*The Only Real Gift has been removed while submitted for publication to Ploughshares. Will return if publication is refused.*

A Little Love Affair

Liberating, isn’t it,
The loss of everything,
Or
The vertigo of standing
At the brink.
The original gamblers’ urge
We played this simple game
Way back before we learned
To make it complicated.
Like Go, we mark territory,
We Try not to get trapped,
We Weigh prisoners against
The prisoners of our other halves.
And when we lose, blood boils
For a minute,
And then re-rack the stones,
A rematch, another go at it.
In the end, we learn
The perfect temperature
For tea,
Is two degrees below boiling.
A degree higher, you burn the leaves.
A degree lower, and all you make
Is hot water.

Actors acting in a play
All sit down at the end of the day
To watch themselves and wonder why
The people closest to their eye
All stand up and clap, But never stay.

Protest

removed while submitted for publication.

This is when you drop your heart,
And walk a league away
To play the game of being incomplete,
A bit apart
From where you'd like to be.

Puma.

One Less


Removed while submitted for publication.

Feather

There is a girl who loves a rock
Tethered so, she cannot stray too far.
But
She is not a beast or a faerie;
She is a feather,
And feathers float forever,
Until they come to rest
In the arms of a collector,
Or caught in the grass
Of a white picket fence.
She is a feather,
And feathers cannot settle, tethered to a rock.
Feathers settle only when
The current allows.
She is a feather,
And feathers should love the wind.

But this one loves a rock.

Wire High

And there the blood flows,
Down the groove in the middle of the
Sword of Damocles.
I never fashioned myself to be the
Killing kind
of history major.

Between the coffee
And the humidifier that you
Borrowed from a friend,
There lies a little lunch break.
you can unplug a little,
Take a deeper breath.

The pages can wait
Can write themselves in twelve-point Wingdings
Until you unwind,
Until you recline,
The breath of a girl in the air, and
In her underwear.

But let it slide down,
Feel the energy draining away,
Pull the wires out of your ears,
And know that we are the generation
That taught the world to kill itself
And chew gum
At the same time.