33

It’s a short story cycle connected by how each story relates to a fictional highway.

Bon appétit!

You are distant and bright.
At night, I string you into myths across the sky.
and I throw my wishes onto you,
watch them pile up
and wait.
You collect dust
and distance
So I’m still awake making star charts out of black holes
trying to pinpoint where the light gets lost.

Behind the thin cotton of your shirt, I feel its heat,
and I watch the shadows that it throws
but the shadows are just shadows.

There’s an ocean that I’ve never seen
but in dreams it seems infinite
I don’t remember
what’s at the end of it,
but sometimes I think I miss it.
I’m living in the “meanwhile,”
you’re living at a distance and I’m
still trying to ween myself off of what was missing;
your name is just someplace I bury my
sent letters to rest
but what if there was never love,
then who’s this ghost?
and why’s its breath
smells like the sea?
I can see inside your shadows
but the shadows can’t see me
I can see inside the shadows
but the shadows can’t see me
I can sing inside your hallows
but you howl and sing the sea

so imagine that our stars
are all projectors,
each beaming our tiny lives down to Earth,
among the other beams of life, walking around
on the planet’s grassy surface, each person
an, on average, one-to-six-foot-tall
reflection off soil and purpose.
Day would be the time when everyone was up and shining,
and night time, only the chosen few.
You say insomniac,
I say saint.
You say God,
I say moon,
you say forgotten,
I say new.
You say ghosts,
and I say,
have you noticed some nights are darker than others?
Via Windex or roof removal, whatever God uses
to spy on us, he seems to leave our dreams alone.

Because I’ve never seen heaven.
But in the sky behind my eyes
I’ve seen fire domes,
on top of ladies—flaming pires
of memory belated, the latent
and the syncopated hips and eyelashes,
arc-arsenal, and Mars and
Volta explosions of
Kentucky backseat
sweat sycamore wind blowing us.
I don’t need
any infinity
but the horizonless highway,
where through gift or lifted fiction,
I raise my soft skinny fist toward the Pacific.
And if I had it my way,
and I did in Schenectady once,
I’d fall asleep, tired from driving, dream
for miles and wake up wide-eyed
for a new migration.

This whole
Ohio to home,
it gets tired by November.
—and I swear in Ohio
February’s eight fucking months long,
and I’m singing choruses into scarves
by the end of it, that,
under our clothes, we’re wild still,
while I’m sweating under coats
and a bright moon, but damn
December in Ohio’s cold.
But at least

there’s snow,

and snow,
and snow—not like Louisville stuck at 33 degrees,
the sky is thick with glitter,

like all the projections of our lives, the pinholes of light
shed from the sky and fell down,
into our palms, and we stand, each
a twilight,
waiting for the dark sky
to catch up with us.
And I hope I can remember
what I did in those minutes,
and if I wake up,
hold them
somewhere to go back to
when I let life relax my eyelids.

I began my day with a hangover cure:
two—rainbow sprinkled and red velvet cake
Bill’s donuts I saved for the morning,
and it reminded me that, sometimes,
I can be good to myself.
Despite an existential crisis
that all we do
hurts someone, sometimes
I think about you.
Like October.
Or when I’m sad, or winter,
or when I get so happy I can’t speak,
or I get horny, and…yeah, I
still watch your butt when you get up to leave.
In the middle of the night, we both woke up
and went to the bathroom, you first.
When I sat down the toilet seat was warm from you,
and I returned and you
were asleep,
and I woke up slowly, revived after nine hours, but
honey, how did you lay still
through another night of bad dreams?
If I could, I would reach, fingerfirst into your head,
and lie there, all night, holding your soft gray mind,
with my hand between
your memories and fears.
I’d pull it out
smelling like your saltysweet poetry,
your anxious lists, or cheese, or sex, or
whatever’s on your mind all day.
I’d wash my hands when I got up,
to keep your dreams yours; and
maybe that’s the most important thing,

but I’d let you taste them first:
the electricflashing swatches of what isn’t yet,
the Geneses of a small god at work,
the infinite audacity of your memory.

