Sadder and Deeper
I dropped off a lover at the sad train station. He got us coffee and I waited in the little street wishing it was full of morning people and would be full of night people but there were just two men by a doorway talking about war.
In the translation seminar people asked how to find a text. Translators told the stories of how they’d found their texts. I found a big white dog in the street. She was cheerful. We knocked on all the doors until somebody knew her house. When they opened the door, they said, Magic, I didn’t even know you were gone–
Outside the grocery store a woman recognized a man in the street. You work at the shelter, she said, you’re funny as shit. It was sunny. I want to be related.
On the bus a girl said to a boy, If my pussy stinks so bad then why is your friend in it all day long? A man yelled about language. A tiny lap-sized girl looked. The yelling man said, This man has a daughter! Later I tried to joke about it in the lawyer bar with the math teacher by titling it A Feminist Issue on Bus 28. I thought I might love the math teacher but I have whatever that sexuality is called where you fall in love from coming until you don’t. When the girl and her friends got down off the bus, she reminded us through dirty springtime windows, We are kids.
At a clinic the man waiting across from me said with a sheepish grandma-flirting smile, You don’t want what I’ve got. Maybe I do though, I think I was thinking. In my mind the chair beside him’s empty, but I know he was talking to someone he knew.
The city was taking people’s houses if they hadn’t gutted them by the date after the flood. One day the homeowner was with us volunteers, touching everyone with his bright attitude. Under the drywall we found plaster, old plaster on old wood laithes, and none of it looked moldy. The house had been in his family for generations. He said, this is beautiful. This must be hundreds of years old, even older than I ever knew, historic. Your beautiful house, we agreed, your beautiful laithes. In my mind I said, your beautiful eyes. They were gold like fall and trying. On the porch he kept trying. I’ll never see the street he saw. There were people there, he said. There were people. There.
She Says She’s Sure My Soul Mate’s Out There
I’m so happy. It’s Saturday night.
Drank a 5PM can in the shower.
By the lamp I’m back at it. Planning summer, new
lives. I turn off the radio coming from France.
In the glass museum I was wrong about the
blue arrival of winter nights. Factories
didn’t interpret these kitchen window skies, but
I left without a souvenir cup to compare. I’m 38.
It’s February. Is this attitude or feeling?
My mother, alive, picks up the phone.
Astrology for Small Potatoes
Some people have a rain cloud above their heads.
And that is why, french fry, their thoughts are frizzy.
The water goes down and floats back up.
Some people have a light bulb dinging just above,
rattling when it’s used up. They stop. They start.
Some people have a spotlight shining down upon
them, tater. That’s why they must keep dancing.
They must keep dancing.
Some people have a forest hovering above the
tops of them. Dirty roots drop worms on them,
and furry worm gobblers. These people are lost
underground, reformed hunters, never going back.
Some people have a bright pail of blood balanced on
the air above them, always about to topple. That is
why they laugh so easily.
Some people have a handsome hawk above them,
but they don’t see the shiny killer because they are hooked
over their phones, reporting me to my boss instead of listening.
How about you, potato? What’s just above your head?
Flying
Our parents are not our real parents. I used to have a
lovebird. Crossed the Bay Bridge to get her.
I’m on a creek bridge in snow with orange gatorade and
an aging spit swan talons boy wet and clawing in my chest.
I wake up again in bird song. I can’t honestly stand it
when indigo morning grays and the day is everyone’s.
Everyone who might mom talks genetic screenings at the cookout.
Why I like past lives. My dog’s tongue is purple and the croci.
Wind moves the purple croci. I wrote about Baisat hearing her
song. Her whole face changed, her whole body, she went fast
to somewhere good. I can’t write about songs. I was seven
when I won the dove in the lottery. I was twenty-one tortured
by thoughts of fourteen. I was the one girl in motorcycle class.
The old men, the young men. They cheered when I passed.