20.88
Your hand on my breast,
yes, this is the start of my
post-coital crying.

20.106
Left-handed lover
on the right side of the bed
wakes warm and wanting.

20.114
To be the first rain
after a decade’s long drought
is to be too late.

20.135
When I miss you most
I put my ear to the ground,
listen for hoof beats.

20.147
Quiet as the clouds
across a moonless night sky,
I slink into you.

20.157
Brutal blues beckoned
for some sunless sky, scrape
by on orange omens.

20.166
Gun-shy at the sound
of your name shot from a mouth,
any mouth at all.

20.173
Shipyard shift whistle
sounds somber and low. Go home
you weary worker.

20.176
Like mail in the rain,
paper soggy, ink running,
too illegible.

20.74
Tame me as animal.
Command me to stay beside
you, lay at your feet.

20.76
The headlines get worse
and worse everyday. There is
no reprieve from it.

20.78
Blessed be the sea
breeze upon my sun kissed skin,
the wind that soothes me.

20.82
I loved you loudly
across space, time; alone in
my cacophony.

20.101
My loud love quiet,
a dissonant hum from far
forgotten echoes.

20.83
Tidewater washed and
hung out to dry in gale force,
salt caked and gritty.

20.96
Romanticizing
eye contact, you held my gaze
and kept it all night.

20.105
You’ll find our story
in the Corrections section
of the New York Times.

20.110 (after Auden)
When it was over,
I poured away the ocean
sand swept up the woods.

Dust Settlement from ‘Object Permanence’ by Nicole Sealey

O,

how I’ll miss you when we’re dead,
though now I’m followed by ghosts

that are not of my making, but moaning
they are mourning the labours of our little

deaths. All the same, all to say we die
each day a little more gorged on pollen,

fallen and rotting in too human lungs.
The phantom of a pain in my chest,

though my heart still beats, impermanent
against the passing of each hour, each day.

Washed away in the rain, the sound
your name makes in my drought-ridden mouth

in the morning in the light of three
east facing windows that greet the sun

with smiles of white framed glass. Who
was last here? Just as dust you are

covering the grave of my bed.

20.55
Aren’t we all afraid
of forgetting what our moms
smell like during spring?

20.56
I would like to speak
in defense of cantaloupe
No one eats it ripe.

20.58
I auctioned off love
and you outbid everyone,
took me home that night.

20.59
Back in the naughty,
back on my bullshit; my home
town of old terrors.

20.64
Hot Fourth of July:
Red jeep, white sheets, blue ocean,
my sun soaked sweetheart.

20.65
Lightning broke the sky.
Fissured fracture split middle
gaping wide open.

20.66
The blue line ell train
window reflected stranger
sharing a twin bed.

20.67
A twin mattress floored
for two bodies meant to be
one by the morning.

20.68
You precipitate
as snow; half frozen, half warm
water falling down.

20.23
I hope you are stealing
all the hydrangeas this season.
Mopheads clean whole homes.

20.26
I spoon you like broth,
hot, into my starving mouth
parched of nourishment.

20.30
We would wash our clothes
in the same water, using
the same lavender.

20.32
Like a hollowed shell,
roll me round the ocean floor
and make of me sand.

20.36
I chased ghost orchids
around a great, dismal swamp,
but found only reeds.

20.38
Please play me as if
an instrument you mastered
with the keenest ear.

20.39
I should have kissed you
more, should have held you close
rthat morning after.

20.42
I’m not leaving you.
I am not leaving. You have
my whole heart at home.

20.49
You struck a match, not
just a chord, setting fire
to my healing heart.

20.51
Scuffletown Park bench:
My arm around your shoulders,
your hand on my thigh.

Hump Day Haiku is Back

20.3
The summer solstice
made in me a sun, burning
hot across the sky.

20.6
She was a bunker,
baby, a hot fever dream
at the end of June.

20.10 (For Sarah)
Angel, come and sit
next to me in the morning,
tell me of your dreams.

