Discretionary Love

They weren’t the greatest Christmas lights in Dallas. You asked for the Galleria or the lightshow outside the firehouse. Those arches were hacky. Blended spicy

25 years into their marriage my Mom teaches my Dad to make cricket sounds, rubbing her lips back and forth to mimic the bug. My

Think daggers. Think the perfect incision of a scalpel, lonely blood, the sky full of stars. So few. Think the city too bright, too close.

The boy I love & I go to a Kroger, looking for our younger selves, with plastic bags in fist. A good leek, like a

Eyes through chain-link mesh analyze from afar— a million amusements. From close— a hefty gate price for a wrist stamp of approval to access the

Gated fence. Steel rails with pointy tops. Too many of us kids in the backseat of our neighbor’s car. They told Polly Cleary she couldn’t

I know how much you enjoy watching the stars— how you imagine their sparkle, not the golden color, and how you’ll gnash your teeth through

In the little brownstone in East Cleveland and how we curled up in companionable conversation how he came over for chicken a la king and

Watch me transform a memory. It starts from the lining of my insides (lilac silk) And steam-engines through the grey matter of my brain – 

You didn’t know it yet But I was coming straight for you Running wild, flying blind periwinkle blue jet fuel throwing my hands up to

is small-town ugly. I catalogue as you drive:               one motel. one bar named Trapper’s.        

I once was a domestic,    laboring in others’ homes—    washing, watching.  And once,    at the park,    when the children wouldn’t listen,

When the light doesn’t listen, I trace its ghost across my skin: sunrise thinning like a paper heartbeat. No one teaches the body how to