The Dancer

Stripes inch through your spine

With the twist of a hula hoop

As it kinks disk by disk towards

A surface, stoic even

To a flimsy ballerina.

Your figure droops into the

Dirt so far that I doubt my

Tylenol on your throat could

Bring back our memories of lights

Passing beside me, between 

This audience to thaw 

Before your stage, your throne. 

It’s your femur that first slides

To a crack with rifles 

Left about a lawn of cement

In the debris of this city.

I get sick with a lone

Pigeon at the sight of you.

Should I call for salt pools 

To fill my eyes instead? 

You may be rattling in this 

Winter but I still can’t—

Not since you slit the flair

Of our ribbons in the throat.

I know that was before your 

Knuckles, ten of twenty in this 

Lake of vodka, bled 

From falling into

Metal on the floor. 

But I won’t forget mom’s voice

Saying you’d bring cash from 

The glamour and noise 

Of a ninety degree day,

The same day you left—

Prodigal daughter to a family of

Bones the year she danced home. 

To Let Pain Talk

Does pain confuse you as much as it does me?

I'm not talking about how the divine can coexist with suffering but rather, what pain is. Where it is.

It's here when I have a stomach ache at 3am that fights my sagging eyelids. It's there on the West Coast when my best friend can't lift the bar of loneliness from her chest.

It scares be how concentrated it is in the hair-raising condition of the homeless man on the streets of Boston in March. How did he make it? His back folds over, far more crooked than my 96 year old grandpa's. It's in the wide-eyed slave of human trafficking with her posture forever lost. I see it when I come out of the safety of a private college's walls and remember that crucifixion is not just an abuse of the past.

But I think pain goes even deeper--do you ever feel it in its physical absence? I sense it in times of peace, when all is as it should be; when the family reunites for holidays and the kitchen is giddy with smells of wild rice soup; when I drive home from work and auburn rays hit the road ahead. This evil lingers in my every day because these days, these "good days," are a lie.

They try to convince me to be satisfied so I try to drink them up, every last drop, and savor the taste--but no! My glass shatters against this warm kitchen wall where complacency dies and we all remember to imagine true good.