a.r.h.

for my birthday,
you and your four best friends
beat the living shit out of me
with water balloons, volleyballs, and a garden hose,
all in the good name of the construction
of my self-defense abilities.
a year later,
for my birthday,
you and your four best friends
threw me into a lake, fully clothed,
the previous year's mission apparently unaccomplished.
i don't quite remember
at what point
we became each other's record-holders,
and secret keepers,
but we always did listen
with tape recorders in our ears.
this was children's trust,
as we were quitting childhood
more quickly than we wanted,
something sacred,
found nowhere else in junior high.
there was one trust
you never extended to me
but i wasn't hurt
the night you called from outside
the interrogation room,
because no one deserves to remember that shit.
shame as sharp as it was helpless
you said you couldn't hate him
no matter what he had done to you,
he was still
your family,
you know, danielle, you said,
you really can't see through the one-way glass
it's just like the movies
but this one isn't worth its ticket stub,
it just hurts.
with courtrooms like war zones,
like finding justice
down the barrel of a gun
these were your secrets,
pedestaled like a lynching
for all to see,
a mother's instrusion:
you didn't dare trust written records
for years after that,
a brother's conviction:
a restraining order
twelve years too late.
you wanted to run from it
like you were the one betraying someone
like you were the one laying landmines,
i don't quite remember
if this was between the reign of
father number two, or father number three
but no one deserves
to be dragged back through that.
it was just a journal, you said.
it was just your way of forgetting.
so when it came time,
when i had grown enough history of my own
to jail up and forget
i knew to tie it with a bow.
they call this voice a gift,
but there are arrows
i aimed at my heart.
maybe this is why we both write so hard.
your brother
taught me how to be angry
for the people i love
and
your mother
taught me to never say things outright
so i can thank them
for my loyalty
and this stage, respectively,
but you,
despite all that had happened,
hadn't outgrown your innocence yet
and to me
it would be worth it
if i could take back all those lessons
i gained at your expense
because no one,
especially not you,
deserves to have to remember that.

this is me, not working on my senior project like i should be.

When I walked out the door,
you said,
good luck.
Just remember,
the road to hell is paved
with those good intentions of yours,
so, sir, I will reach your
well paved hell, gladly,
and with singing,
much sooner than meet
whatever appropriate alternative you would have me
pointed towards
and you should know,
a wiser man than you once told me
there is no compass to this,
I spent the first 15 years of my life,
in a school
learning to pray like porcelain
to speak proper and softly
"like a woman should"
to respect the powerful
like they could nail
through my hands
it’s not to say
it didn’t make me who I am
just that it also grew
forest fires between my joints
and I am still burning.
I was brought up by the righteous
the standards,
those guardians of redemption
acting as though beyond earshot of the steeple
the sinners
are lying in ambush
ready to jump,
take by force these castles
of judgments,
but we wayside have no use
for blinded fortresses,
does your holiness burn?
Does it look like steam,
my smoke is not that clean,
it’s too busy
turning me inside out
finding inadequacy beneath each new vein
between fire-fights I remind myself
that your God doesn’t listen
when I sing
but somehow, it’s still my job
to answer
when they ask me if my God has a heart
or a heart of stone
I wish I knew how to sew up
the wrists slit open
by your stained glass
but I’m not a medic,
or a saint,
and words heal like bandages
wrapped around the foot
when it’s the hand that’s been cut off,
when I walked out the door,
you denounced my potential
as something becoming an angel,
less potent,
because I don’t burn with my faith,
like you
but, sir, you’ve tied us at the stake,
walked backwards
away, dredging the path from your toes
with catechisms like gasoline
your God might even
strike the ground to light a fuse,
I wouldn’t know:
because my God is tied to the same splinters
as my ankle
like some three-legged race
and we’re both praying
hard as hell
for blasphemy.
I don’t burn with my faith,
but when the thunderstorms
brew in my stomach
the leaves start roasting up in my throat
trying to get up and out
like the innocent on death row
we wayside,
we have no use for blindness.
We already know
that we can’t walk.
So please, all this business
about the road to heaven
or the road to hell
is doing us no use.
It’s ok if the forest chimney-smoked down,
so long as we find some water,
my throat made itself sandpaper
from all the leaves,
and God,
he’s burning around the edges,
like the compass you gave me
that I am still learning
not to use.

girl please.

