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

Here I am. The hotel business room at a Holiday Inn Express, waiting until sleep finds its way back, or I crash in half-sleep comatose for the night. Two hours to Gatlinburg tomorrow and then three more to home. So, let’s go through the trip so far:
1. Cape San Blas, FL—the usual family hang out with Gramps and Granny at the beach house. three days.
2. Cocoa Beach, FL—waiting on the boat/getting on the ship. two days.
3. International waters—Heading to Free Port. Twelve to fifteen hours.
4. Free Port, Bahamas—one day
5. Nassau, Bahamas—one day (Atlantis water park)
6. International waters—total loss in the casino: $28.67. one day.
7. Cocoa Beach, FL—prolonging the inevitable? One day.
8. 2004 Toyota 4-Runner—seven hours or so. Who knows.
9. Spartanburg, SC—here we are and here we keep breathing.
Do people say “we” to give themselves a sense of comfort? Well, I guess then I should say, do “we” say “we” to comfort “ourselves”? Makes you feel like you’re not the only one who hasn’t slept in three days, who hasn’t had a decent, full, complete night’s sleep. Tired is not the question. I’m tired enough to put Rip Van himself to shame. It’s a question of surrender. My boyfriend once told me that in order to have the most fulfilling night’s sleep; one should simply surrender to the pull of fatigue. It shouldn’t be a forced act. Maybe that’s where I sit. Seven to twelve hours in a car isn’t exactly my idea of a good time, so I try to sleep. And here I am. I’ve been to two hotels since leaving the ship and I still have not slept.
I miss my bed.
I miss routine. I miss Mark. Hell, I miss work. And it’s not that I haven’t enjoyed myself—I’ve had a blast—I just…don’t want to be coasting anymore. I’m sick of summer.
I never could quite understand why it was that I hated disliked summer so much. It’s too hot, or It’s too humid, or There’s no rain, just didn’t seem to cut it. It wasn’t the meteorological aspects of summer I hated so much, it was just the emptiness of it. I wasn’t working for a goal, wasn’t trying to reach a certain rite of passage. It was just…summer. During my regulated, ask-to-pee, days in the public school system, I understood that the purpose of every day was to work to the end of the year and go on to the next one. But what’s this middle? This time period where everyone seems to seem doubly alive and doubly…pathless.
Autumn is a time of preparation. It’s time to stock up and take inventory for what is to come. It is productive. In winter, everything is dormant. Waiting, stilling in the suspense for what comes next, still preparing for the next stage of life. The ashes of the phoenix, if you will. And spring is all about rebirth. It’s new life. It’s green; it’s a display of strength and endurance over the course of the cold months. But then you have summer. Summer. Relaxing, overbearing summer. Is there not a productive steam to the hot sixty? Is there not another sight but the flailing of springtime’s joy, shaking it and choking it out until it’s been bled dry? This is why I don’t sleep. I think too much. It is also why I’ll live somewhere where the seasons are blurred around the edges and you end up with two and a half instead of four.

10:43. I’m still awake. Typical, I won’t say that’s not normal for me. Eleven, twelve, I’m usually up. We’ll see if the clock ticks past two for me again tonight, though. Mark said he would call at eleven. So a good seventeen minutes until he interrupts my brooding. Good. I need someone to. I need someone to shake me. To rock me to sleep. I feel like a jumble of angles and soft muscles and crease marks from the sheets. I don’t feel human like this.
We keep the temperature at home at about the 75 degree mark. I’d lower it ten if I could but my mom has hyperthyroid disease and she’s cold all the time. I have two fans in my bedroom, though and most nights in the summer I keep the window open and let in some good old Kentucky air. Well, it would be if I didn’t live in a lower middle-class suburban neighborhood on the very edge of I-75. I can’t remember a time when I couldn’t hear the interstate from my backyard. Daddy works third shift at the Toyota plant so he needs to live in a place where he can leave as late as possible. That way, him and mom can have as much of the day as possible together. 4pm to 4am, he’s at work. So, you can imagine I don’t see him much either. It’s alright though. My dad and I are of the stand-offish type so neither of us need that much attention.
Maybe. I don’t feel like I need that much attention. Of course, I’m a writer, so what the hell do I know? My life is within the bindings of moleskin notebooks and simulated computer paper on hotel Aspire processers.
Nine minutes.
Jesus, I spend half my time checking my phone to see how long until he calls. If I don’t marry him, the next guy better be pretty impressive. I don’t imagine there will be, though. He says I make him feel worse by telling him I haven’t slept or that I have headaches late in the day. I showed him where they were, just above my ear, curving around the back of my head like those microphones they use in stage shows. Throbbing, like I could scratch out the skin, but most of the time I don’t notice they’re there. The day I pulled my knee out of the socket twice I still remember his face. Agony. Sheer agony. I knew that he loved me the moment he saw me on the ground. It was two o’clock in the morning and we were playing volleyball after prom. And I was on the floor. I dove for a ball and loosened the joint and then served, stepped down off the swing and out came my knee.
I remember he half carried me to the car. Lugged me into the backseat. I still think he’s crazy. Maybe he is for loving someone like me. Who knows. If he can love someone who’s such a calamity, he must have some sort of complex. I love him, I really do…but where do I fall in? I’m not that pretty. I’m not skinny. I’m polite, only because I’m freakishly shy. I have outbursts of spontaneous ingratitude and life-threatening, thrill-seeking behavior. I curse. I’m only lady-like when I want to sweet talk him into something. Where’s the appeal? And I’m a hypochondriac with psycho-symptomatic insomnia. Wow. I’m a keeper.
But, I guess, you know. I believe in God and Jesus and I believe in loving people and I am trying. I’m an artist. Sometimes I tell myself it’s my words he’s really in love with. It’s poetry, not the poet. If I stopped writing…would he stop loving me?
11:00 and I’m wondering if the phone will ring if I look at it. I should check if it has signal. But if I do, I’m really checking if he’s called. God, I’m obsessive. He texts to say he’ll call soon. He’s working on a survey for the University of Kentucky.

