They say it’s hard to hide yourself
these days, from the government
or justice or the in-laws.
What with the more cautious precautions
and the latest technology,
and all.

They say it’s hard to find the plane
that dropped from the radar,
blind to all one hundred and sixty-two
of its people hiding, sliding
softly into a sea where they
won’t be found.

They say it’s hard to be innocent
when you’ve killed a man,
and yet he’s innocent,
and we look on as this country’s racism
sails him away from
the choppy dark waters of 2014.

They say we will find you,
a bursting threat, and yet
when we want to be found,
the clock will make its rounds
too quickly.

And what if I were to
lose myself tonight?
Lose myself in the drink,
in the heartache, in the words,
in the years that go by
faster if you force them.
Would you find me?

A wet and warm
December in rural New Jersey
awaited me,
made me a stranger in my
own home.

I didn’t wake to white
when I woke that first Wednesday
morning, but instead
the gray skies and
mild temperatures
that weren’t meant for here.

I looked out the window and
wondered where the white
Christmas I'd expected had
wandered to, where the 
welcome I'd waited for
had wound up.

How silly that weather can
throw me so easily
from my feet,
from familiarity.
How silly that weather
can give me such unease,
as if the change in it
was somehow personal.

I wonder, 
how could I have left my home
and let the comforting cold
leave with me?

I ask,
how now can I choose between this
new North and the South
I’ve only just begun to love?

Last time I traveled away
I found solace in the growing night
that rushed past me as my rushing train
passed, not stopping for pictures
or bathroom breaks
or even the best views.

Through fogged winter windows
I watched the leafless trees
of Virginia go by until it was too dark
to see the little towns we slid through.

Hours later I looked
into the lights of coming cities
and was slammed by
the realization that I didn’t belong
in one, that the dreams I’d had for
so long were not founded
in reality.
And on the nearly empty train
I felt rising in me the emotions
of childhood that never quite left.
I cried for the town I’d just met
and had already
fallen in love with
as I rushed along metal tracks
farther away from it.

The train I’d allowed to take me
took me deeper into cities,
into a future in which 
a city loomed likely, and I thought,
love, why is it
so easy to fall into?


(See the poem I wrote on that "last" train ride here, for context.)

after Gregory Orr’s Self Portrait at 20

I stand beside myself and
see how others see me.
Long hair like a waterfall,
a flimsy shield
in which I can hide myself.

Because my skin
is the color of milk,
I know: this is not as
unlucky as it feels.

Because my round cheeks
have not always been round,
I know: this is mine to undo
as I have done.

                             And yet,
it was not the sight of myself
but the way you looked at me
that gave me the courage to
do what comes next.
I stood outside of myself for
so long before
stepping back in, 
ready to embrace
what I found there.

The sun sinks like an egg yolk
on the horizon, into the black
pan of night.
Beneath, we sit side by side,
eyes stuck to it,
each acutely aware of the other.

In my memory it cracks
against the line of land,
spreading.
Its dredges reach us
and you tell me
you could do this again
tomorrow, and tomorrow,
and tomorrow--isn’t it
beautiful?—and the whites
of your eyes glow when you
turn to me,
the parts of egg no one wants
but that serve to
fill them up just enough.

For Jackie

Tonight, she will sleep to climb
the stairs again.
Long brown hair falling down
her back as she runs up.
The boys are behind
her always,
long snakes winding
against and along the walls.
The door closes quickly;
she has gone in,
a snap of light
whipping across her face
before it’s sharp black and
they’ve gone in, too.

He was smashing,
she thought, and still,
every night,
there he is, smashing
into her across broken bottles,
her long brown hair
stuck to the liquid
pooling there.

Wishing to fall through
the floor but only going up,
always, always,
carried on snakes,
she glides up those stairs.
This dream is her broken record,
and she keeps breaking. 

Black & white & translucent,
the opposites of you once
rolled through the binders
lining my shelves.
Negatives.

I used to take your picture
so that I could keep you.
Now, the curling streams
of images spread themselves
out on your floor
beneath your dry hands,
catching with paper cuts--
you’ve taken you back.

Still I’ll remember how
you once gave me the pleasure;
looked into the lens,
eyes wide,
allowing me yourself
in the only way you knew
I knew how.

Oh Shenandoah, I long to see you
from the top of the Blue Ridge
near 20 miles away, I would stand
between two peaks,
sun rising,
looking out and down

Oh Shenandoah, I long to hear you
and I would shut my eyes,
two half-moons
blocking sunlight
like the mountains,
wind lifting my hair,
sprawling my hands out into
it, listening

Oh Shenandoah, it’s far I wander
always, there are things
in the way of light--
but still I dream that
I could stand up
high, feeling,
breath catching on

Oh Shenandoah,
away, we’re bound away.

The white tulle circling my waist
keeps me caught here, in this in between,
a nearly empty drink clutched in my left hand.
A new one is poured and in a moment
I am young again, suddenly back
at
          my first ballet recital:
tutu wider than I am tall,
hands resting on
the sheer size of it,
red cheeks
pinched with happiness
          
         or Halloween, age 8:
the skirted mermaid’s tail
my mother had sewn for me,
the felt scales of it
beneath my tiny hands,
the glitter on my eyes
too heavy

          or that family vacation:
the Maui sun setting behind me,
dancing on the beach with
my hands in the long plastic grass
that trailed from my
narrow hips,
the real flowers
around my neck slowly dying,
the adults looking on.

We are not those with
frames of pictures that
line the windowsills.
At night our string lights
hang themselves between the scribbles
and figures we’ve sprayed
onto the walls in place of
the portraits our parents
would put there.
The windowsills are empty
but for our spray cans--
we are not those who
appreciate the ordinary.