After the High School Reunion

It has always been a long time.
It’s always been a long life of looking
into someone else’s windows,

leaning against the road’s shoulder,
against the car’s pavement, against

the memory I want to never
want to have again. Maybe this
is what yearning is. Maybe too why

I hate that word, the hook of it,
shepherding me back into a past

I promise myself I don’t remember.
I do remember. The toothpaste
I pressed against zits and how

my skin still pinked, erupted, and
the Lysoled sick days, the trash

can carrying crumpled paper
like good roses. Look at me,
there, the girl who sliced her own

bangs badly, who refused to keep
two hands on the steering wheel.

Look. There’s the me who stopped
believing in the concept of bangs
and started believing the right way

to drive forward was to never look
back. Wasn’t I beautiful when I was

at my most ugly, wasn’t I exactly
the kind of thing one loves the most
when it’s left behind?

_

There Was Wild a Violence in My Mind

I tell you, I loved like a lake lipping the house
and its foundations, a tremor cracking concrete,

a dam that knows its power is in holding on
and decides to let go. There was something so real

in the feel of it, the car skinning the edge of the bridge
and below a chasm grinning back, gums silvered, the fall

down like heaven, like any absence on earth is.
It was never mine anyway, the body I felt like

a thudding animal against a display of sky, the blank
where thigh met thigh, where a nothing blossomed

faster than shock. How empty I’d been born.
Even the dumb grasses knew what to do. I didn’t

know how to take my own hand and I didn’t know how
to give it, either. I was a terror, monstrous as anything

holy, I opened my eyes, a fury like a blessing, I saw
that out there, without me, a world grew and grew.

_

Sliding into Scale

It is all so embarrassing. I mean how small a human body looks
against the sky. I mean the way milk always curdles in fruit tea & how

I always forget. To God we must look like sad miniatures. Toys. Like
the bravest mistakes. I swear I was so sure when one of my feet followed

the other that I could keep walking forever. That I would always be
a body and never a sky. I forget. There’s no way to know how

God sees us because it’s impossible for us to see like God. I mean
isn’t that the point? We scale by the size of our thumbs, the size

of a nail sliding into a hand & then into a slice of wood. The point is
that all the points of measurement we’ve built into our architecture

can’t build a way for us to understand that everything carries a clock inside,
even us. Even a tree. Even in the cradle it’s there rocking inside us, our death,

& still we just do the thing we call living, which is pretending that death
isn’t the self but a stranger who we’ll never have to meet.