Pink Poetry by emilyalexanderdesign

PINK

P O E T RY BY E M I LY B O M B A D E S I G N E D BY E M I LY A L E X A N D E R

PINK POETRY BY

E M I LY B O M B A

PINK

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS To my dear friends Emily, Channing, Sophia, Daisy, & Marlee for inspiring me to be the best version of myself To my beloved parents & sister for supporting my writing ever since I was a little girl To my fellow poetry lovers, writers, & editors who have believed in me all along— especially Kavya, Summer & Lucas To my poetry instructors & English professors who fostered my confidence To the people & places who shape the human experience I am blessed call mine

CONTENTS

Artist’s Statement

Choosing

Full Moon

Tender Fruit

A Tall Glass of Chardonnay

Ode to my Daily Cup of Tea

The Day After (Her Passing)

Sunday Occasion

Half-Life

Bottled Time

Pink

I Speak Softly to the Universe

Solitude

The Next Chapter

Thanks to You

The Space Between You and the World

Our Age

artist statem I have found, within both reading and writing poetry, that creative sustenance arrives within the fearless, organic attempts that make me discover something I hadn’t thought of prior to the poems I craft. I believe my poetry resides between the space of what is and what is subjectively idealized, and for this reason my writing is dream-like, wishful, and expansive. I’ve found that, within my voice, everything makes sense within the various alternate worlds I create as a writer, so perhaps my speaker is striving to arrive at these particular places in real life. My poetic voice and gravitational writing style have been developing slowly and steadily throughout time, and I feel that now, more than ever before, I have a better grasp of what truly makes me the writer that I am. As both a writer and thinker, I attempted to define and illuminate my personal style as well as break apart the recurring themes and attitudes of my speaker. I place a large emphasis on the tone of each of my poems, and feel that tones are powerful in the way they shape the content embedded within poems. Thus, I persistently strive to reflect this technique through primarily soft diction and lyricism. I tend to write somewhat like Romantic poets at times, primarily because I gravitate towards the natural, physical, and spiritual as a means to draw out a personal search for truth in the world. My poetry can be defined by powerful descriptions through themes of love, reflection and introspection, spirituality, connection, longing, a relationship with the natural world, and an inherent glorification of small, everyday moments, all of which reflect my desire to achieve a more expansive understanding of being within the world. My writing style is typically sentimental, intimate, and, at most times, optimistic. In addition, I often write poetry as a form of meditation, specifically on natural or ethereal elements, human pleasure and existence, existential inquiry, and dream-like

�* t’s ment. occurrences. My poems typically denote positive tones, but sometimes with a twist, because I am influenced by similar tones in the work of poets I admire most, such as Walt Whitman. I have very clearly adopted his form of free verse and lyricism, and connect with his themes of love, connection, hope, and nature. My writing process reflects a scattered sort of stream of consciousness style, but I use what I generate in creative drafts to produce poetry that is free-flowing, full of wonder, and encapsulates a wide-eyed view of the world. I even often allow my poems to define themselves through this timely process, and discover embedded meaning with every next version. Through having written a number of poems that have been carefully edited and shaped to better fit my stylistic achievements, I would wholly define my writing style as one that focuses on illuminated description and imagery, in addition to various forms of lineage including both enjambed and end-stopped lines, though I definitely feel more inclined to create enjambment in order to display the tension that exists within most of my poems. I also experiment with sonic texture as well as incorporating rhythm and cadence into my style. The ways in which language can be shaped and styled is what draws me to create poetry of my own, so for this reason I tend to focus most on my personal diction and crafted tone. In regard to structure, I find myself writing in either fixed forms—with primarily tercets and couplets—or employing variations of fixed forms. I find myself writing in concrete but rather low register diction in order to communicate the desired tone of my speaker: one that is raw and honest. For example, I experimented with the imperative in “Choosing,” an informal tone in “Half-Life,” a formal tone in “The Day After Her Passing” and “Sunday Occasion,” and a sincere tone in “Our Age.” My tones range from joyful to fearful, but I always try to incorporate a voice that