I want to spread love like peanut butter, thick as when you’re home, and your mom just bought the big value bucket. I want to speak like the knife you lick the very last smears off of, to never cut the wanting tongue, stay only as sharp as trust to gouge deep into the jar my mother raised me from, and smear the love like a five-year-old cooking for himself, get my fingers messy with love, and end up eating more than I bargained for. I want to get that phone call, and pick you up, your face pink and sticky, your hands shaking, drive home in silence, and book our whole afternoon for hammock therapy. I want to bring soap to the lake and swim until our skin is pruny and the lightning bugs sparkle against the night-black hills like the stars might mingle into the rippling water themselves, and realize we forgot towels. To sit on the asphalt by the water, clean and cool and accumulating mosquito bites, and dry off by the moon’s secondhand sunlight.

In a town where everything is secondhand, I want to be the first hand to clutch yours while you tell me, stiff-lipped on the ride home, about the stab wounds your brother left you. I want the second hand on the clock to speed us through the mornings days and evenings and midnights, and mornings and days and nights, and weekends, and weeks
to the place where we sit on the broken couch on my Christmas-strand-lit porch, telling each other
between heavy, unspeakable pauses,
“I’ll miss you.”
and, “I’ll be coming back.”
and you, “They always say that.”

I want my throat to knot up like the rope you tie to trust with your high and dangling life; I want to hurt so bad I prove you wrong. And I want my back to crack when you pick me up in a hug the day I pull into your driveway and you’re married, and life isn’t quite what you hoped it would be back in our lake-bathing days, but you still pray. You’ll have just bought your mom her dream home, a cute little place down the road with a blackberry bush in the back she makes jam from now, and you’ll offer me some. And we’ll make PB&J’s. And you’ll say, “Spread the peanut butter thick, you’re home.”

Have you ever made a bad decision
that you’ve never really
ever regretted?

It’s my third cup of coffee, and I
will not apologize for feeling
good, or for needing to.
I will sleep tomorrow.

It’s important to remember though
that many of these decisions
pop up at night,
when the daylight police of
conscience, and
consequences,
aren’t patrolling the ghettos and the alleyways
that you hang around in at night. (You should know
that that’s the most dangerous time
to run into a looming fun figure
you’ve never seen before.)

You should know better. But the truth is,
you don’t.
Otherwise,
you would have taken that foreign exit off the highway
instead of turning your night drive around toward your bed;
you would have stayed afterward outside the stage door
instead of tucking your Sharpie between your legs and walking to your parking space;
you would have gotten the extra chocolate chips, because come on,
you’re already at fucking Waffle House;
you would have kept the words “I have to work in the morning”
to yourself, or screamed them, half singing, “I have to work in the morning!”
before finishing the beer,
the bowl,
the whole stash,
the whole fridge,
the whole house,
the whole town,
the whole continent, because in the morning, you will hop across the ocean
and come down on land so hard it hurts your ankles,
because you know who sleeps?
Your parents.

You know who dreams?
Your kids.
You know who’s going be alive after you die?

The ones who stay up all night Christmas Eve,
kicking hot sheets off their cold legs, deciding whether or not
to let themselves
want the thing at the top of their list.

You know when they fall asleep?
When they decide to find it behind their eyelids,
in their heads if they have to,
because tomorrow’s just another morning.

When we crucified the charismatic carpenter,
did we suddenly miss him,
like the Indians missed the Buffalo?
Have they heard the legends I was taught in kindergarten?
George Washington sounded like Santa Claus,
and I believed in the neat evil wrapped up in the last-minute ribbon of history
like I knew bad children got coal,
and sinners got fire.

Did we keep his Godbones
from his meat;
could the sacrificial lamb feed the masses
gathered for a frontier miracle?
Who shot, is shooting,
out the windows of trains
at saints for fun:
the white-bearded well-read male on the History Channel,
or the white male writing a poem about it?

