the perseids fall

the perseids fall. the weather breaks, sharp heat turning to sudden wind and sometime rain. i stand at the kitchen sink, scrubbing what remains of your life. a photo of the most beautiful work your hands ever made. the thing itself long since rotted by mountain rains and sometime sun. a license plate with your…

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what to remember

remember not that you argued with your sister, but that you sang in the kitchen alone, and the house remembered a sound it had not heard in years. remember fireflies blinking slowly in the roadside dark and a night sky as open as the Arizona night sky – remember, on the last night, every star…

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predation

i forgive myself for choosing to be a predator. for sharp teeth and an active imagination. for killing my meat, in an age when killing is a luxury, not a need. i forgive myself for raising birds to be slaughtered, and for doing the slaughtering. for the gasping opened beak and warm blood running down…

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the brightness of the sky/ overwhelms my eyes

i am always turning away from you. seven years of arrival and departure without continuance at the center, the motion away built into the motion toward. brightest love of my life from whom i must turn, whose desires i could not satisfy, after enough time, my own not matching yours. what can i do with…

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avoidance

my hands are hardening as my heart softens. i try to hurry the process and things tear. blisters rise and sting. i bruise too easily, fall too fast. the massive cottonwoods humble and reduce me. i get small, laying on the patio, hurtling through space beneath a sky massed with leaves flecked with stars. the…

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needs

to say, you are meeting my needs is also to say, i have needs and today, you fill them. it is also to say, i need you. dangerous ground, the breakwater, the undertow land pulling out to sea. i need you also means, i need for you to need me. and if not, then what?…

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