the adulteress

I've been going back and forth
between the kitchen and the front door

Are you a lost cat
waiting for a familiar scent to guide you home?
Are you anticipating
a comforting gust around every foreign corner?

The innocent scenarios play in a loop
but I know that I am discovered:
the grit has floated to the surface
and no amount of my regret will rinse
the memory of it from your eyes

Nevertheless I scrub the counters
stack the dishes
so you will find a cleaner home
when your need to see my face contort in shame
brings you slowly back

And yet it's not the guilt that keeps me awake
even while I steep in it
but the fear
that when the ire bleeds into your cheeks
at the sight of this jaw line
it will be for your foolishness in trusting
not for loving me.

the joy parade

There was that half hour, sitting in the back of a rusted Toyota in the middle of the Rum, red sand all around whisked into my face by the tires and the unstoppable wind, monoliths carved out by centuries and teeth of cartoon-blue sky, dust mating with the residual sweat of Nabatean exploration on my skin, greasy hair, a ribbed tank top, a convoy, and the broadest smile I could muster up without guile. Ecstasy vaporized through the pores: the first moment of grateful, self-realized living.

And then there was your genuine peace and confidence when you said that you could not forget me and would be around for a while, window-adjacent anticipation every day like clockwork, dreams becoming comfortably-elevated reality, children's cries resounding in my lungs, pride of the future, a disposition to happy compromise, and first trust in the orchestrator of childhood hopes and adult responsibility.

Of these two, only one remains, taunted by the memory of his younger brother. Desperate for a new beginning, I created Cain and Abel, and I knew all along that all the good die young.

cradle the grave

Living with this parasitic doubt, I fall asleep quickly and stay there too long, the better to dream it away.

Treachery is a hockey card, a gambling debt repaid too soon to overwrite the inclination toward the illicit, too fast to fill the grave with anything other than a fine white powder.

You love too well to be out of practice, and I’m too out of practice to be worth your while.

Despite the secret liaisons and hidden childhood fortunes and despite the prairie cold that radiates from your untouchable skin, it’s me, always me; I have my doubt for company.

beyond the seams

It happens every time—
seed
to sapling
to struggling romantic progeny—
and to every thing there is this season.

So then how does it surprise? and catch quick
adrenalous breaths in my feeble fetal lungs?

It happens, you said.
So it does,
and it takes,
and it squeezes,
and it builds, sways, creaks, fluxes, takes, ruptures, sings,
it does,
and every time the unknown pattern
is sewn by a recognizable hand,
is added to the pile.

The pattern-maker,
the master seamstress,
pioneer of the temporary garment:
she
(couldn’t you guess)
sews these new threads
in familiar treachery,
by sleight of hand,
adds to the quilt that started as a
twin
carried you through college
doubling
(never coupling)
into the weaker royal of your young professionalism
so that you knew your bedfellow,
negative space,
knew to speak from a lack,
learned to be a lack,
learned to be lacking,
until he was no longer gone
but you were.