20.11
I swallowed your sound
and tasted sulphur then salt,
sage, and rosemary.

20.12
Briny salt marsh stench
of low land low tide decay
wafts with welcome winds.

20.15
“Te quieres.” I
asked you how to say true "I
want you," in Spanish.

a gem amongst the rubble
of the rest of us.
the best of us
can’t hold candles
without the threat of
burning alive.
but you breathe fire
and eat ash
for breakfast with eggs
and toast, no butter.
know better than most
how to catch smoke
and inhale it
to spark a flame.

loving you, well that didn’t cost anything except
the curve of the pointer & middle fingers on my left hand,

the memories that are now a part of their musculature
& the pain they feel in the bitter winter winds,

gallons of gas for the miles we many-ed,
the water bill from foreign showers & washing machines

that cleaned our sex-sweat-sticky bodies
& our lovingly dirtied sheets, more than

a barrel of wine, the better than bottom shelf gin
in the liquor cabinet & the nice tonic I would buy to treat myself,

(which was always an excuse to treat you
to something nicer than store brand

or Canada Dry) the time it took to fall
for you (which wasn’t very long at all)

& the time it will take to fall out of you
(which I fear might never happen; I might die

before I’ve truly bled you from my system),
the prettiest salmon filets from the fresh side

of the fish monger in the neighborhood grocery store,
special spices I acquired for new recipes

I tried to impress you with, a new-to-you camera,
(which you would use to capture me within fifty millimeters)

words I can not count on my fingers or toes, words
that don’t have a numerical value at all (word count

doesn’t work), postage for letters lined with lies
I told myself to protect you from the truth,

an arm & a leg, countless thoughts you’d pay
a penny for each one gladly though they weren’t worth

two. how many hours can make up the difference?
what kind of change can I expect from this transaction?

I always believed I gave what I got, but maybe
my heart was too precious to loan

and now it’s collaterally damaged,
not worth what I traded it for;

loving you was worthless, in fact,
I gained no dividends from the investment

& now I’m piss poor and the worse for it,
a lesser valued knock-off someone else won’t pay

full price for or get as much out of,
no more blood from the stone.

I will never be the first to let go.
I will hold on with my teeth bared and sunk
into the soft, fleshy palm of your hand.
You must pry my jaw open with brute strength,
or cut your limb and leave it in my mouth.
Only then will I concede, no longer
interested in dead things decaying
like a dog who gnawed the flesh off a bone
and left it at the feet of its master.
In this disaster there is no relief,
no form of you etched into the wall, just
the dust of you trailing, fading, leaving
my belly hungry, my blood boiled down
to marrow stock that would nourish no one.

Do you still picture me
behind your lens when your
shutter clicks to capture
someone else, somewhere else
some time near golden hour?
Sometimes I still see you
clear in the view finder,
but your image won’t
focus for very long,
not long enough to hold
onto though I do try
with all of my might, with
all the sight that I have.

Is this the drowning?
Let me keep my hands,
my big hands I won’t
use to stay afloat
in some deep ocean.
I will inhale if
I must the water
saturated, heavy
with salt light as lead
in my liquid lungs.

#612
Dad, it’s your daughter
calling from the road kidnapped
by my one true love.

#589
My baby shot me
through the heart with hot, hot lead,
weighed me down with love.

#595
Have we recovered
fully from last season’s flood,
or did the rot set?

#604
Suffer for flowers
for flowers suffer for you
a beauty too grave.

#576
Red cardinal come,
perch on this high branch and pray,
forgive me my sins.

#616
No artificial
hormones to dictate movements
in this body.

How cruel to name a flower for a bird
when the flower itself cannot fly far,
or even at all.
only airborne in
the wind like a fugitive on the run
from the law of Newton’s basic physics:
that which is in motion, stays in motion.
But flowers cannot fly for heaven’s sake,
though each one an angel among the mire
life sinks into and is born out of
like a phoenix more suited for the sea.

curiosity killed the cat
at three o'clock in the morning
behind the back of a liquor store
with a stroke of a switch blade
along the sinewy, blood pumping
veins and arteries of its neck.
The Cheshire has a new grin now,
and it's permanent, sanguine;
the pearly whites of feline fangs
replaced with the ghostly pale
of a spinal column.

