Re-Vamp

I've decided just now I'm going to make a greater effort to blog and write more. I mean, I'm a creative writing major, for heaven's sake. So, I will make an effort to blog every night about whatever. There'll be crap, and there'll be gold, that's just how it works.

I found my green glasses and the writer is back in me.

:D

Dear Poem,

I left the window open all of last October,
and you never found your way
through moon-licked thickets
and rows of P.O. Boxes
to my new address.

Meanwhile, November lost itself to the rain.

Through December I thought maybe
God forgot that cluster of stars
I found you in when they dropped
into the palm of my hand,
squinting one-eyed, upside down
on the purple shag rug.

But you weren’t lost in the sky, just lost
in the mail, along with all Mark’s promised letters,
stuck to the upper lip of someone else’s mailbox.

Meanwhile, the snow got too heavy
to hear the passing cars.

In January you came back
on an x-ray scan of a black pair of lungs,
gulping life with my jigsaw breaths.
Somehow you managed to hide again
behind the Christmas tree box
where we found the wasp nest.
I scooped you between a Goodwill mug
and a pad of post-its so you couldn’t fly away.

Meanwhile, our ears pounded with
beating wings.

In February, I tapped you off the sides,
begging for a sting, hoping 1:30
was the right kind of morning, my toes
were the right kind of frostbite blue,
and the rain, the thunder, the light
from Wilmore’s water tower
wouldn’t scare you back inside.

Doubt

I believe in silence
the prayer whispered between
earlobe and the goose bumps
caught in your throat
while blood curls back from
toes and stiff digits like
one foot caught outside
the quilt in the morning.

I believe in the shadow
of your clavicle sticking
up from your collar
when that black t-shirt
is stuck under you and
you’re fighting for
the remote after I
refuse every good show
for cartoons from 1958.

I believe in thorn pricks
when the hole in the fence
isn't as big as it was
last summer when I
still liked mustard
and oatmeal but not
together.

I believe in vicious breaths
into plastic carport grass
facedown
when the lights are swarmed
with June bugs and nobody's
voice carries past
the glow worms we left
in the cracks of sidewalk.

©Jordyn Rhorer 2010

Allay

I will unknot the creases in your muscles where your inside map space curls into a roundabout u-turn crossed over bypass to nowhere. Your hemispheres of patterned land separated by violet ink swirls under your eyes curl around the same route into white knuckle grip, snow chained fingers on a steering wheel. I will loosen them, mold, curl them around my own just like the days when my whole hand could fit into my daddy's, when necks wrapped themselves out the car window open mouthed, eyes shut. I'll fold myself inside your bones, unscrew all the pins, try and teach you the geography of your complexion. Please learn that skin is skin and my skin wants for your skin and it was meant to sag and wrinkle and twist around green branched, split ended in spring, curl in lip pursed u's where I've been. It breaks open in powdered flakes of orange leaf autumn. I will wrap you around every season, pull, stretch and maybe taffy will feel right, your lips will find the smile God found in the dark. I'll let you simmer, let you rise and scoop out the seeds of your middle stuck end-to-end like vanilla beans spread over Mom’s bamboo cutting board. You are sugar orange slices left stale in a crystal star-of-David bowl in the back cabinet of the dining room curio. Once I tried to hide you under the porch planks, between panes of tinted car windows, behind the lattice we put up to keep the rabbits out, but you were too much lightening and not enough still quilted silence. Someday I will knead your shoulders into raisin bread. Smooth.

©Jordyn Rhorer 2010

Solid Ground

I always told you that you were as impossible
as the orange on fine point paint brushes
scattered across a kitchen table, burnt
like it was scraped off the horizon coming
through the window to me, hands soft
on hips, begging for two more minutes.

I always told you that you were as impossible
as the moon across my bedspread and I told you
to please come in, please not be scared, please
just breathe in my ear and we could press our
feet against the wall to cool our souls from
ninety-six degree summer pinched between
my ear and your chest; give me sixty more beats.

I always told you that you were as impossible
as believing I could dance, believing I could
crumble in someone’s arms, believing I could
take apart your smile with a snow-fallen evening
just down the street, hiding your car behind
curved avenues, can’t see from kitchen windows,
being too chicken to stay in the park after
the gate should’ve been closed, I could never
believe in my own skin and you were so

impossible as every license plate that passed
on the highway—you always called it the highway
and I bit my tongue on interstate—heading south
to the nearest Taco Bell, you are the most
impossible double-take, red eyed, cowlick
I couldn’t flatten down no matter how much
I begged for you to stay. You are as impossible
as 21 days a year ago, the whim that set me
across the table from you and I lifted my eyes,
and I believed.

©Jordyn Rhorer 2010