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 mine like all the days
when my whole hand could fit into my daddy's, like necks wrapped
themselves out the car window open mouthed, eyes shut. I'll fold myself
inside your bones, unscrew all the pins, 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 you 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.

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

Sidewalk Flowers

I give you my hands.
There's strawberry juice dried
in the spaces between middle and ring,
under the nail, inside the cuticles,
lumped in the bowl of my palm.
I sucked it away like an open wound
and just when I said I’d eaten too many,
I peeled away the skin of my hands,
left them behind, open, patient
like a locust shell at your feet.
Children wait in Narcissus stance,
brushing orange dust over ant holes
by the sidewalk and pointing at the
crystalline fingers, asking you if I
really meant I’d be back for them
one day.

©Jordyn Rhorer 2010

Treasure

I would put you on display like a butterfly
with a straight pin through its abdomen,
its wings dipped in wax and spread
wide—exposed. I would put you in a glass box,
paint the insides with red, your face blue as
mesa sky drop you off in ten thousand museums
and sell your copies for wells in Africa. I’d dip
you in bronze and stand you behind the pulpit,
convince everyone you were Baal or God or
the devil one, they’d call you Jesus to the
chips in the paint and all the creases in your joints.
I’d carve you from marble and cut my name
across your chest, trap you in a jar, screw on
the lid and put you away to permeate your taste.
I’d pull you out in the middle of the night, pour
you around and get the world drunk, admiring
your figure on the wall, spread over the floor,
the tapestry stitches in your back. I’d fold you
in the towels to keep them fresh, bake you
in the blackberry cobbler and stitch myself
through your veins, chisel your hands
away from David’s sling and catch
you in the light, hang you like a crystal
over the bay windows, swallow you like a pill
to cure the cancer spots under my skin, follow
you away off ocean cliffs, drink, drown, sink
to the bottom and bury you with me in the sand.

©Jordyn Rhorer 2010

Vow

I promise, there’s no way you could be anything but the
inside of a spider web. You aren’t human at all the way
your lips curl into a string thumb-tacked maze across
cork boards directing to the next paper clipping
with names scribbled over faces in red ink.
I promise you couldn’t be anything but dust
in the palm of my hands spread over the grooves
of my knuckles, knocked over the concrete
when I got to the bottom of the chalk stick.
I promise that you couldn’t be more than
the apple I plucked from the bowl on the counter
and I knew the green ones were better but
you couldn’t be anything more than
the red picnic blanket on the lawn next to the lake
and you promised you wouldn’t let the ducks
take my shoes. I promise you couldn’t be
anything but the tree in the courtyard when
Nichelle took all your Chinese food but you
just looked at me and smiled and I promise
that’s who you are when I look at you.

©Jordyn Rhorer 2010

Treaty

You owe me five more minutes
ripening by the vines out back,
sixty more seconds for the dew
to slide off the tomato’s skin.
And I owe you the time of day,
the shadow on the sundial
pointed northward since the trees
had grown too thick overhead.

You owe me two more breaths
sucked slow from the straw,
dipped in iced tea and apple juleps,
in the back of my throat while soda
fizzed in my nose. I owe you three
more words and eighteen more
seconds of grief. You owe me
something to grieve for, something
to wrap around the grasshopper’s leg,
naivety, one more week of childhood.

