Division Street

I'd like to call it a dance record,
drowning you out, applied in layers,
different colors, textured fabrics.
Folding sheets, stretched between arguments.
This is our routine, the same one we've performed
for generations. I heat dinner unevenly,
wait for you to come home, romanticize, drown you out.
I pretend the warm laundry is you. The music of chores,
surprised at how common it feels. Your favorite
sweater is black with red stripes, and I pretend
it doesn't smell like you, drown you out.
I'd like to call it big band, hailing magic, chaotic,
but the only charge I feel comes from dryer sheets, static.
I am static.

Periphery

We are guiltiest of idolatry,
lining our thoughts
with the currency of shortcuts.

Collapsed on the bed is the lover we worship,
the system we're used to. We are the deadbeats,
feet propped, happy with our long day's work.

"We do what we can for our families,"
is our patent-pending excuse, cupboards stocked,
Honduras and China on our legs and backs, our feet and faces.

We are the guiltiest of laziness,
ignoring the periphery when an arm strikes the windshield.

We are guiltiest of idolatry,
lining our thoughts with the currency of shortcuts.
We are guiltiest of the American Dream.

Turning in Your Hands

The dream is light prismed, shared,
splintered. Each of us is a fragment
of each of us, half realized. Corrupted
by lies and money, fifty stars bleed on the fabric
as these hearts bleed between starched sheets.
The era of dreaming is over, prismed, shared,
splintered. Each of us is a discarded letter,
torn in equal shreds. The dream is light
peeking through blinds of jealousy,
between sips of alcohol. The dream is light
flickering, extinguished. The dream is over.

Where mist meets disappearance, the narrator speaks of sickness
not because it is pretty, but because it is familiar.
Words replace failed organs. Words replace the community.
And while everybody is sick, only some get sustenance.

The narrator speaks childlike into a solitary microphone
hiding a gash. Once, he kissed it to make it better.
He told her that she was radiant. And yet we are only sick
one at a time, when it's convenient for others, when pills
are the shape of conscience, when we whisper sweet rumors

about the disappeared. The narrator speaks into the attentive
ear of the politician, the doctor getting kickbacks, and
any possible donors. We compose a useless symphony not
for sympathy. Yes, the narrator speaks of justice but not
of practice. The orchestra of the body is missing an instrument,
a valuable piece. Words replace the notes, the failure

of this community, but they cannot replace you. They cannot
replace the deliberate kiss, holding the narrator's purse
in waiting rooms, in figures of speech, and in your absence,
she speaks of nothing but fragments, miles between
fragments, and the dream of returning home.

The Bugs Don't Matter

We tell each other stories
contained within the veins
the backs of leaves

You forget the holes
on purpose because
the bugs don't matter

I am not interested in
the lies, the lacy, elegant leaf
Instead, I read the braille

of what's missing, the silence
implied: we are not friends
We care not for directness,

only poetry, only the leaves
we pluck, only the implied
goodbyes, rounded edges

of what's missing