We are all a little broken
but our heartstrings don't need tuning.
They trill and shine and echo
in our chambered chests,
rise and fall in purest melancholy,
sit still and wait patiently.
Sometimes in the silence of the outside
I can hear a collective drumbeat--
the wounded marching,
snapping our pieces back together.




-03.01.2013

I am not a flower.

I am not a flower,

certainly not yours. 

No slender stem,

delicate leaves, 

or fragile femininity.

If you crush me,

I do not please

you with fragrant and honeyed verses.

I sting.

Like nettles and thorns,

like salt rubbed in a wound--

yo no soy una flor.

Como una tormenta de viento

I tear things limb from limb,

y cuando bailo en el cielo,

yo saco tu aliento,

and leave you floundering on the shore.

While I still soar.

-02.04.13

My first attempt at Spanish poetry, dedicated to Sandra Cisneros. 

When you smile at me,
metaphors metamorph out of
thin air and the light that shines
from your tenderness;
and like tendrils they creep
up my spine, graze my ribs
and grow to the very ends of my limbs
to hang like soul-shaped fruit,
ambrosia on the poetree.
Your smile tastes like water on the parched lips
of a desert traveler,
like life,
cupped in strong but soft hands,
hands that make fists
to knock on doors,
then hold them open,
then hold themselves open
so that I may find comfort in them.

I haven't seen your smile in a long time.
Haven't felt that warmth like the breath in my body
and I'm staring to wonder if these chills
were of loneliness
and not ecstasy.

It's not easy for me
to sing these songs,
and not know
how long the silence
will echo when I'm done.

Eternity isn't even a whisper on my lips-
I only wait for my next heartbeat,
afraid its faint rhythm will fade completely.

Sense and logic betray me,
curl away like so much smoke
I use to choke the rising sound of war drums in my chest.
When I let go, the resulting wave
crashes through dam(n) and all debris
and I frantically try to
scoop gray matter free before
it scrambles into a beautiful delusion.

I am no stranger to insanity, or
its artistic qualities.
The way it paints dreams
into the daytime,
interrupting rational thought,
unapologetic as hunger.
The yearning and grieving
for imaginary feelings
never fades into the backdrop.
Small melodramas of the mind
play themselves out center-stage
of my 4-chamber opera house.
At performances' end, the atrium fills
with a bitter taste,
sharp and metallic like a knife's edge
that I hold between my teeth when I smile these days.

I gave the soft-edged ones away,
along with the better parts of my head.
I may have made you up in their stead.
Turned you from flesh to a
foolish girl's poetree.
Thought I'd cling to your idea like limbs
to a support a weak reality.

Blindly,
I grope at twisting vines
and when I open my eyes
I freefall,
pray that my roots
are strong
but soft enough
to catch me.



Nov./Dec. 2012

I have been walking lightly, living on the surface of things, thinking that if I look hard enough I’ll understand what’s underneath. I've imagined it, often vividly, but I received only fragments of meaning. But to really see and know I have to tread firmly, confident that when I fall (because we all fall) it will not be into nothingness. It is the unknown that frightens, yes, but there is always something in the darkness. If I open my arms and welcome that something like a new friend, I will succeed. I will be safe.

Poem about Love

I never sought love from other men,
just from my mother,
and from my father to a lesser extent.
Love has always meant duty,
you see,
my mom was past thirty
and within a month she was married
and within a year I was born.
Love is sacrifice, I’m told.
But love is the sacrifice
of responsibility
as I’ve come to see.

Family
is a strange tree
and mine was uprooted,
shipped overseas.
I was just a seedling, but
my mother never forgot
how broken branches hurt
like broken bones,
and never fully healed.
When the heart is in the motherland
it doesn’t make music for children.
But I still put my heart in my mother’s hands,
and the cold that seeped in has been hard to let go.
I grew on tears,
mine and hers,
withered inside, and didn’t care for the sky anymore.
Now that I’m older,
(still a child, always her child)
and my heart pumps more blue than warmth,
heartstrings stretched and frozen
to any melodies--
I have to learn sacrifice all over again.
Learn to take responsibility for my heart,
to dance closer to the flames
even if I risk getting burned.

Loving is learned.

There were lessons in vulnerability
that I avoided,
so that only I could hurt myself.
Scar tissue layered like bark around my heart,
climbed like vines up the inside of my arms.
My dad taught me that if I never expect anything from anyone,
I will never be disappointed.
But I always expected too much from myself
and made it hard to let go
of the barbed wire keeping the world out
and the hurt in.

I tend to ruin a good thing before I even begin,
too afraid to know love, to melt the ice away
and drown in the coming tide.

I could never let anyone in
past iron walls, rusted
to resemble warm blood from a distance.

Red isn’t always the color of love, and
actions don’t always translate
transgeographically.
And why does it have to be either/or
when actions and words are the arteries and veins
of the same feelings?

There are definitions and there are realities,
and love is ever-shifting.

Its conditionality put a price
on something I didn’t think I could afford.
The indifference
to my tears dried them up and left
an empty well.
I could drop pennies
or diamonds
but still only hear the same hollow echo of
four chambers empty of a
four-letter word.

All I wanted
was for them to read the love between lines and dashes.
But our tongues always caught
the wrong syllables,
and we never learned the common language.

Parents model the roles we expect to see and be,
And when I say that men are incapable of loving,
I only speak from what I believe,
And when I say I will be lonely,
I speak from a deep-centered inadequacy.

Every now and then
I spiral in self-doubt,
am astonished when I feel a pulse
under thin skin.
Some feelings are still foreign
and fall apart in the absence of an interpreter.

I try to learn this language all over again,
start with a pen--
write a thousand ways
to know love.





--09/03/2012

not quite a wallflower

wallflower
sounds too pretty a word
for someone so plain.
i think i would look at a flower on the wall;
though small and faded
it still possesses more elegance than,
say, a leaf
and remains much more appealing than
a fly.

Tongue tied

Sounds try to outrun each other, hurtle over teeth and tumble out my mouth with no parting kiss, no time for my tongue to untangle itself. Deep breath. Try again.