Was Thanksgiving the Last Supper we’d be able to reach across the table
over our brothers’, sisters’, crazy uncles’, priests’, rabbis’, plumbers’, bookies’, drug dealers’, drummers’, storytellers’, medicine women’s, and gentle-handed grandmothers’ laps
and grab some bread for ourselves?
Where did the food go, did it leave
with the sin? Will we starve
without transgression?

eradication gone sacred

Did we use every part of the cross when we nailed the carpenter up for saying,
“Love thyself as you confront your neighbor;
knock on their door and ask if you can borrow any salt,
use it on their fields; and when you turn the other cheek,
pick up the salt from the ground and spread it to preserve the meat of their Messiahs;
let them use their bones and skin for homes.”? I wonder what fire ate the roofbeams
that the cross became,
because the roofs we build out of belief
always leak in places we don’t expect. We burn books
of truth in the fireplace for warmth
because the smoke smells like life after fear,
and yet we still need blankets.

Tell me a story by the fire tonight. One where
we win, and the ending is vague enough to hope we’re
still winning
after the story’s done,
and the coals which once held off the rain
have died.
They’ll light easy in the morning.

Ritalin skittles,
because consciousness is candy;
vomiting riddles, only my nausea understands me.
I’ve been losing my Kentucky teeth
trying to spell “Success” with B.A., G.P.A., an A, an A,
an A, an A minus, an A, an A, a B, an A, and another fat sweet A,
but all that spells is, “AAAAAAAAAA!
…bgbp.” (See? It’s not even good for a metaphor.)
It doesn’t quite make sense
to color in the whole big picture of my future with one black ink pen
—way back when,
hallways ago, pencils allowed for shading.
Now sensation’s making fake place-holders for cash.
But instead of green paper, I’ve got green peppers,
a past,
and a garden
(for the future)—the sidelines of these notebooks
are just for the tallies that I’m marking
on this gray matter’s stone wall.

Prison metaphors, and phone calls,
scissored cords that bungeed
together my sanity for all March long,
or at least a couple weeks
or maybe days, anymore
I can’t tell R.E.M. from sweets; I
measure time passed by rotting teeth,
or a double-fast-emptying shared tube of toothpaste.

I can taste traces of promise on your morning breath.
And the toothbrush you keep at my place
tastes like mint and last night’s dreams, clean as hope.
And I’ve never stared in someone’s eyes and thought about money.

So when someone bought the painting you thought had gotten thrown away,
I noticed new elegant doodles in all your notebook margins, honey.
You see, this poem and your paint
share a tainted scrap paper birthright,
with unsent-across-the-classroom love notes,
reminders,
assignments,
and eyes stolen downward to
what might be more true than the gravity that brought down the trees it’s written down on.

Pay mind to what you rip out.
You may need it someday when your spine gives out,
and your wrinkles return to the trees,
and to the ground,
and again,
as a scrap poem or painting’s skin.

Baptisms, Baths, miracles, oceans, fear, tumultous rivers, veins, highways, the cool feeling of water evaporating off your skin, towels, wet sockless feet squeaking in shoes, water in your mouth, can’t swim, can’t sink, waves, and being tossed, and floating, and swimming hard, and splashing around and getting nowhere and being thrown twenty feet and pulled under and pushed up and gasp wet and inhale water and cough and catch your breath and float and smile, exhausted.

“All of the turns are on
this side of the foot,” you explain
in your tiny British accent. You sit next to me
on your bed, and take off
your sock
to show me the long callus
like a stretch of coral
along your foot.

“It’s like forgetting you exist,”
you explain, looking past me
into the mirror. You do not smile,
but your arms arch upward
over curves your spine down
and up,
and your bare feet burrow into
bedroom carpet.

Every French mot de danse swims mute
through the curving of your bones
while you stretch
your muscles in the only tongue I
would love to speak.
–the vernacular of grace.
You say to me,
“It’s pronounced,
‘abrasion.’”