
Pick a few, or one, that really matters
or no one at all. Enjoy yourself
the way they do not know how to enjoy you.

You do not have to apologize
when you finally look someone else in the eye
and say, you cannot have this.
This is mine and I won’t give it to you.
Even when they call you names.
Even when they run crying for sympathy
beseeching an authority that does not care
to justify their selfishness.
Even when you are told it is wrong
to pull back when uncaring hands
try to move you. Even when
you are told to apologize for refusing
to see selflessness as a virtue,
for knowing what you do not have to do.

They will not know what to do
with a creature like you.
You stun them with radiant shamelessness
until they retreat into their own wounds,
want you to apologize
for refusing to carve spaces into yourself
big enough to carry someone else’s fear.
Go home, alone.
Decorate your room with hearts.
Hold yourself the way no one else knows how.

Hiding Places

The fingers of the fir tree
I named Thomas
out in the backyard.

A table in the corner
with a beer and an open tab
watching everyone watch
the people singing in the bright lights.

The closet in the laundry room
smelling my mother’s dresses
listening to footsteps thunder on
down the hallway.

A screen showing me
someone else’s story,
as if it will give me the roadmap to mine.

The image of myself
in the side mirror,
the Goo Goo Dolls in my headphones
casting a moody light over my face
gazing out the window
willing my family into nonexistence.

The muddy opaque paintbrush-water
between what is kind
and what is true
when you ask me if you hurt me.

Ways that Falling in Love Makes You More Creative With Language

They challenge you
the way salt water challenges open sores.

You work through it
the way a father works through the one weekend
his children are visiting.

They are different
the way life after a lobotomy is different.

You learn independence
the way the tiny pink shoe on the sidewalk
is learning independence.

You are always trying
the way the moth lurching around the fluorescent bulb
is always trying.

You become creative
the way the cornered, starving dog
is creative.

Why She is Crying

When she looks at him
she sees a bright red wound
he does not seem to notice

he winces
whenever he speaks

he clings to her
so tightly that

she wonders if she made it
deeper
every time she breathed

she cannot breathe
without feeling guilty

she is alone
with a wailing child
he cannot see

her arms
are so tired
of holding something

refusing to be held.

Thoughts on Silence

1.
I remember reading that once you go from observing a conversation to participating in it,
half of it is lost to you. The sound of your own voice ripples your vision, warps the picture
before you. Your thoughts thicken like concrete. Certainty seduces you. You begin to forget
how much you did not know, just a few minutes ago.

2.
In Quaker Meeting, all of the pews face the center of the room. People sit across from each other
saying nothing. One hour, uncountable breaths. Awake. Sometimes, an urgent pull,
a hot metal hook in your diaphragm, a heady adrenaline buzz, your heart sending bees
through your veins. How terrifying – the certainty. The need to speak when you know
everyone must listen, how desperate the message is that wants to shatter such quiet.

3.
My first love did not speak to me for four years after we broke up. I wrote books, albums
for him. They were not so much art as transcripts of the half-dialogue constantly running
through my head, thousands of bottled messages the tide washed back to me, sealed tight as promises.
Last summer, we spent 7 hours in a coffeeshop in unbroken conversation.  I said
simple, mundane things surprised me. Sometimes, I said nothing at all. That evening,
the bottles on the shore were full of seawater. For all of their urgency, I cannot recall
a single scroll. Not one word they held.

Reasons He Thinks She is Crying

She was having a nightmare
before he woke her.

She is too attached to the little boy who is sick.
She wants him to be ok.
She is tired.

She feels too much.
She thinks too much about
what she is feeling.
She went to a poetry reading.
She still reads her ex’s blog.
She looks for things
that make her sad.

Her friends are busy.
She doesn’t want to be alone.
She misses someone else.
She loves someone else.

She wants something big
and he is not big.
She wants him to be different.
She doesn’t want him
to be with the old girlfriend.
She cannot decide what she wants.

She didn’t tell him why she was sad.
She didn’t let him fix it.

The Unnamed

I wonder if she is jealous of widows,
who have a word
that can describe the shade of loss
they have been stained.

I wonder if she stands in his doorway
trying to read it in the bars of his crib,
the neatly folded shirts
he would soon outgrow,

the windows full
of dusty velvet light.
It is not morning
but the night is faded
and slipping away from her.
In between
is a nameless awake.

I imagine a word so small
she holds her breath
when she cuts its fingernails

so impossibly heavy
her spine curls
like a tree trunk over time
cradling its weight
in the slope of her hip –

the turning of the first empty page
halfway through a photo album

the sound from his throat
that she knew she belonged to
before it sounded like “mother”

I wish for her
a name like a rosary
she can run through her fingers
while she walks back down the hall
closes her eyes
and waits for dawn.