Nape

You can't know
every girl's heart. Some want to reach
right in and grab the beat

while another might smile
as she blows a hole through you
before mounting you
on the wall with her other trophies.

Wild isn't soft.
My nape isn't downy, it's bristly,
matted with dirt, flea-bitten, mangy,
sleeping under boughs and stars
in the rain, eyes downcast, in the heat, panting,
nibbling at grass or wild roses
or tame roses if they aren't guarded by fences
because thorns or consuming beauty don't mean anything
when you're hungry.

And then it's over
not how you thought, is it,
Diana was the Huntress
and led her pack, arrow notched,
standing up to Apollo.

Don't mistake fair.
Don't turn your back
since we may as well face what's coming:
inside every smile is a slice

Average

When you take the black
letters, hips jutting provocatively
from the placid white page
smooth them out, add then divide
like some emotional accountant
filing notes on a spreadsheet
an average of love
spikes from your heart
they puddle into grey

Average is where we land
it's the law
standing in pre-sized shoes
forgetting the bright sun that bathes us
like that time at the zoo watching the new baby elephant
already wrinkled and snouty
but acceptably so
grey its nature
nature its habit

And night's luxury, magnified silence, absent
light except when is light truly absent
if you can pull the sheet over your eyes
blink so hard stars appear
like some private heaven
piercing silver and gold into the muddled black
the grey that won't stay
still

trying to collect
and recollect if being lumped in together
a bumpy hash, with all the others,
is something you do
to yourself

Explaining

I could try
explaining
then the word spreads out like an oil spill
letters stretch more than an old waistband
that no longer quite holds in
what it's supposed to

"Ex" as in former
"plain" as the nose on my face or that place
where rain falls or not-vanilla yogurt
"ing" as in dyslexic gin I should be drinkgin

and it loses
what it was supposed to keep
this explaining
dropping keys down the culvert
butter-side-down floor toast
a quiet confidence

The look in your eyes
if I could see them, if you could try
blinking the wet out of the word
me explaining
and let me see them again

but I can't make sense
the syllables jumble themselves up
a sibilant S, a glottal G, a misshapen
word too often leaked out
explaining doesn't spell
trust

Hands

I don't think she ever got a manicure in her life.

I'll have to ask. Grandmom's fingers were twisted from arthritis, red from ten thousand pans of hot dish water and heavy pan lifting. At market, she expertly knuckled tomatoes and peppers, gingerly held up ginger and mushrooms to muster eye-level confirmation of her digital inspection, and in kitchen she still firmly grasped the very well-honed chef's blade.

She left Mom her knives. The tines are still good. The handles have seen better days, and the 10" blade is now probably 8-1/2", with the thickest part sharpened down to barely more than a paring knife. But it cuts.

Everything made it through multiple uses. Plastic bags ended up rinsed, inverted on the dish drain or hanging by clips from a line. Paper towels, rung out, draped over cups. Tin foil was crinkled and wrinkled, folded and creased before being replaced in a drawer. New towels sat unused in the drawer, so each visit one or another of us would spirit an old one out when she wasn't looking. They had no fluff left, no absorbancy. They weren't even good for washing cars or dogs.

The knuckle tips on her right hand were askew perhaps 30 degrees from the main digits. From scrubbing? Gripping? When she curled it around the scotch tumbler she had me pour - "two fingers, dear - you're having a drink too, aren't you?" she left no doubt that the glass would remain firmly grasped, whatever the color or angle of her fingers.

At 93 she finally let loose her grip, before I would. As she lay in the bed at CHOMP, many of her offspring milling around the waiting area, children hanging over the benches to look at the koi in the indoor pond, adults doing the low-volume huddles here and there, seated in the neutral-colored fabric chairs, I took my turn at bedside. My aunt, a physician, patiently explained to my younger son what each of the tubes were for. "What's this?" he'd chirp, one after another, fascinated at the dials and fluids and, oh, GG, who was awake and smiling. I gripped her hand and looked at her face and she said, finally, you can let go, when it appeared I wouldn't.

I think she smiled. It would make sense if she smiled. I'll remember it that way, arrange her lips and mouth just so, put the words in her voice, in my mind's ear. We'll hear the timbre and the silence and feel goosebumps and it may as well be her hands that held mine and let go, finally, when they finally let go.

Joshua Tree

The Joshua tree stationed next to the driveway sagged in the Victorville summer heat. If he could stand tall. If he could, like his brethren who hopscotched across the desert floor, but here roots were cramped by cement, and instead he crouched like he would spring free at any moment. But he never did. And the crouch became a slouch.

