SMALL VICTORIES

 

They appear out of nowhere.

Like thoughts sometimes do.

They fly around my kitchen

and become an irritant I must live with

that spreads from room to room.

 

They land on windows, walls, and mirrors,

on the glass in picture frames,

on the cupboard doors.

 

Perhaps it’s the fruit that’s turned

or the unemptied compost that has them

so suddenly and prodigiously appear.

 

Sometimes I think

the sink, the drain…

the pipes and the plumbing,

the building’s dark inner workings,

that wind behind the walls unseen,

are the source.

Yes, this is where the gnats 

must come from, I think.

From a place like this.

 

I can lose hours in a day,

in a week, over weeks,

running around my small apartment

swatting at them,

working myself into a frenzy,

like an animal in a cage,

especially when I swing and miss.

 

They are almost invisible

and yet they are my enemy

–like thoughts are sometimes–

and I want to crush them,

because they are everywhere:

a buzzing so close to my ears.

 

I want to annihilate them.

Such a big word for such little threats.

But the gusto with which I go after them

is fueled by a ferocity no other word can carry.

I want to be a killer.

 

A speck of blood on the mirror …

is the victory I am after.

Or so I think.

 

USHER

 

In a dream,

I am late.

The auditorium dims to dark.

I show you my ticket.

Your flashlight leads the way,

guides us down the aisle.

We walk in silence.

I take my assigned seat.

And like a ghost you are gone.

 

As the curtain opens

in my mind, I wonder

where have you brought me,

what will I be shown,

in the dark,

in the hush,

that’s only visible

in the theater of dreams?

DIFFERENT STATES

1.
A widow was proclaimed legally sane yesterday, when
there was no sky, no sun, no moon. Only smoke.
Also on that day her home could not, despite
all its efforts and with every drawer open,
show her proof she was ever born.

2.
A chair, yellow and faded, ancestral, holds space
for heartbreak, collapse, recovery—all the cycles
of life—making the present nostalgic and
nostalgia the here and now. Tomorrow, this seat
will move from one home to another and continue
to be for its owner what it has always been.
A shelter. A sanctuary.

3.
A walk along the bay. If you look, you’ll see it.
Something’s in the water. An otter, a seal, a rock.
It’s there, then gone. Did it go under?
Did the sea rise? There is always
the surface and what’s underneath.

4.
A friend in the desert, bundled, trudging
through snow made of lightning and thunder,
readies his artist studio—a prefab trailer—for winter,
as he hears that his new home, just a few states away,
in a place called Talent, almost burned. Was spared.
And somewhere between where he is and isn't,
between fire and ice, is Love, safe, newly forged,
where he also resides, belongs.

5.
"You hit bottom," I read somewhere, "when
you stop digging." For me, I must let go entirely
of the concept of shovel, of grasping and pushing.
Only then will Ox, an ancient power, shoulder
my burden, and carry me and my thinking—

the greatest weight of all—home.

UNLIKELY OMEN

Since when did a stuffed animal

become so ominous

and cracks in the pavement

seem so foreboding?