They tell you to use landmarks
to remember where you’ve been,
at least that’s what my daddy taught me
when I learned the ways around town
behind the wheel of his large SUV
that took up half of every road it turned on
or intersection it came to
like the one that has dueling 7-11s
squaring off on either side of the street.
Calz Pizza watches from the opposite corner
on the edge of its seat.
landmarks mark off a place,
maybe tell about a time
or two before when some great someone
said something serious
people can be landmarks, too
like a first love, and a what Love, and a who loved who
more, a man who taught me to shoot a gun,
or a woman who sung the blues so well,
farewell to fair weathered friends,
whose jurisdiction ends where the sidewalk bends
around the corner
from the pizza place with perfect cannoli.
and it ain’t like a landmark can’t move,
or be moved
to tears over fears of destruction or misplacement,
getting regulated to the top shelf
of the bookcase in the basement
of a brain that would rather forget where it came from
and the pathways formed by chemicals
charting routes along arteries and veins carrying
oxygen away from and back to the heart
of the matter is that she is a Grand Canyon
on the highway 66 of my life,
a deep scar in the crust of my earth
that runs from north to south
down the inside of my left thigh where
my femoral artery pumps vulnerably.
I’ll just be glad it wasn’t severed,
no,
my heart did not drain my body of blood to trail behind
as I walked in kind with slow rolling tumble weeds
down dirt roads, through the desert where
a cactus named Casper became a friendly ghost
and followed me all the way back home to the coast
where lighthouses mark land so ships know shore
of the danger that lies ahead.
A beacon of home and a sight to see
as you leave port passing cranes in the sky,
and I don’t wanna feel those metal clouds either
cause what’s the difference between
sea-level cities that are sinking into
raised graves marked by headstones that read:
HERE LIE THE DAMNED WHO WERE MADE TO THINK
ATLANTIS WAS NOT A RUIN,
but a paradise promised
like the one they banished Eve from
for feeding off forbidden fruit
grown from the tree of life,
which cursed her with the gift of giving it.

(Haiku #378)
Tell me you love me
in secret, behind closed doors
with whispers of truth.

(Haiku #387)
Braid curls of my hair
into tendrils of your own.
Call it a love lock.

(Haiku #391)
I have to mourn you;
sit Shiva for the living,
shred the shirts you shared.

(Haiku #392)
You did not sleep well.
Were there monsters in your bed?
Did they look like me?(

Haiku #396)
I loved you so much
I stopped using contractions
‘cause you can’t read them.

(Haiku #397)
It’s late October.
Ghosts are mourning both for us
and our little deaths.

(Haiku #398)
Is blue the warmest?
Because this shade feels colder,
icy in my viens.

(Haiku #399)
I wrote our story
on a blank airplane napkin
then threw it away.

The signs of my depression:
my car needs serious maintenance and
I keep hurting myself in the kitchen.
Please pay attention:
THIS IS A CRY FOR HELP.
It seems I have a deficit of something
I can’t quite put my finger on
because I just severed it at the third knuckle
with a butcher’s knife and now blood
floods the cavity of the carcass I was cleaning.
This is a real emergency.
The vegetables are steaming, kettle screaming
and ready to brew some tea.
But I can’t staunch this bleeding and now
every thing will be overcooked, burned,
the tea too strong and the vegetables mush,
and I can’t tell if it’s my blood
or that of the lamb I slaughtered
that coats the counter in a red film so thick
and slick it spills to floor
and across the stove, over the cutting board
seasoning each morsel of the meal
I can't serve anyone but myself.
I can't smell the potatoes burning in the oven
over the odor of fresh blood from fresher meat.
I’m losing it; my blood, my mind, the dinner
I prepared for two which now tastes of iron.
My shadow will go hungry, and my soul
will leave dissatisfied, angry, Hell-bent
on eating a meal fit for no one.
Let me cauterize this wound
using the open flame from the stove top.
Let me sear this flesh the way I would
a fillet of fish with one less finger to carry
its head on this dish.

