Lullaby

I may never meet
your other friends, the ones
tucked away in the corners
of my brain, their faces
a blur of sand and clouds.
For a brief time,
you and your stories were home
to me. We still wash
each other's feet
in my memories, our toes
stretched far enough
to ache.

Small Spaces

Underneath the phobias and philias is an understanding,
like knowing that the left side of the bed
is mine, and the right side stays cool and wrinkle-free.
These are hidden terms,
buried in a contract,
in the hamper, in the planter
on the windowsill.
If you feel discouraged,
there will always be
the miscellaneous items
that cause structures to quake
and ink to run:
old candles, their wax bubbled dry;
cherry trees, ripened slowly;
the symmetry of wonder,
your eyes matching
the level of your interest.
And then there's a pause
instead of a goodnight, a fragile placeholder
for when the time comes.
Fortunately, I am fashionably late,
and my soldiers have already
tucked themselves in.

The Drawer

Amanda Kovattana: helped client empty boyfriend's sock drawer. We figured he wasn't coming back; he walked out five years ago.

Arranged neatly, in short columns of black, brown, green, and gray, are his socks. The drawer contains only about ten pairs, each having its own story: The gray pair came from his father, whose feet were wider, rougher. The brown were a gift, dress socks worn thin from too many job interviews.

"Maybe, he'll remember that he didn't pack these," she thinks to herself, but after five years, they still line the drawer, soft and stubborn, like the single wrinkle between her brows.

In the cedar drawer, they're protected, like warm little secrets. "This gray pair, this is important," she recalls, holding up a folded bundle. "He wore these when we went to dinner." The subtle little argyle pattern stretched taut over his ankles, covering an odd mole over his left talus bone. She feels like the talus: muscleless, needing to be surrounded by those like herself in order to function.

"Yeah, yeah. He'll remember," she says finally, and closes the drawer again. She used to open the drawer more often, not long after he left. Then, she only opened it twice a year, sometimes forgetting they were in there, sometimes being afraid. This last time, she opens the drawer and leaves it open, waiting for the moth who'll never come.

Shells, Shelter

They hide the ocean in a shell.
- Arcade Fire, "Half Light I"

It isn't fair how
little effort it takes
to swallow all of your heroes
and let them harden
in the kiln of your gut.
It is easy
to write about stars because
it is easy
to write about ignorance.
How can I trust my eyes
when light travels so slowly?

When the fire is out,
the inspiration is ready.
Be careful not to burn yourself.
That's easy, too.
One day, the antimatter
in your gut
will take those stars
and eat them.
How can I trust my brain
when antimatter and matter,
the yin and yang, the good and evil
are composed of atoms,
then strings
laced in and out of consciousness?
What good is reality
when it's hidden behind
layers of skin and muscle,
trapped in the universe
of one's body?

Zeta

How the universe began is a rhetorical question, a function or formula. It hangs off the New Moon after coming back, decades after circling Saturn, transforming, restructuring.

I pretend to count your eyelashes, each one its own universe. Somewhere, with child-like wonder, I’m counting the veins on a leaf, counting the spots in my eyes, hoping for parallelism and connection.

In all capital letters, I ask, and the questions always come back--return to sender. That’s the center of romance. The center isn’t the heart; it’s the lungs. It’s the breath it takes to ask, to aggressively strum the vocal chords.

The number of veins is twenty-five. The number of spots is forty-three. In my throat, the answers bloom, and I trace them to Jupiter, where they separate into two paths of philosophy--to move forward or backward, the feature of balance.