Give me the fish in the tank and I’ll
pull the thorns from your hands
and the open window in the morning.
You owe me the tickets to Newport,
each gallon of gasoline burned. And I
owe you every second of finger-painted
play and every page I ever read.
I owe you the ink in my heart,
but all you owe is the paint
in your lungs. You owe me color.
And I’ll give you all the rest.

©Jordyn Rhorer 2010

Low Tones

I stripped the sheets off the bed and traced
the creases in my knees all the way back
to the arrowed point under my chin,
pulling muscles wrapped over bone
into crest-curve spinal cord, following,
reading dunes like brail on leather,

The phone was off the hook, swinging
from the side of the bed, dial tones
percolating through Mom’s quilt, reaching
over the hill of my shoulders, with foreign
fingers over collarbone, under earlobe, down

wrinkled brow, up through brain stem to receptors
receiving blue light from the T.V., hollow ears
until waking, and I clicked the headset back
on its base before crawling back through
the bare mattress to where I was before
I knew the bed was empty.

The shadow shapes on the walls recounted
the hours somewhere between two and five
when dial tones turned to low tones of under-
water breathing, of toes peeling away

from the fitted sheet sprung back
from its elastic—tucked under the left ankle
through another loop of crooked joints.

The books were still strewn on the floor
with lost baseball cards and a wristfull
of hair ties, buried under grocery list poems
and cups full of pens and grape juice.

I folded the papers, flattened the pages
with the balls of my feet and reached up
to cut off the ceiling fan, turning to come
back, one head to two pillows before
I knew the bed was empty.

Odyssey

Oh the places you will go,
in hopscotch, morse code paths
to destiny, to existence. Check
under each footprint and God
will hide between your toes.
This is no common symphony,
harmony, no triplet stanza to follow.
Tread softly let the whip of summer
pass through your veins, grab you up
by the waist and carry you away.
Never fly straight to never. Always
stop along the way. Here the poet
clears the brush and ventures through
valleys of shadows, through darkened hearts,
making glow worm trails will the souls of their feet.

Release The Beast

“The best thing that could happen to poetry is to drive it out of the universities with burning pitch forks. Starve the lavish grants. Strangle them all in a barrel of water. Cast them out. The current culture, in which poetry is written for and supported by poets has created a kind of state-sanctioned poetry that resists innovation. When and if poetry is ever made to answer to the broader public, then we may begin to see some great poetry again—the greatness that is the collaboration between audience and artist.”


It seems to me that Andrew Sullivan, author of the recent essay, “Let Poetry Die”, in an online edition of “The Daily Dish” needs to update his home library. It is hard for me to believe that anyone, especially those in the writing field, could ignore the growth of poetry since the modernists. To say that poetry stopped at Ashbery is to say that the last real painters were Picasso and Pollock and that conceptual art has no place in society. It’s a pretentious statement to say the least, and in my opinion, a fairly ignorant one. Sullivan calls for poetry to be a phoenix, to die and be reborn from the ashes of its destruction, but what he doesn’t realize, I think, is that poetry is constantly renewing itself.

One can’t ignore the changes that have come through poetry that are real examples of poetry. The fact that Sullivan has the audacity to say that poetry was lost after Ashbery is a real slap in the face to amazing poets like Allen Ginsburg, Ezra Pound, Yusef Komunyakka and Rita Dove. The face of poetry and the face of the world have changed since Elliot and Frost (although their poetry is still a strong house). Just because Andrew Sullivan can’t accept change doesn’t mean he should chase poetry around like a maniac with a pitchfork. Look at Slam Poetry; look at all the performance poetry that is leaking out from big cities on down to little places like Lexington. Poetry is alive and is thriving; people just have to know where to find it. Look back at beat poetry, and post-modern poetry. They have changed the face of the way people read poetry and you look at poets like Billy Collins who have followed the footsteps of poets like Frank O’Hara and realize that poetry is adapting to become closer to the reader. It’s transforming itself for its audience. Billy Collins (certainly not a poet in Sullivan’s eyes) is one of the most popular poets of today and his roots can be seen in O’Hara’s poetry. It’s obvious his style is all his own, but his ideas are rooted in the modernists. Frank O’Hara said in “Personism, a Manifesto” that “The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages,” and that’s what has become a characteristic of contemporary poetry across the board. And it’s not surprising that poetry today is under a microscope, tied up for execution. Isn’t that what happened with Picasso? With Warhol? Just as post-modernist art has been beaten down, so have poets like Pound—following a Pollok-esque style of poetry. Art will forever be criticized and there will forever be people like Andrew Sullivan who don’t open themselves up to art.