is hopeful. I also tend to hone in on particular images with careful intent in an attempt to create each scene as being viscerally understood by the audience. With this, I find myself executing imagistic techniques in order to allow readers to completely engage with my poems and understand the narratives I develop. By conjuring not only images, but emotions that directly reflect the presence of each, I attempt to colorfully evoke both a personal and universal experience. I often use a combination of both enjambed and end-stopped lines in order to create subtle tension that manifests naturally within my poems, as well as an acute sense of inquiry that leaves both myself as a speaker as well as the audience, perplexed. I am inspired by the poet Brenda Shaughnessy for her unique utilization of tercets with stanza breaks that both hang and fall from one line into the next in order to amplify poems’ tension and even thwart readers’ expectations concerning the consecutive word or phrase after an enjambed line. In her collection Human Dark with Sugar she includes a combination of both enhambed and end-stopped lines, but her enjambed lines often stand out more than those that are end-stopped. The enjambment she employs seems to both shape the tone of and reflect her various speakers’ wavering attitudes, which I attempt to integrate in my own poems this quarter. For instance, in the poem “Sorry, T.,” she uses tercets to increase tension as we’re hung out from some lines to others without syntactic resolution. She even combines this lineage technique with end-stopped lines that work to balance out the poem from its weighing tension. This abrupt kind of hanging, enjambed line break allows us both the time and space necessary to wait and see how the syntax will resolve on the next line. The stanza: “When I talk you glaze over like the sun / on shifty pavement. / I won’t see the lip of a step / before I bloody my knees again” drops into the next tercet beginning with the line “before I bloody my knees again.” She intentionally breaks this line in order to create anticipation of where the speaker will go after not having seen this “step.” This technique also creates physical space between the two images of a pavement step and the speaker’s bloody knee, which contributes effectively to the transition between events in the poem. The tercet form and enjambed lines not only increases the tension felt in the piece as a reader, but it inspires me to create a similar register within images of my own poems. I used hanging lines most in my poem “The Day After Her Passing,” especially in the line: “I ruminate / falling over quick” with “falling” marking the first word of the consecutive stanza before the line “I ruminate.” I am certainly drawn to writing poems that appear organized on the page. I feel as though my speaker’s various thought patterns and complex narratives need to be complemented by heavy enjambment, so I attempt to break lines while continuing to move down and across the page. However, I’ve found a sweet spot within both my use of couplets and tercets because within

this fixed form, I can create enjambment by my choosing while still crafting a poem that looks objectively organized on the page. In addition, I find it comforting to experiment with combinations of poetic forms, such as combining tercets and couplets in the poem “The Day After Her Passing.” I gravitate towards tercets not only because I appreciate the medium-length lines and line breaks falling from the end of one stanza to the start of the next, but because the form allows me the freedom to enjamb, ask questions, create both stability and instability, and end in different ways such as in couplets. At this point, I feel more comfortable with matching a fit form to the content of my writing, which is something I struggled to do in the past. I appreciate my ability to now neatly complement and even accentuate my poems’ investigation of subject, especially in regard to stanzaic organization and line breaks. I’ve also developed a consistent habit of integrating both ornate and colloquial language into my poems because I feel as though this creates a much needed balance between the poems’ rhythmic achievement and narrative sequence. I identify most with the poet Susan Leslie Mooreand for the ways in which she explores the depth of meaning and human existence in her investigation of subject matter, but even more so the various lineages she utilizes throughout her poetry, all of which serve as a vehicle for the poems’ movement as well as an extension of the content. The ways in which her poems move through the page, break, utter, and stutter have inspired me to write alongside her. I developed a particular liking for tercets from reading a variety of her poems in which this is the primary form, but Moore even combines tercets with other forms like couplets or single line stanzas, inspiring me to do the same. She specifically uses tercets to increase tension as readers are hung out from line to line without syntactic resolution. The mature utilization of this technique allows for the adoption of dual syntactic resolution, and I actually found myself adopting a similar voice in some of my poems. I admire the way the very last line of a tercet is fed into the first line of the next, thus allowing readers both the time and space to determine just how the syntax will resolve on the next line. I am most fond of her as a writer, though, because of the careful ways in which she crafts various images that neatly reflect each poem’s tone as well as its metaphysical intent. In doing so, she appeals to the reader’s physical senses, which allows us to more comprehensively understand her poems’ vision. For instance, in her poem “From the Start,” the line: “Give me a Cornell box and a rare photograph of a Parisian street before the war,” conjures a very specific image, as do the lines: ““Let me sing on the roof when / the planes depart. Let the planes carry / my song to the water” (lines 15-21). This highly concentrated visual imagery ensures that each image is derived from creative imagination, directly after it is presented, which thus allows me to completely engage with the poem. There exist no questions after her images are introduced,

