My heart is a hotel room

and I am alone here tonight

cold windows, cold sheets, warm breath

cold city sparkling coldly below

time drying on my thighs.

If you ask me, I will tell you:

even as a child, I knew

childhood was a mistake.

It’s been a long day.

Now I am 37. The mornings go on

until four o’clock.

That is when I am closest to death.

Today I am eating tulip leaves, dying of water.  

Because there is the unreal

and then there is the really really unreal.

When you are my age you will understand.

My hair grows long and I cut it

my hair grows long again and I cut it again.

Change is seduction.

Change is seduction,    

seduction is a message:

you could never be this again

even if you wanted it.

Now I am 37.

Who even am I

hungover, not even real

I froze my eyes with the lip of a Coke can.

Well water and jasmine

milk milk lemonade

the perfume of the suburbs haunts my hangover

and every ex-boyfriend finds me on the internet.

I was drunk enough to look in the mirror

and think, this is OK.

Now I am stoned, eating cake in bed.

Sorrow is a long game.

When there is nowhere else to go

past all desire, past the place of feelings

my hands are sexy lions

hunting in the yellow forests of memory.

I don’t want to remember things.

Paper like moth wings

those folded notes

soft foxed edges.

Handful of pony beads.

High school high school high school.

Why won’t you help me not feel like this?

All the dying commas fall

blazing from the sky.

The moon has a drunken face

laughing and laughing over the gravel drive

in the blood-bright October air.

The truth is not that bad    

coming from you.       

But when the truth is

coming for you

that is another story.

Who can loosen a Champagne muselet with her teeth?

Uh-oh.

I can.

Are we ever not within a breath of hell?

Jim Beams, like 3 or 4 of them, and

I am past reason.

I am licking the tender inside

of my own tender elbow.

I am the rickety queen of my own bed.

The last time I was beautiful I

carried the cold in on my coat

carried a book wrapped in brown paper,

a surprise. My hair a crown of braids.

Candlelight, fat glasses of golden wine.

Be careful what you wish for

in the airport bar.

Now I am burning

and burning in circles.

My crown is fire. No, rain.  No, fire.

My crown is the heat of things passing.

published in Fine Print’s Fall 2019 issue