We’re sitting in my car.
The freeway above us
is roaring like man-made thunder
because trains went out of style
with handwritten letters
and high school sweethearts,
and she tells me,
they don’t believe her.
We’re seniors in high school,
and we both know,
that’s just another word for
broken-record questions
of college-bound degree-expectant
salary-hungry achievement-bullshit,
like,
“why don’t you have your life
figured out like algebra?
Why aren’t you fitting
your hearts for the boxes yet?”
This poem is dedicated to many things,
among them,
finals week.
Shrunken behind stacks of
information I didn’t learn
God knows when I should have,
we begin to ask ourselves
why we signed up for us,
and they continue interrogating,
“Why do you dance like Armageddon is coming?
You’ll know, soon enough,
stupid kids,
you’ll have bills to unwrap
you’ll have shoes to fill, big shoes,
and they are stiff,
so iron your face to match.
Be an adult.”
This is dedicated to childhood,
and I don’t remember mine
so forgive me
for making one now,
she wants to be a screenwriter.
She wants to save Africa.
She wants to build a homeless shelter
to keep out the winter
faces kept strong fighting things like
cold and poverty
don’t have need for reshaping,
yet they have the nerve to continue,
“You’ll never change the world.
Stupid kids,
stop wasting all your sparkle.
Stop playing pretend,” they say,
like childhood doesn’t have
life measured out like sugar cookies,
like birthday candles should never
have been wished on in the first place,
successful lives are bred
in library halls
that laugh at the thought
of ever housing a fairytale,
you’ll thank us,
they say.
We build you these libraries,
these playgrounds for
economic stability,
we built this freeway
that your dreams are parked beneath,
we pragmatists,
with our suit jackets
with our ironed faces
and box-fitted hearts,
not the travels
we forgot to map
when graduate school came knocking,
nobody flies.
Nobody sings.
These are the things they tell us.
This is dedicated to the girl who let me know
that these things they tell us
are lies.
Libraries aren’t libraries
without a little bit of impossibility,
and she reminds me,
they are wrong about the sparkle.
Maybe she'll never be a screenwriter.
Maybe I’ll never write
myself into those libraries,
but it won’t be for lack of believing,
see,
the stars in the skies,
are really already gone,
but their legacies have outlived them
light-years still channeling their
mysteries our way,
so, Emilie, I don’t wish
on falling stars anymore
I just keep stacking up doubts
you've helped me displace,
naming all the possibilities left over
in your honor.

jefferson and sprague.

Like touching an electric fence without crying
the officer tells me too calmly to speak up,
he can’t hear the address I’ve just given him.
There is an earthquake
racking my body and I don’t know why,
the van is stopped a block and a half behind me
hazards blinking like hell’s gate,
there are children in the backseat, I hear.
My suburban-raised instinct tells me that
like the rabbit I am
it’s safer to walk on by,
but the phone in my hand doesn’t make me
a Good Samaritan,
I just wanted to be able
to sleep that night
the driver’s seat is clutching the woman, but barely
I choose not to listen to what they both are saying,
but silently wonder if
he had ever sent her flowers,
if she ever gently kissed him on the forehead,
I always imagined that dialing 911
would feel much more like strength
than these bricks on my chest
it’s in every word they yell
that I can’t quite block out,
a passerby made of stronger mettle than I
calls him disrespectful,
he replies like a wolf
interrupted while eating
that disrespectful means nothing
because she is his wife,
“Do you see any weapons, ma’am?”
I should have said yes
From here, rage looks like land mines
beneath the car-seats I can’t see
but know are there
the way I know my shadow in the midnight
it’s in the way that none of them cry
while she yells at a stranger
to call the police,
it’s been eternity fifteen minutes long
the officer is still asking me
how old and how tall they are,
what color their van is,
I tear my throat open not screaming,
come see for yourself,
my friends are standing at the intersection
not sure if they should watch
the way I feel like a hypocrite
every winter I watch snow fall
we never see the police arrive,
never hear the sirens promising safety
when it was done shaking me,
the adrenaline rested
at the bottom of my stomach
and the ceiling of my spinal cord,
even when I began
speaking with the law enforcement,
he could see only
something in front of him to be tamed
I bet she wore a wedding dress once,
I bet they used to say I love you
like promising safety to a bookshelf
in a burning building,
from a block and a half away,
her hair smells like an incinerator
there are melted letters
smoking on his fingertips
I don’t know who is holding the keys right now
who is feeling like the alpha
at this particular standstill
but the children are still not crying,
and the sirens
haven’t even started their empty promises yet.

last night was so dark, i exhaled a smokestack.