nor any difficulty of interpretation, which even further complements the poem’s ability to create distance between images that comprise reality and those that exist in the imaginative realm. By conjuring not only images, but emotions that directly reflect the existence of these images, Moore is able to amplify the reader’s imaginative experience. I took heavy inspiration from this poem of hers in particular, not only for the imagery, but for the various imperative statements, which I ended up adopting in my very first poem in this chapbook, Choosing. This poem of mine is in direct conversation with Moore’s “From the Start,” not only because of my adoption of the imperative but because I also wanted to create a highly imaginative experience and inside look into the depths of the speaker’s mind. With this, the poem utilizes a number of metaphors justice Moore does in hers, and in addition I attempt to thwart readers’ expectations of this within lines like: “Lie down with me on a bed / of fresh grass and reveal your psychology.” Figurative language is quintessential to Moore’s poetry, and she often crafts titles that run into the first line, even further creating a metaphor as a means to begin the poem. In “I Say to the Stars Get Inside Me,” (my favorite poem of hers) the poem reads: “I Say to the Stars Get Inside Me / because that’s the way I talk to the sky” (line 1). This creates a very abstract image and feeds far into the reader’s imagination, but it also levels the speaker with the sky in a way that indeed creates a heavy kind of physical distance between her and the metaphysical world, but also creates a rather sentimental, or emotional connection between her and the sky. I read this line to be one of the most powerful of hers, and I became so inspired by this creative technique that I began adopting it in some of my poems, such as “I Say to the Universe Make Me Burst,” which is also in conversation with Moore’s.I took inspiration from her sky imagery, ethereal concepts, and direct tone,, aloof which I attempted to mimic in my poem. I truly appreciate the various ways in which Moore both expands and deepens our physical, emotional, and imaginative experience of poetry, and I’m happy to have had the privilege of reading her work thus far! In addition, I am inspired by Valzhyna Mort’s way of utilizing figurative language as a means to reflect the haunting imagery that comprises her collection Music for the Dead and Resurrected and reflected the integration of metaphors in my poems such as in “Choosing,” “Pink,” “Our Age,” and “Half-Life.” However, the metaphors she creates are dark and often morbid, such as in the poem “Ode to Branca,” while the metaphors in my poems serve to enhance the audience’s experience in a positively visceral and appealing way. For instance, Mort likens the sun in the sky to what we interpret to be a brain tumor in the shape of a circle through the line: “If the sun appears inside its boneless sky, / the sky is diagnosed with a tumor” (7-8). We witness her dark imagination in the way she likens something we think to be bright and lively with something that is quite literally deadly. To imagine a malignant tumor in the shape of the sun and inhabiting the sky is arguably very morbid, especially when pictured in a “boneless sky.” Her figurative language not only makes readers uncomfortable, but evokes emotions of despair and confusion, working as a very effective vehicle. In doing so, the speaker is able to project a human diagnosis inside the body onto the sky, and this metaphorical jump not only reflects a high stride of imagination, but both reflects and deepens the speaker’s experience.