In the case of my early death:

If my impending doom results in a gory mess,
don’t let my mother see me.
If I am serenely passed into the ether,
body undisturbed,
save for the organs I no longer need,
let her bathe me, her poor baby, and
prepare my body for the sea.
Drop me in the deep blue
the way I came into this green world,
naked,
but freckled by summers of hot sun kisses,
and scarred by days of play,
with a mouth shaped bruise
at the base of my neck
where my lover tried her best to suck
the life from me before my little death,
and with one less lock of hair
in the chaotic structure
of curls spout from my head.
Let my father rub the strands
between his nail-bit fingers.
And if my sister cries, let her find me
in her daughter, her son;
allow meto live on in her children.
Give my niece my rings,
and if they are too big,
make a necklace of them
with threads from my clothes.
Give everything else away,
let me go;
feel me in the rain that will fall
and the fog that will rise,
in each drop of dew
on each blade of grass,
an earthly ether into I will have
passed.

Poor Maggie
Have I told you the one about Margaret?
She was born in a farmhouse in Virginia Beach
when Virginia Beach was still Princess Anne County.
She was sixth and sickly.
Her father called her “Dahling,” forgetting his /r/s in a drawl,
when he pressed the cool cloth to her red-hot head.“
Everything’s gonna be alright, Dahling,”
He’d say to her, perched on a stool next to the day bed
she called home on the screened in porch,
the same porch her mother issued all her children on,
the wood of it warped with life, the foundation crumbling.
And in May, when her fever often peaked,
her red-hot head would stew in the sickly-sweet aromaof strawberries.
In the fever of her dreams
it was the fields of berries that burned.
Night and day.
the red flame roared over the land in the sun,
the field swallowed in a daily inferno.
At night, while the sea air settled swiftly over the fields
and Margaret’s sweat-stained,
tear-stained, red delicious cheeks,
the fire smoldered in its red-hot coals,
as the fever smoldered behind her eyes.
“Everything’s gonna be alright, Dahling,”
sweeps over her ears and through her swollen brain,
drawing her out of her dreams, tempering her mind,
while her blood boils like the asphalt in the summer.
And in November, when the fields produce
dark green swaths of hearty leaves,
Margaret would burn under her blankets
on the day bed she called home.
Wouldn’t the cool nights and brisk days
of late fall smother her fever?
Alas, it raged.
Even as the night chill set in when the sun dipped
behind tall, old pines across the fields,
freezing the dew clung to the collards
and frosting over her fever, her red-hot head,
“Everything’s gonna be alright, Dahling.”

(Haiku #262)
She could not handle
the violence of my love.
I bleed too freely.

(Haiku #265)
A bruise billowed up
and spread blue and purple in
the shape of her mouth.

(Haiku #301)
Color me confused
when you kiss me to leave clues
of the way you feel.

(Haiku #369)
Early morning sun
came in through the window pane
to cast tall shadows.

(Haiku #370)
Home is not a house.
Nor can it be a person.
It is a feeling.

(Haiku #372)
I miss rose petals
and how they feel after rain
on my finger tips.

(Haiku #373)
The leaves turned too slow.
Burnt orange, sunny yellow,
brown before the fall.

(Haiku #376)
Waking without you
felt as hollow as the drum
that beats in my heart.

(Haiku #379)
The early bird fell
in love with the night owl and
never slept again.

(Haiku #260)
I took your photo
off the wall, out of its frame,
and lit it on fire.

(Haiku #270)
I woke with the ache
of loneliness, with the dread
of knowing you’re gone.

(Haiku #297)
She knows how I wake
with want in my finger tips
and lust on my lips.

