The Good Half
When you said you only wanted half of me,
did you mean the top or the bottom half?
Maybe you meant the outside half and not the inside half
Not the half that dives into the ocean but continually emerges the same person,
A salt-covered osprey shaking off the sand,
Looking you in the eye and asking you where you’ve been
Not the half that learned to fight like my mother with words that shoot to kill
No, you wanted the kill
The deer
The fawn falling softly on the mossy ground
Not the hoofs thrashing though the duff, stopping abruptly with her head raised sniffing the air
You wanted the half that flies, not the half that escapes
Fuck You for Dying
You–
gouger of eyes
plucker of stars
clear girl, vanishing in smoke like a magic show
Me–
making a permanent mourning cross between my eyebrows
begging you, forever on the run like a wave, not to return the ocean
I have been known to say that yours was a windsong,
tall and stoic like a ceiba,
and dangerous like it too
then suddenly sad, like a long journey home from a joyous trip
Your body inhabited by echoes and maudlin voices,
and when we would least expect it, shielded under the covers with only a flashlight between us,
a bird would shift free from inside you and fly away leaving us both aghast and delighted
You and me–
a conversation between angels
a violent sob before the sea, sad fury, unstoppable
we were made of everything
Dew Drops
My mother loved me hard enough to break my heart forever,
to split it wide so that cedar and ironwood trees would root where the fault lines stood
she knew, even as I grew inside her, that I was her wish come true
her little girl
She named me after a soft morning shower, in the hopes that I would bring her peace
Instead, she has often been left to wonder where on earth I came from
and forced to be the impatient steward of my weird
hours spent searching for perfect baby girl dresses
that I eschewed for ripped t-shirts and bare feet
She used to pull me under the covers on Sunday mornings and wrap me up in her sheets
showing me, even then, that I am worth holding on to
Her love is like sunlight,
turning the watermark of expulsion and diaspora into something
unbent, beguiling yet somehow honest
shimmering in cloudy water,
the last gleaming thing in this gutted, splintered earth
Everybody Wants to Own Me
My independence looks a lot like fear when held up to the light
My readiness to accept that my hands are only a reflection of the baggage they carry
That I am only human, and I don’t know how to love you past my own risk—
It will get to you
You will want to be my savior, my medic
And I will let you, I will use you as a door to somewhere out of here
Safe in your arms I will shed parts of me I thought I needed, one at a time like baby teeth
Until what is left is the deepest naked,
The final layer of consent
You will be part of this moment that I chose
Until the next moment when I may choose to not include you,
And in that moment of change, will you have the courage to leave me alone?
Or will your hands clench to the strings of me
Clipping my wings
Stapling my feet to the ground
Tell me I cannot make it in this hard world without you
Will you say that I am only soft because the world told me to be a soft woman?
Or will you see that I am soft despite what this world has done to steal my softness?
Dumpster Fire Press 