Conversely, in my poem “Choosing,” the lines “Let the sky cry in gentle teardrops,” “Rub me with the truth so we can stop pushing / our feelings outside,” and “let me touch the sun / with my fingertips” all create images to expand the speaker’s desire for a more fulfilling life experience. These metaphors exude feelings of longing, hope, and intimacy in order to reflect an inherent desire for connection. In addition, in the poem “Pink,” the lines: “like the cool breath of the wind,” “the emerald sea / and its ethereal sounds / will never tell you their secrets / like I do,” “Pheromones make me dizzy / and I hesitate when I dip my toe / into desire” all use figurative language to evoke visceral feelings relating to either the natural or physical realms, and serve to reflect the speaker’s search for truth within a complex reality comprising the world we live in. These particular metaphors work as a vehicle of the speaker’s language and communicate the dream-like tone of the poem. Additionally, in the poem “Our Age,” the lines: “hearts / fill with golden flakes made from afternoon sun,” and “skin screams beneath hot showers” include these metaphors to convey the inherent feelings of the speaker in relation to their age and position in the world at this time. The poem reflects the complexities of living in an age of youth, and thus these lines work to accentuate this visceral feeling. Lastly, in “Half-Life,” the line “Trees have eyes and watch our legs [....]” includes a metaphor that initially appears almost haunting like Morts’, but truly exists to contrast the existence of nature with human existence. This metaphor purposefully comes at the end of the poem to capture the bittersweet tone and reflect the speaker’s attitude towards human consumption of the natural world. I hope for others to resonate with my poetry in particular ways that best suit them, but I certainly write from primarily personal experience. What I love about poetry is that it satisfies both the personal and universal intimate human experience. With this, I hope to invite the audience into my poems to share any human experiences they might have. At this point in my writing, I hope for readers to recognize my recurring themes as well as my hopefully now distinct voice and style, specifically because I have integrated a variety of elements and techniques that reflect me as a writer, thinker, and human being. I have learned how to play with form to bring new depths of meaning to my poems, and I’ve found how necessary this is in all poetry, especially to mirror the thematic scope of the poem in addition to the particular message it aims to convey. I am incredibly grateful for poetry and I am very excited to continue my poetic writing endeavors for as long as I can!

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CHOOSING If every morning warrants a start, let me shed yesterday’s habits, begin again, when tomorrow arrives. Give me a quiet space of my own so I can unravel my primitive agonies in the space between lines on the page. Let me sing a song beautiful enough for me to open my mouth wide. Feed me apples and blackberries so I’ll be reminded of summertime. Delight me with petals from buttercups in your garden so you can share with me your creation. Rid me of hapless days and give me sentimental nights. Gift me time to finish novels pressed too tight along my bookshelf. Orient me sideways, no longer from a standard angle. Lie down with me on a bed of fresh grass and reveal your psychology. Let the sky cry in gentle teardrops so I can enjoy wet soil beneath my toes. Let me be grateful for days that live and die after the earth rotates around its axis. Show up for me on Thursday without reckless abandon. Take away digital love and replace it with something more tangible. Let me celebrate people with sensation; don’t make me apologize. Take away shame and tell me it’s safe to be the humans we are. Give me a new name so I can be addressed by my choosing. Rub me with truth so we can stop pushing our feelings outside. Let me walk for miles along the mountain so I can find my way up with the wind. Don’t let me breathe the air I leave behind, but let me touch the sun with fingertips. Lay me down in linen sheets and I’ll dream away the day—move into the life I live inside my head.

FULL MOON My father lifts his fingers to the shining and my eyes grow liquid wide — swimming in sparkle.

A round wheel floating in dim-lit night never stripped of stars or space.

Moonlight voyages down kissing my naked face, casting my vision with grey pockets carved carefully in silver.

I sit beneath the blanketed sky: our canvas dripping in blue, deep with atmospheres unseen.

A glittering sphere rests before me: awfully silent, though never alone— I imagine the weight of this shape hanging low stars pulsing on either side.

When stars come out to do their dance, invisible streaks create a holy path between— blind me in white and catch me with open eyes.

As breath fades into natural mist, he muddles a grin to accompany my glee. 17

TENDER FRUIT Birthed in the spring, ripe fruit hollers beneath summer shade. The sun paints tints of blush and ivory across crevices of palms, newly rinsed under the cool gush of the faucet. Orange shell is tossed side to side, up and down gripping every edge, the force of vibrating hands. It slips and twists in humid air, as I watch. I wedge the tip of my forefinger, a nail beneath fleshy surface, sliding without puncture. Peeling back a layer of Sunday afternoon, my gentle hands are cleansed with a candy scent.

The naked exterior lies limp, cells shed beneath coral skin. Each slice is liquid crisp—decorated waves curl until each reaches its arch, packed together waiting to be split. Tearing each sliver, my eyes glaze over: cutting delicately I discover a delicious clarity within each cracked smile, wet with concealed juices. Crinkle, pop, shh, goes the fissure beneath my forefinger— Bursting with gratitude, the body’s flesh oozes as I shake with zest. With the roof of my palette, I soak up precipitation while teeth crunch and chew. Lush and sticky, my tongue drinks loudly as I lick the slime off pruned fingertips— their swollen texture marked by a tender fruit.

