crosswords

and my head is swimming brimming with all the mumbling mumbled things i forget to say. there are hopping popping toads at my eyelids, vying for attention. yr leafy wrist is a summons, my bruising feet a warning. i'm daydreaming about bicycles and rivers and longlost curlyheaded comrades who lure me to long nights of adventure.

(it makes me wonder if i should flee before the hot blue skies return.)

my throat is a waterfall and this world is a riverbed. debris is rising beneath my ribcage.

and you know, it's been almost a year since i've seen the ocean.

twitchy lids

Today I drank espresso, over ice, till my fingers and my tongue jittered and my eyelids peeled open. Today I saw her at the door and backtracked to say hello. She's only been back here a week, she says, but she's trying to figure it out still. I nod. Cities are hard, I say. I love Chicago, and I hate it. Yeah, they are, she says. She looks solid and beautiful and strong, but her eyes are always worried, like mine. Sometimes on my happiest days strangers stop to cheer me up because I look too sad when I squint in the sun.

I worry too hard about all these lost-eyed girls, about these boys who try and drink themselves far away.

I feel helpless without my contacts in because everything blurs and I can no longer interpret the lines in their faces. Sometimes I like it better that way. (Sometimes i wonder which of us is more real. Sometimes I don't.) His hair is a blessing. Her high heels are a disguise. There are black smudges on my calves and my thumbs and my forehead. I am feeling the pavement through the cracking soles of my shoes. I am tiring of block letters and dark sunglasses. Our lists grow shorter; the days grow longer.

they say chemicals

i want rollerskates, a tape recorder, and a hammock so i can skate to the park and lie hanging beneath the trees singing soft songs to the breeze.

it's been two weeks since i've practiced and already my fingers have forgotten all the strings. it's been seven months since i biked for hours along the danube, singing with all my might to the sun. seven months! that's so many days between me and where i maybe want to be. i maybe want to be everywhere or anywhere or just somewhere where all my friends won't keep moving away. yesterday everything was a reminder, and i could feel my eyes stretching wide to take in all these places just out of reach. i rode home a new way and found the smoothest-rolling paved alley in the city, & when i looked to my left, through the slats of the fence and across the empty lot, another cyclist was mirroring my path.

i remember the way she cut his hair and then brushed the clippings from his bare back, hesitantly, tenderly.

i remember hands on my thighs from both sides while we piled on laps and sang beatles songs in someone's hallway on a fuzzy early morning.

yellow ink

candlelit card games on summer porches and the soft sweet taste of small smooth onions in my mouth. cinder block confessions, shared cigarettes, crumbling foundations and smudged cheeks.

summer nighttimes sweep by in broad strokes, each illuminating a new depth or a slow fade to misdirection. our small hands - yours with bitten fingernails, mine long and knobby-jointed - our small hands grasp at the few straws of our bareskinned memories while we stub toes on new demands. on door sills and windowsills and rusty screens dangling from their frames. in the summer you are the light of a borrowed cigarette gesticulating toward the dawn. in the summer the sticky air on my thighs brings me to leafy forests and old streets framed in wrought iron. you are the bruise on my gums. you are the damp hairs lying flat on my neck, the irresolute wanderings of fruit flies around our lazy yard.