Have you ever coughed up darkness?
There is an ocean bed that rests between my palms
on days the sun doesn’t have enough courage
to protect me from the clouds.
Love is blue,
and don’t let my children’s books fool you,
rain is not.
The essence of the heart is not red or softness
or bread on butter as we all imagine,
or would like to.
Once, I put a microscope to my wrist,
hoping to understand the gear shafts
that tick-tock my pulse,
but they guessed at my intentions
before I had time to adjust the lens
and escaped to my eardrums,
there,
they told me secrets not meant for eyes
like how the rhythm of the human biology
can never be incorrect,
but it can be inadequate,
and how the cadence of our heartbeats
can sometimes depend
on the velocity of the tears of God,
with these references I support my belief
that rain can only bless speechless things
like a horse’s water trough
or fields that understand nothing of emotion.

I saw a picture of a ribcage split open,
this is how I know that we carry
thump-thumps the color of a cloud-home,
when I wrote this yesterday
I wondered at
how many different words I can use
to describe the heart
and how many to describe the sky?
More than I have ever found to explain God
but not nearly enough,
so record this poem as a lack of creativity.
If I am any basis for comparison,
may I test the measure of your chest, too?
Does yours have a paperweight nucleus like mine?
Is it a sinking life raft that has every reason to float too?
We are not heroic fairytales.
The ground below us imagines what
we would taste like softer.
It has become so hungry,
it has forgotten how to eat,
the way love remains elusive to those who have been lonely
all their lives.

When I die, they will find a pot full of pennies in my diaphragm
wishes I swallowed when I should have been stargazing.
I pray the autopsy will make someone else less poor,
although I know the mortician will be struck with this jar
like an affliction,
like a deaf man healed to hear,
who cannot say hallelujah, for he knows not how,
and my pennies are pieces of smoke.
There are ghosts in my lungs,
they are looking for my heart,
they are looking for yours,
so record this poem as a warning bell
or a raindrop playing the piano.
If you must feed the darkness,
tell it to eat everything red inside you
for the heart is a piece of the sky;
even demons cannot drink what is poisonous to them,
when it rains I will cup my hands,
tell them my chest is not a vineyard,
but the lagoon between my fingers
holds everything they ought to and will not take from me.
every time they do not leave,
my breath looks like steam
the roof of my mouth tastes like clouds and clockwork,
I hold precipitation behind my eyes
the way soldiers hold extra ammunition,
my breath always smells like thunderstorms and seaweed,
have you ever coughed up darkness?

why dad stopped running.

I don’t come from many places.
My first house was a
quiet box of suburbia
in a gated community
with a fence as high as balance
to keep my family’s sanity
from escaping,
I always got the feeling there
dad was running
from something.
Our neighbors were
adults too rough
to deal with childhood’s
bicycle tracks
and chalk portraits.
We were 45 minutes
from the only two places
I ever went:
church and school.
We were also
3 ½ hours
from the only friend I had,
but please,
I am far from looking for pity,
just qualifying that I too
wish to be entitled
to this breath.
I used to think
there are things
we never grow out of,
and this December planted nothing
but the terrifying idea that I had added
to my fear of the dark
to a terror of a white called snow
so make no mistake:
humanity has a footprint
like a shadow
and this one’s a stamp
too permanent
to hide from,
I wonder if angels see in color,
if they also have felt
their hearts in their throats
when they realized it is possible to fear
both black and white
and for all the words of the bible
I believe to be true
most days heaven
sounds to me
the way I imagine
a refugee camp
sounded to my Nepali friends
who live down Division
nine and a half months ago
before they spoke English,
an escape,
something safer,
but not home.
When I was eleven,
our second house was a skyscraper
it was green then
and smelled like
dad unlearning the
programmed uselessness
his parents once taught him
by their absence,
he rebuilt my room
with my mother’s father
and began to
understand significance
I don’t come from many places.
But I too know
how to spell the word “lost”
I too know exactly
how hollow a chest can be
I was never one to
pretend that I am made
of anything more than
well-placed shots in the dark
call me lucky.
I used to think
there are things
we never grow out of,
and if there are,
humanity is first among them
but if you asked me,
I’d tell you what I learned
the day dad stopped running:
I’m not looking for heaven,
the streetlamp eyes
lining the aisles of this room
assure me
heaven is already here
and we are not angels
but I dare you,
welcome the days
you feel your pulse in your throat,
tattoo fire on your breath,
and breathe the air so warm
the snowmelt is as loud as
the darkness evaporating.
If you’re looking for an escape,
you’ve landed on
the wrong edge of the planet,
but if you’re willing to frame your self-portrait
with bicycle tracks
I’ll bet you everything I’ve ever believed in
that we’ll make the angels jealous
of this light spectrum we have,
called “home.”