A TALL GL A SS O F CHAR NNAY DO

i’ve never tasted wine in October so crisp and delicate on my young tongue only thirsty for wet lips. whirling around mine, whirry and hot, you wait patiently still for me, swirling until i smell wafts of apples, honey crisp but mixed with sour lemon zest. you’re even sweeter than my favorite Sauvignon Blanc—dry, white, and fullbodied with only slight acidity but vanilla skin and toasted eyes aged with oak. you’re sweeter than a sweet late-harvest-style dessert in my grandmother’s cottage grove, but not too sweet for me because you should know i don’t like cherry pie or hot pursuits made too tart. you’re natural and easy to sip because you thrive in climates both warm and cool with sunned skin; golden bubbles surface your hollow cheeks until they dissolve slowly into my glass.

to Ode my

Dai

Cup of 22

ODE TO MY DAILY CUP OF TEA

Harvested leaves waft through cool air, brewed mildly astringent but soft to the touch, and elements diffuse into piping liquid as steam enters nostrils, now wet with dew. Lavender lemon drops in a porcelain cup: an invisible gloss infuses warmth, awakening flesh between morning lips as steamed bubbles hover above. Juiced with young stems, China garden leaves feed my craving for a release so sweet I sink during the first hour of daylight untouched. The soothing serum flows between frosted gums: a sweet, misty taste hangs high in my palate, and a botanical stream flows down my esophagus, as the rich herbs enlighten beating lungs. Permeated water boils swells on the surface of my tongue: hot flavor lingers while I pray it never escapes.

Tea 23

THE DAY AFTER HER PASSING

the sunlight casts my opaque shadow and I return to the southern coastline for its vibrant sky. I wander along the bluff, to see how far the edge feels near, so I peek over and imagine the possibility of my body falling into cool air, defying gravity. I ruminate tumbling over quick, collapsing into an ocean of unknown depths, I pay tribute to my slow breath and the way it follows me into

legged only to feel an unfamiliar hollowness in my belly and the herons greet me at my side. I want to soar with them and carry their song back home. I want to lie flat with my back against the ocean, floating away as the Sunday current. I’d let the sky in with my hands, soaked with ancient pacific sea salt. The evening unravels through yellowtinted lenses, cheap enough to create artificial pigments of the sun at rest against the winter horizon. Still, I watch the tide move in gentle waves as the ocean’s gradient sparkles beneath the same sun that always etched her

clouds when I shut my eyes with a deep prayer and sigh. I’m not afraid of the ocean’s water, but I do

hair gold. When I fall quiet to the wind her voice comes through song, just long enough

fear the space in between. I sit cross-

for the sun to disappear before my body.

SUNDAY OCCASION

SUNDAY OCCASION There isn’t enough coffee left for the two of us and you cooked your eggs too long on the stove. I play our colorful melody in the kitchen at the rise of dawn, barefoot on cold tile too thin to warm calluses between my toes. The lemon drops in my water are warm from the sun’s early heat, but your lips taste bittersweet and cool. Petaled corners of the countertop let us meet at fingertips, and yes, it’s only 10:00 a.m. but I’m afraid the sun will escape us before we make it outside. Pine trees beckon fondly towards afternoon light, where we sit tranquilly, move in slow motion with the breeze beneath their branches and another song. Your touch makes me teeter and reflect the time we’ve gained. I know the light haze comprising the day will only last until tomorrow. I am waiting for mornings that sink slowly into days, feelings to unravel, sparkling espressos that ignite the silence. But you are occasioned by waves and water that seeps between your pores. When your gaze pours into mine, your eyes glance between blue parallels. I watch you from my cove and I read between the days we’ve shared. There isn’t enough coffee left for the two of us and you cooked your eggs too long on the stove.