It’s not poetry that’s pushing society away. Society doesn’t realize what poetry is. Society is becoming more accepting of the mediocre and the downright terrible. With the availability of blogs and web sites now, anyone can be a great poet, but that’s not really how it should be. I agree with Mr. Sullivan that poets shouldn’t write for other poets—they need to remember who their real audience is, but I believe poets today need a lesson in constructive criticism. Poets write for other poets, because other poets are the only ones who are willing to say, “Man, this is really terrible.” For a writer, your work is your baby. It’s your own creation, but, as Mitchell Douglas would say, “You have to be willing to let them kill the baby.” Otherwise, the mediocre seeps into our publications and the poetry that is wide-spread throughout society. Poets should be conscious of their audience, but their audience is responsible for keeping the poets in line.

It’s a fine line to walk, between accepting criticism and calling out for personal creativity, but the amount of poetry that is accepted today that shouldn’t be is vastly understated. Personally, I think that Sullivan’s statement that poetry should be “driven out of the universities with burning pitch forks.” (first of all, how can a metal pitch fork be burning?) is ludicrous. It’s the MFA “cookie-cutter” programs that are weeding out this mediocre that Sullivan is so passionate about demolishing. Sure, there are poets from those kinds of programs that stick with a copied style that no one likes to read, but writers like Nikkey Finney come with those programs, Kelly Norman Ellis and Crystal Wilkinson. MFA programs need to adapt their curriculum—update it to new forms. They might be breeding mediocrity, but they shouldn’t be done away with. They need to be revised. I was under the impression that it was important for a writer to learn the rules before breaking them—maybe I’m wrong, but these programs are dishing out poets that are the blood of poetry today.

They’re the blood of a beast that is more mighty and terrible and awesome than Mr. Andrew Sullivan realizes. Poetry is constantly renewing itself and whenever society can stop chaining it up and threatening it with these mysterious metal pitchforks that burn, it can thrive. Poetry is not a beast to be killed. Society needs to cut off its own choke collar, accept change and see the art growing around it. Don’t kill poetry—release it.

Aquainted

(Winner of the "Take Back the Night" Festival 2010)


Night is in the far corner of her bedroom,
arms over bony knees, tucked behind
the moonlit curtains, waiting
for the door handle to stop
rattling the glow-in-the-dark
planets hanging from her ceiling.

She is asphyxiated by the eternity
between the dips of the horizons,
hoping to be extinguished
into silent sunrise so she can
pretend she doesn’t exist,
so she can go back to bed
and pretend it isn’t so warm.

Night has lost her nerve
to her own reflection. She is afraid
of the black in her eyes and the stars
on her skin, all the constellation
blue prints. She smothers them in
flannel pajamas and prays the pounding
in her head will disappear behind
the bed skirt and stay with all
the lost socks and wool sweaters.

She hides inside her cornflower
blanket and imagines she
is the sun inside a jar, flickering
through flutters of wings,
pushing against the lid,
wishing someone had
remembered air holes.

lexington (1st draft)

my first breaths were drawn blue.
even at birth i wanted to be a part
of the sky and my mother said
i wouldn’t open my eyes for a month

so i listened to daddy’s voice
and wondered what I was.

maybe i’m late discovering
myself; my eyes just opened
and i have these new fingers spread
over the curve of my brow to shield
orange kentucky summer.

why couldn’t i have been a tobacco field cloud?
i have these arm angles that bend
over body and these palms of hands
that taste hay bales and sweat
off newborn calves’ backs.
the air is so dry
full of morning

here i am
drawing blue breath
and squeezing my toes around
all this grass they call blue.
but to me, it’s just as green
as the vines in my chest

i am rooted
in this place where
blue was my first breath.

Random Rants

I'm not really sure if I ever got around to one central point....but that's what rants are for anyway. Just some thoughts on humanity:

The human race is incredibly fascinating. Fascinating and hilarious, I might say. Being a part of the race, I can’t say I’m not susceptible to its calamities, its chaos. However, if one steps back and looks at how easily we tattoo the history of our race on our skin they might find that the pigment is so distorted we can’t tell which way is backwards and which is our front. Humans remember in a way that is unlike the rest of earth’s inhabitants. We remember the mistakes of the past and take them on as our own burlap load over this rail-tie crossing journey we call life. My sins are the sins of my mother, of her mother, of hers and so on…


This isn’t to say that we should forget the past at all. That’s how things like the Holocaust repeat themselves. No, we shouldn’t forget what we’ve learned over the course of our existence, but have we paid so much attention to what our father’s father’s father’s father did that we spend each day making it our duty to make up for it. What the human race fails to see is that we cannot recall the entire history of our ancestors’ sins on our bones or they’ll break. We must own our own sins and right them before anything else.