(Haiku #312)
I slept next to you,
your form familiar phantom
from my deepest dreams.

(Haiku #363)
Put coins on my eyes
for the toll I’ll have to pay
in order to cross.

(Haiku #364)
Open the windows.
Let fall filter through; leaf’s crunch,
smoky apple air.

(Haiku #366)
Walking on egg shells
with the yolk still on my face,
whites wetting my lips.

(Haiku #367)
My blues are azure.
Bright bolts of blissful sadness
lined with white silver.

(Haiku #368)
Call me Holly Go-
lightly with my own mean red
sen route to breakfast.

(Haiku #298)
You’re a hurricane
whose eye has settled over
my too flooded land.

(Haiku #317)
I took the whole mile
when you gave me just the inch
and ran home guilty.

(Haiku #323)
Hunger pains rumbled
in the pit of my belly,
but not for no food.

(Haiku #333)
Tornado sirens
sound off in the far distance,
but no one dare move.

(Haiku #358)
Ask a question and
at the end of a sigh waits
one word, an answer.

(Haiku #359)
God damn, I’m trying.
Give me the space to be wrong
and learn from my faults.

(Haiku #360)
The world is burning
while Nero plays his fiddle
with a flaming bow.

(Haiku #361)
I died a devil,
was remembered an angel,
lived as if neither.

(Haiku #362)
They say that drowning
is euphoric, but only
after the panic.

(Haiku #320)
I write in cursive
that my baby cannot read.
My letters get lost.

(Haiku #326)
I apologize
for ruining your perfect
exit strategy.

(Haiku #336)
Did you feel it first
when you met me or later
when you let me go?

(Haiku #342)
Married the mountain
and took its name as my own
when I reached the peak.

(Haiku #348)
Should I rip my clothes,
break every mirror hanging,
and throw out the chairs?

(Haiku #350)
Sweat out my sickness,
rid this weak body of you
and recover quick.

(Haiku #351)
Sunday, Adoni
swept in the garden alone
for his crown was lost.

(Haiku #354)
Here lies the true damned
who knew Hell’s not a ruin,
but a paradise.

(Haiku #355)
Sever both my hands
like the thief who was caught twice
with blood on his palms.

(Haiku #305)
How cruel to be left
with these little reminders
the shape of her mouth.

(Haiku #322)
The use of past tense
signifies things finalized,
no longer present.

(Haiku #324)
Love called me crying.
There was no one at home and
all the doors were locked.

(Haiku #327)
Unlike the pale moon,
I can consume you without
you ever waning.

(Haiku #329)
Don’t speak. Words break spells
cast with silent intention,
quiet devotion.

(Haiku #334)
I hope she’s okay,
safe in these times of danger,
whole in her big heart.

(Haiku #343)
You painted my face
with a smashed egg, yolk dripping
down and off my chin.

(Haiku #344)
There’s a tree on Main
that produces perfectly
plump pomegranates.

(Haiku #345)
Death makes fools of us,
laughs in our faces, and says,
“I wait for no one.”

(For Joe)You beautiful boy,
with your proud profile Roman,
we were not worthy.

(Haiku #269)
It was as if all
the iron in my blood turned
to rust too fragile.

(Haiku #302)
Chased my shy shadow
out of the open window
on to Never-Land.

(Haiku #303)
Sing to me, crickets.
Play me the songs of your night.
Lull me fast asleep.

(Haiku #307)
One hundred Russian
twists to off the belly fat
Mom told you to lose.

(Haiku #310)
Did you leave your mark
for me or for the others
that will pass this way?

(Haiku #318)
What bliss! is drowning
when the water in your lungs
tastes of high heaven.

(Haiku #321)
Oh silly sister,
where did the good girls grow up,
what games did they play?

(Haiku #330)
Ain’t no rest for me,
not till my baby come home
and eat off my plate.

(Haiku #339)
Yes, tornado come
and tear this house off of its
crumbling foundation.