Category: Poetry

Ankles painted red with clay,
we’d pound our chests like timpanis,
comparing the shape and depth
of our blisters and calluses
against each other.

Anyone who thought
we were twins was victim to our fool,
my name escaping
your lips
from across the court.

Bright yellow fuzz we’d find
in unexpected places
hours after we were
finished. We’d laugh
loud and ask just
how it could’ve gotten there.

We’d brace for
cold showers on
hot mornings underneath
the unforgiving sun, for
suicides and
spider drills and you
asking our coach why
the conditioning exercises always had such
violent names.

The day after you quit
I saw an actual spider
on the lip of the baseline
and pounded it flat into the clay
with my racket. 

My father’s voice bears the weight of indignant, violent memory
a voice so heavy that he struggles to carry it
it swells and collapses and sways and stirs, and I worry that he will
fall right to the floor
right down to the floor, there with his feet
there with his head, here with me,
A constant inclination for a cold, inhospitable, merciful floor
And at the summits of the swells and the riverbeds of the valleys,
At the apogee and at the anchorage, I worry

so when the dog died at the ripe old age of twelve my father
responded as he usually did, which was to sigh heavily,
boil an egg for six minutes, and eat it in two bites.

my mother always believed if you made hens lay eggs year-round, they’d
run out, so in the winter my father would eat oranges instead
like a monster: biting them whole, spitting out the rind. I peeled
them hesitantly, and he beat me for the orange residue under my nails.

my father loved that old dog. once my mother cursed it as she came
around and found it licking rotten apples; my father loved that dog so
he bought five apples at the grocery store, and forgot the bread.
he used to crawl downstairs while my mother was asleep,
so he could pet that dog, kiss that old dog, who slept so soundly.
in the mornings I woke to see his body circled
around the circle of that dog banished to the kitchen floor.
I had to wake him back to my mother, place an old coat
over the dog, so it would not stir.

my father loved that dog, though he always knew his marriage would outlive it,
that one day there would only be a cold bed, the white morning sky in the window,
and no-dog curled in-between them, but possibly it was precisely
because my father knew that dog would die in his lifetime, possibly he
only loved it because he knew that sad beast
would die someday soon, and after he had kissed it
goodbye, he could get back to what mattered, things that would only last
for as long as he had his mouth around them:

bites out of covered fruit, full of seeds and rind.
drinks from a boiled egg at night, tipping back the wet and yolky center,
as he laughed, mouth wide, face up towards the yellow moon. 

in eighth grade, I had a science teacher
who taught us the phases of the moon.
he taught us other stuff too,
like physics and friction and gravity and velocity
and why it snows more on one side of the mountain
than the other.
he taught us all sorts of things,
but I only ever remembered the moon.

I knew that it looked like a “D” when it was growing
and a “C” when it was shrinking.
the moon set the alphabet backwards.
waxing waning crescent gibbous
words that flowed over my tongue
and straight to the memory
crescent slivers over campfire flickers
and a mirror lake full moon reflection.
the moon is hard to forget.

that teacher followed us to high school
and one day there was a solar eclipse
and we gathered outside
not not looking at the sky.
he approached me and asked if I remembered why
eclipses happen.
I didn’t. I looked instead at the half-moon leaf
shadows the eclipse made on the ground.
like a waxing gibbous, I said,
pointing at the dancing shadows.
he smiled, a little sad.

in college now
I go for a bike ride near my childhood home
where my life has been put on pause.
the sun has already set
the sky went from orange to pink and now,
blue again,
like the day needed one last look.
the deer have gathered in the field.
the wheatgrass looks like moonlight.
I look up, and there,
tucked in among the blue-grey sky.
fingernail moon.
waning crescent. just a sliver
of wheatgrass.