BOTTLED TIME

You found me moonlight dancing in the frozen dirt that night in a half-sunken circle of dangerous sweat. Your hardened smile, glowing face cracked my ears with deafening laughter; I remember those watered eyes musing my soul with a misguided kiss. You would feed upon my lips in the yellow corner crusted over with ancient wallpaper, and next to us that 1955 novel you always promised to read to me. “Next time,” you’d say, but time played its tricks And cut you short fourhundred miles from the central coast, it’s palm trees— The sun only promised to stay with you until I returned home. When you pierce my mind, gnaw your teeth at my side in a dreamscape, I see the rareness of that sea-washed gaze, drowning me in your meditative state. 28

You’d caress my ears with the surface of your thumbs while your almond hair curled up in broken light to mimic mine. I remember being suffocated by your warm breath, entering my young lungs only shortly after my favorite birthday. It’s May, and you were supposed to be gone, though I see your name in the signs and on the streets, only wishing I could look the other way. because that’s the way I talk in the dark the universe

PI 30

NK 31

PINK I. If all that’s best is love and zest, here’s a body and face bearing weight alongside mine and here’s the sun in its final hour painting colored stripes across the sky. How sweet! Each waking sound and sensation, like the cool breath of the wind or pale lips molding gently into a cherry kiss. The four petals of the daffodil dance and I know that zealous finger grazing the inner crevice of my thigh excites a novel kind of curiosity. If doing nothing for hours in blissful solitude births the stillness that exists before entering this world,

I must be— dreaming— you tell me I’m a goddess, deep in song and rich in love but do you know what it’s like to depart from yourself? Do you know what it’s like to feel you are someone else in a universe you wish to claim as your own? The brink of reality plants my feet deep in sun-baked soil, dense and deafening but always with secrets leading to imagination. Don’t let me bear my mind’s weight on your chest tonight, but lull me to sleep with the sound of your drug because only then can I travel to my fantastical place.

II.

Listen! The emerald sea and its ethereal sounds will never tell you their secrets like I do. Don’t tell me the world is wry with the conspicuous glow of others, because every taste of color melts down to the surface of my core like pink cotton candy dissolving into the 7 ‘o’clock sky.

III.

Pheromones make me dizzy and I hesitate when I dip my toe in desire—I surely know this danger. Prospects are made holy by the sun and I wonder if pebbles beneath me dream of sea glass. This sanguine soul I bear tells me to breathe and I hear the echo

of my bones chiming beneath the surface of my flesh, so I’ll save you in a portrait for now and honor myself because this heightened wonder will always belong to me.

I call mine will never fade away. Will always remain Mine Will always belong To me Will always Be mine I call mine will never

i speak softy to the universe 34

stl e

w t

i s someti me

I Speak Softly to the Universe listens to my beating chest, purple veins pulsating under tender skin. Love is kind but your hands conceal my eyes from the stars— their permanence. Maybe if you lift me from my feet God will see, and forgive all the sins I gifted to myself. You told me the wind can’t hear my soft whispers but sometimes it whistles back. When daylight fades,, I pretend to walk the moon— colors become illusions, I imagine swimming through space and orbiting the sun as I lay across the cemented world. Sometimes I burrow beneath the mattress with my lungs, the weight of my breath. Find me a star—I’ll take it wherever I choose.

When the world seems too much with me 37

SOLITUDE SOLIT When the world seems too much with me I perform a ritual: a series of moments composed giving me the serenity I so desperately crave. During waking hours in the happiest of cities, the autumn breeze is still too cool on young skin. I sit in a restful kind of silence in my downstairs bedroom, when the harvest moon floats outside my ivory windowsill. There’s healing crystals and incense scattered across a rustic table so low to the ground it looks like a shrine; fictitious human faces plastered there, on the right side of the wall— I’ve trapped myself here in my own shy space when the others are only as far as the living room. It’s wise to take a crosslegged seat on cold, wood floor so my mouth doesn’t have to move as quick as theirs on leather couches torn: 40

TUDE SOLITUDE a room where talk is incessant and laughs are emphatic— even when the television is blaring. I succumb myself to the utter quiet that silences the muscle strung with purple veins beating desperately inside my chest so I can listen to slow huffs that exit my nostrils, one by one. I enjoy my own company perhaps too much— The empty hollowness is intoxicating but I’ll watch my reflection and stare mindlessly at the flicker of a singular candle flame because only in solitude will I discover an uncomfortable kind of ease.

