The pink skies and dry air
The blue tongues and dark secrets
soften like chalk pastels
on our fingerprints

Remember picking up pinecones
discovering the city by bike
surprised by anything
we could dig and bury

Nine p.m. is fading
The steepest sand hill
is still sinking
and your hair isn’t short anymore

My teeth are straight 
and my tires are flat
and your dog has been dead for years

So we move on 
thinking we’re clever
swimming against the tide
toward our new fears

We drive down one-ways
in opposite directions
remembering our swingset
when country Taylor Swift plays

We used to want each other’s 
happy stories
the way adults like sob stories
to donate to and feel better 
about themselves

We used to hold up the moon 
with our feet, peace signs high
popcorn stuck in our gums
Photographs veiled with dust
at the back of our drawers

I’m beginning to sleep 
before midnight
with the playroom black
The door closed

The dolls lay close
but not touching

I have spent most of my life as a writer, 
spinning universes and microscope lenses,
cosmic horrors, and hope.
Intellectual treatise, statistical research, and internet rant.
but despite this,
and despite months of trying,
I am shit at writing love poems.

And you, 
you deserve love poems
but convention and tradition offer me no council

I mean, 
I could promise pull down the moon for you, 
and I’m sure you’d be impressed by my scientific prowess 
as I tear chapters from your favorite science fiction 
to build the world’s first tractor beam…
But the minute I turn that thing on, 
oceans will pull back from distant shores 
and rush towards our coastal town 
killing hundreds of our friends 
and thousands of innocent fish somewhere in the vicinity of Tahiti, 
and I just don’t think expressing love with the mass murder of people 
…and fish 
makes a whole lot of sense.

You can call me unromantic, 
but no matter how fond of you I am, 
I just don’t think any one person is worth an extinction level event.

I could tell you that your soulful, eyes shine like the sun, 
that you are like staring at the sun,
But, one of the myriad reasons I love you
is that unlike some other loves, 
in some other poems,
you are not out to blind me. 
…and unlike the sun, 
you don’t give me skin cancer.

I am suspicious that
celestial metaphors secretly suck.
Maybe I’m being too literal, 
but I feel like comparing our love to silent, 
deadly titans, suspended in cold unknowable expanse, is like saying
we will always be so distant, we will only really see each other 
in the reflections of our past.

I want better for us,
words that don’t imply 
emotions have rendered us scientifically illiterate sociopaths.

After hours and months, the best I’ve been able to come up with is this: 
I’ll be right back, with coffee.

No, seriously,
I think these might be 
The Most Romantic Words. 
…Hear me out.

When I say, I’ll be right back with coffee
I mean I will face blindness, 
from the actual sun, 
at whiskey hangover o’clock,
so you can sleep a little longer.

I mean I want your mind to function at full capacity
because while, yes, you are inarguably beautiful,
I’m very much like a zombie
in that I am really into you for your brains.

It means, I want to give you comfort
and as proper Seattleites 
our comfort curls steaming
from mugs clutched between fingers
and tongues tempered to know 
a little bitterness enhances warmth.

When I say, “I’ll be right back with coffee”,
I mean you’ve known me to leave,
And I have known you to leave,
and we’ve seen each other run
both away from and toward dangerous things
…like each other
and while we may put cold unknowable distance between us, 
if I can provide warmth, or comfort, or a few minutes of peace
rest assured,
even if I have to go for a while,
I’ll be right back, with coffee.

Another storm has the neighbors’ chickens
all lumped together and subdued, so
I can’t hear them from my attic room.

Rain has thrown itself
for days against the roof.
“What is the cruelest month?” people ask.

Last year I watched a man
put one poor frozen bird
in a garbage bag at the end of winter;
it had been stuck in a corner of the coop.

That’s what Spring does: uncover
what you thought was gone, flood
the dirt and leave you to wonder
which is meaner-
the freeze or its long thaw.

End of the year gray. Anchors
Where balloons should be, or: 
Could peace wait on the outer
Bank of sane. How in the holiday
Buzz to say nothing for clear, that is:

Give me back remembering,
Its attendant costumed sting.