His was a crown of crow diadems.

Red velvet curtains lined the living room window. Every morning he greeted them as they faded from black into blood. Faintly, he once heard them referred to as hooker drapes, then laughter. The brown haired human who turned the lights on and off, and who every few days dripped a water drink on the brown dirt, that would be her laugh.

He did not have hands.

He did not have fingers to brush her soft cheeks, or a mouth to speak with. Only his many arms could stiffly wave, when fickle Wind chose to visit. Not so fickle, perhaps: the human brought out a stick with thin twigs and brushed away his fallen skin, which Wind would shake free on her visits. His skin, once green, then yellow, then brown, would snap free and flutter. They could be butterflies, if they could fly upwards, couldn't they?

His other skin was also his tongue and nose and ears and armor. Its name sounded nothing like the voice of the black and white creature who squatted and made water and who had a mouth. He had skin that fell away and drank the sun and changed colors, and he had skin that had long memory and was constant and rough.

If he had had fingers that could have caressed her cheek, he would have found it soft as the underside of a new leaf. For her kind, she was old. Sometimes her acorns came to visit, parking their cars on the cement shoe that kept him contained. They would slink past him on the walkway carrying bags and boxes, commenting on the drapes, on the bright, on the dry air. He knew their names. When she watered his roots, she talked to him, words tumbling from her human mouth. Without a tongue, he became adept with his bark ears and listened.

Once when she was young with child she had sailed across the blue water and landed among dark haired people. There she had more young with black-brown hair, five in total who knew of each other. If there were others that didn't breathe, well, he had no mouth to speak for them. He listened as the bombs fell and rose in her voice, between the tinkle of water splashing from leaves to earth. He heard the march of millions of feet, and the grumbling hunger from millions of mouths, and he was curious why they didn't just turn skin into leaves and drink the sun?

She stayed with him for a number of turns. He was not old for his kind; trees don't count so much as live. He paid no attention to the flickering box that somehow deafened all the people. He didn't use soap, and if he was happy, it was when the damp earth cozened his skin and he could stretch another few leaves into the sky, and breathe in the wind and the sun and the sharp stars who kept him company in the dark.

Cabinet

I put all the hurt words

here and here: they have four letters.

Name them.

Keep them like keys in your pocket:

unlock the rusty tetanus cabinet

and scrape them across the floor of your heart

so deep they gouge the floor

well up in red tears

scar over like railroad tracks into your past.

Catch!

Keep ‘em.

I’ve pried open the window

so sunlight and the smiling moon can peek in

and don’t need them anymore.

It’s an old house; used, the doors

have been kicked open and banged shut

but the cabinets here are full

forgiveness and trust aren’t just words

they’re utensils: used daily, a bit scratched

love is carefully dried and returned

even when it gets bent.

I won’t rebuild the foundation – it’s got good bones

even if I’ve pained or painted it wrong sometimes

there’s no need for keys anymore;

there are no more secret cabinets

no more silent hurt

no love that can’t be shown to friends

no trust that can’t be mended

when it matters

Air

Like every night, the windows are blacked out. Snippets, mere slivers of light invite whistling then silence and stilled breathing, then the end of silence and the end of breathing, for some. Others will scream into the void, into the brick returned to dust and mounds.

Black is safest, but it’s not really black: the moon still shines, starlight twinkles, and from heaven the bombers can see silhouettes like in a child’s school performance in a darkened theater: enough to illuminate the crouching figures, enough to see what waits.

Pass the popcorn (there is no popcorn). Turn on the light (for god’s sake don’t turn on the light! Can’t you hear the engines’ whine?) Momma I’m scared (hush, hush baby, it’ll be all right.) You want to breathe again but the pilots might hear you. You want to breath again but closing your eyes is like a bear hugging you too tightly, it’s like that time in the swimming pool you got held under the water and fear ripped out your heart and you wanted to breath, anything, open your mouth and suck in water just to fill your lungs with something besides fear but it’s still dark. And the planes are still overhead. And you want to check the corners of the window to make sure no light can escape, like picking a scab – it won’t change anything for the better.

Time doesn’t pass with the sweep of a second hand. It doesn’t freeze like the top of a swing’s arc, the moment you leap into the void, and you see how the nearby tree limbs sieve light through dust, how the baby’s red hat sticks to her head, how far away lies the earth, how your heart is overhead until all at once gravity reaffirms her smooth embrace and your feet ache to find the ground, and laughing you land and roll and sound re-emerges from your ears.

It’s over. The all-clear sounds.

How do they know, Momma? What, baby, know what? To sound the sirens. How do they know it’s safe?