the next chapter In a few years, I’ll sip slowly from a ceramic cup on the patio of my four-bedroom apartment while flipping frivolously through perfume-infused pages of Vogue, and on some Saturday mornings I might find myself alone in the heart of Seattle. I’ll dress in far too expensive business attire and purchase my produce from Pike Place; I’ll be seduced by candles from Anthropologie but still careful not to drink one too many mojitos at the bar on 2nd Avenue. My marketing position might cost me more than I can generate, but I’ll move my hands hastily on a keyboard and write content that forces people to listen. My boss will make tasteless remarks, but perhaps the people will be as lovely as their home gardenias and my team will congratulate my qualitative efforts. After a while, I’ll glare at the heartshaped birthmark on the inner crevice of my wedding finger, but just who will ask me to carry my favorite stone? Soulmates exist in many numbers not merely one, but just how will I decide with these squinted, fragile eyes of mine?

A few men might profit off my body but I know I’ll eventually save one for myself along with all the moments that comprise Sunday afternoons, and maybe I’ll even keep love if he’s kind. My body will lay limp over linen sheets after a long weekday, and I bet I’ll feel heavy in the evening light, but I’ll write a poem every so often and share my attempts with the retired writer next door who loves in black ink as the sky waits for us to unwind. Perhaps I’ll indulge in semi-wishful thinking so that I can go about my day without dwelling on the birds and the bees and the flowers and a world gone utterly awry.

THANKS TO YOU, I remember moving quickly through the depths of a little south town in Spain, killing time and escaping familiar confines I am sinking slowly into now. In places where I first knew no one but myself, I accepted charming invitations in sociably warm tones, on barren rooftops, and through portaled doors. I remember floating through the eastern hemisphere with only a pocket full of cash but a diminishing kind of fear I can attribute only to you. You found me under a black umbrella, soaked in Monday rain outside a murky hostel the day I arrived alone without a coat warm enough to walk the avenue. You dragged my anguished feet through narrow streets never forgotten, taught me about Guinness and how to follow the moon as far as the road goes. I found you sipping soft whiskey at the bar on Amor de Dios, and you asked to watch my eyes long enough for the sun to go down. I now know time is precious, but I’ve learned to despise goodbyes because the clock never ceases to stop for you or I. I often think of my old red suitcase packed with white pebbles and the branches of a willow tree when I could feel the sky against my breath and my eyes glazed beneath the morning sun. You said, Only in America, do you strive to be someone. Now, here I am, effortlessly existing.

THE

S P A C E

BETWEEN YOU AND THE WORLD

If all we know is uncertainty and the war Inside your head stops you from sleeping soundly Under the weightless sky and its stars untouched, Remember when laughter is abysmal and the sky Paints your favorite shade of rosy pink, You’ll find the world is limitless And possibility is endless but excitement Will stir your insides and all that is imminent Will fill the spaces between you and the world There are spaces and timeless places you have Yet to explore, like the neighbor’s house Next door or the coastal village just south of yours If you handpick small moments to keep For yourself, you’ll soak up time and find Yourself swimming in unabashed gratitude I hope you appreciate the smoothness of Your olive-oiled skin rubbed with the sun From the ripe age of twenty-one But may you never lose the child in you born

To play and I hope you find a canopy to watch The hanging moon and count celestial shapes I hope you discover bona fide emotions Within your being and experience voluptuous Sensations from physical touch I hope you sink into the gaze of the people you trust And feel comfortable revealing the hidden parts of yourself kept silent for far too long You’ll come to marvel at the human capacity for impatient Loquacity, and even notice the world’s eternal beauty Despite the mortal propensity for unwanted suffering One day your aesthetic visions will come to fruition So that the world can appreciate your artfulness the way You admire yellow leaves in autumn I hope you witness the passion burning In your glimmering eyes so that your soul ignites A flame hot enough for the world to see

Our Age

Breathe into each other’s silence, hearts fill with golden flakes made from afternoon sun. Liquid skin becomes ablaze beneath star-lids of obsidian eyes, canvas dripping in blue beams of exaltation. Our youthfulness climbs with every puff like obtuse meanings derived from electric melodies. Our hearts rumble, our bodies decline every beat paired with an American Spirit We sip a ripeness, collapse into age, crave the space where our kin reside. Souls sharpen skin screams beneath hot showers and we pray the water will rinse what we wish to leave behind. We are children through forests of eucalyptus trees in colors vibrant we glide through wet streets. We walk with our palms pressed tightly together so we can show the world how much love we bear. 49