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Heartache & Lossexpand_moreHe does not dare to ask the question flaring in his head. Will she stay.
Barbra Nightingale
She whispers all these rocks burning up in the sky can’t be a good thing.
He was getting a divorce. I was married with two teenage children.
Doctor, he devoted. When she poorly, he bring her mint tea in bed.
The church was clearly the work of a madman driven crazy by the wind.
I’m there inside La Fonda at the bar ordering another glass of red wine!
You think I couldn’t write it because I look like a mechanic, I said.
I didn’t want to start a poem with night where there should be a name.
It’s life that is hard: sleeping, eating, loving, and dying are easy.
Death is our common ancestor. It doesn’t care who we have dined with.
We’d open our mouths and sink, trying to make an ocean of ourselves.
Finger tracing the terrain, you hold me through autumn’s loss of color.
Maybe it’s a Thursday, & I’m coming home to make you dinner.
God, I need to know what happened to those who tried to cross.
His mooseness was implacable, the light behind him from the trees.
“Tell me about the things you can’t tell me about when I’m dressed.”
All of this leaves me floating in seas of prehistory and indeterminacy.
“We don’t feel like a couple. Haven’t felt like a couple for a very long while.”
What felt like sanctity now felt like nothingness, like death.
He folds on himself like a sheet kicked off the foot of a bed.
Every day I was forced to return to the one place I did not want to be.
One makes one’s peace with words in a poem and space in a dream.
Everything is mine on loan: the leaves I’ve combed out of my hands.
Before giant pandas earn heir name, they cub pinkly and mewling.
It wasn’t the bees I thought to tell but wasps the evening you died.
My mother hoped moving would erase the affair with a married man.
The transformation of their maid from shadow to sexpot thrills Maizie.
As soon as her grandparents left, BLAM, the dance in her died.
My first suicidal ideations occurred to me when I was ten, eleven, twelve.