The portraiture made overkill
By rain. No incoming. The quantum
State the same. The slide to black,
The self-quilled quell to love
The heartburn sun, its citrus sky. 
If only.

i.
In the other world, everything smells like cherries.
Every phone call is the news of someone’s death,
and every cigarette is candy. In the other world, 
you tell me you do not love me every day, and our
bed is made from cedar trees. The horses run rider-
less and frightened, chased by men with bottles for
weapons and collarbones made of ice. The plains
are a burnt orange in the other world, and everyone
reeks of a longing to understand.

ii.
In the other world, she never died, and everything
tastes like gunmetal. Everyone washes themselves
in coldness and sleeps in the bath. In the other world,
I tell you to keep the dogs at bay, and our bed is made
from palm leaves. The ocean laps at sand that is still
glass, riddled with shipwreck. The mountains tumble
down themselves in the other world, and everyone
speaks to each other in tongues.

iii.
In the other world, everything sounds like a heart-
beat. Everything is made of tinsel, multi-colored, and
glows in the dark. In the other world, we tell each 
other every secret, and our bed is made from cattails.
Grief slithers in and out of our ears, only frightened
away by singing. The grasslands mumble mutely to
themselves in the other world, and everyone knows
only their own names.

Part 1: Untitled

It was yesterday or something, when I heard 
the song playing in a store, asking

do I make myself a blessing to everyone I meet?

I don’t sing it to myself, exactly, but I do repeat it, 
metallic gyre, all the day long.

In the at-home lab of an electrical engineer,
I was surrounded by metallic gyres (not an industry term,)
tiny spools of wire thread that do not unwind 
to fulfill their purpose.

I touched things carefully, understanding 
none of them, vaguely 
susceptible like a green bruise because

we had woken up in one another’s 
legs. Do I make myself a blessing?

(I really do. I am 
not perfect, but lovely,

and a perceived dearth of this,
of lovely people, is just a 
cultivated skew, benefiting whom?

It’s like, capitalism.)

Anyway, unearthed Soviet 
tubes filled with brief 
forests of material mythos

surrounded me, hofbrau, 
complex blessing. Engineer says: 
…(the) reactors all disappeared 
and who knows where they are. Each could kill
100,000 people.

He makes coffee, I sit on the lawn.

Oh, and at 1:47 we watched a rocket 
ascend. It did not go straight up,

in case you are wondering.

Part 2: Rocket Ascent at Vandenberg

It appeared to experience 
a horizontal epoch, a teendom.

Maybe meandering is part of all 
great inclinations. I’m reminded of

“…the falcon cannot hear the falconer,” 
but that’s never really true, it’s only a game.

The rocket could definitely hear the falconer,
and I feel sure that it still does, 
even at this very moment.

The town knows about darkness, the slithered purple 
that comes on the land when rotation hides the sun.
Something gathered, slow and heavy and electric, almost 
as though the town knows evil is coming, and its shape.

From here we can’t see spots on the sun. We know 
where the roads go and where, how the ground lies.
The town has us because we know it, and it knows us.
It sees through our lies, even the ones we tell ourselves.

And in the dark, the town is ours and we are the town’s. 
Being in the town is prosaic, sensuous, alcoholic;
black galaxies shot with morphic red. We see ourselves 
drowning in the sweet evil falls and liking it.

There is no life here but the death of days.
Something is going to happen. Can’t we feel it?

we’re crying in a costco parking lot 
fiending for that intimacy we once felt
because every so often we lose it and
then i get depressed when i think you deserve much better 
sometimes i think i deserve better too most of the time it feels 
like i am already holding all the good that’s out there
large and fragile in my arms i hold on for dear life

the woman parked across from us is staring 
i wonder if she’s ever felt like a failure

on my knees on the stairs that lead up to your father’s bedroom
we’ve unearthed that intimacy and it takes us away
as usual so easily in the dark of the oakland warehouse
the delight of the freedom to touch taste tie
no time to worry about whether 
my roommates will hear us laughing when the cheap ikea
bed gives up and we keep fucking on the debris 
sometimes i’m so ashamed at the pleasure 
of the way you fill me in these moments

on the stairs in my mouth in my hands
i wonder if we could really feel things all that differently

the car seats are reclined as far as they can go 
we’re here again face to face with each other 
trying hard not to look away because we’re not ready
to be face to face with the end
honey let’s take the sobbing upstairs
and it becomes a perfectly choreographed waltz with
your head gently falling onto my heavy chest while hands wrap hands
when we make contact the weight is lifted and you fall asleep as quick as always
i hate that i can’t help but stare your at-peace tender face 
moving in perfect synchronicity with the rhythm of my unsteady
breath as it ruffles your hair 

i fall asleep with lips and tears in your hair
i wonder if anything lasts for ever

the ammonite an index of sutures
i got tired of cataloging them
hermetically sealing little traumas
afraid they’d get to know one another go boom
little mother catastrophes instead
i smashed little rocks to bits in a ditch
each shard a memory released pressure
from stomach the common burial ground
the cavity of accumulation
each little box coated in dust and feelings
each glass stone chamber not really secret
i get ready to shatter the discretions
i open my palms no explosions no pain
coalesce little traumas wrap your wounds
around each other a chrysalis blood
a becoming of feathers of air a fire