What am I getting at? Let me find my point here.

If we continue to try and make up for things that are gone and done with, how will we move forward? We constantly live in the past and with our necks craned so far behind us, we’re liable to stumble over our next big problem. Honorable as it may be to try and make up for our blunders, we over exacerbate them by bringing them up day after day.

Here’s what I propose:

Make a mistake (for it’s good to make mistakes every now and again) and learn from it. Apologize, repent, whatever you have to do, and then move on. Move on. In Isaiah 43:18 God says, “’Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past.’” He goes on to say that He is making new things and making, “’a way in the desert; and streams in the wasteland.’” God makes all things new again and forgives those who repent. We should remember our sin, learn from our sin, but should not dwell on it. The whole point of having a savior is having sins removed. Our transgressions are gone and forgotten by God, so why do we insist on remembering them.

I’m afraid, I haven’t quite reached what I intended to say initially. We as humans, as people have difficulties accepting the fact that we’re no longer guilty in God’s eyes. That’s not to say that we don’t sin, but that we’re forgiven for what we do. When God wipes the slate clean, it’s so hard to wipe it clean in our minds.

There are terrible things that our own nature can lead to when left unchecked, but they are also things that I think we inherently know are wrong. However, we can’t seem to forget the years of slavery that was put on the African Americans in the U.S. or that Blacks were discriminated against for years after was slavery was gone. I’m not saying these things should be forgotten, just put to rest. We can’t atone for something forever. I’m also not saying that God forgives all of America for that blotch of iniquity, because I don’t know the mind of God and can’t speak for him. All I’m trying to say is that we as a people need to put to rest all of our reservations. I can’t look at every person on the street with a different race than mine and think, Oh, well, I better be nice to them because of all that stuff that happened in the past.

That’s not getting rid of the problem. The only way to be rid of racism is to look at each individual person as a person with thoughts and ideals. We as Christians are taught to love all people. Jesus says to his disciples in Mathew 25:45 “’I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.’” We are called to not just be evangelicals or to “save” the masses, but to love all people and serve them through our service to God. Service comes from love and therefore if we love God, we serve him. If we love people, we serve them. How do we love people? Look at them as individuals and stop remembering the history of the world when we see the color of someone’s skin.

The way we remember also gives me another point—we hold grudges. We can’t let go of, not only our own transgressions, but the sins that others have committed against us. Forgiveness is a mouthful for humans—for Americans especially. We’re taught from an early age that this world is eye for an eye and that no wrong should go unpunished.

Unpunish it.

That’s another dare I have for you. The next time someone says something or does something to you, love them and let it go unpunished. We’re not the judges of the world. We as Christians are not God’s mouth and we cannot speak for him. It is not my job or anyone else’s to condemn those who do wrong. That’s God’s job. Our job is to love people. Our job is to stop hurting people with the way we remember their debts to us and the way we live around them. Our job is to be the servants of people regardless of what they do to us. That’s how Christ came into the world and that’s how He taught us to be throughout His teachings. We must come with a childlike eagerness to the Lord and we must stop looking inwardly to how we’ve been hurt. Look into the eyes of that one co-worker you can’t stand, look into the lines of the face of that kid that insists on insulting you and tell me that Jesus doesn’t love them too. Remember that they are one of God’s creations as much as you are and remember that God forgave you for the wrongs you did. Tell me that there’s one reason that we shouldn’t forgive and love them.

Vacant

By the back lot of Spalding’s bakery on West 6th
I reached my fingers around the rusted gate
of used-to-be farmland dropped out-of-the-sky
sideways into inner-city and curled my hand
around a pale blue blossom, took the petals
between the printed pads of index and thumb.

You drew plans for empty spaces on your notepad.

I kicked the broken bottles at my feet,
asked you to hold my notebook but,
stuck my pen through the thick
of my ponytail and clambered
over the red gate, dropped
into a patch of could-be-poison-oak.

I wrote the names of fauna on my hands,
pressed my palms to the bricks of the bakery,
touched my cheek to the panes of the windows,
scribbled the taste of the dust on my forearm.

You pressed yourself against the metal until
the flakes of red-40 paint stuck to the white lettering
of your t-shirt, while I turned over rock and abandoned
lawn chair, counting daddy-long-legs and the circles
of a spider’s web, drawing further away.

I told you writing was about discovering empty.

Mourn

This is the silence I must tell, when lips blessed
the taste of goodbye, the taste of salted
holy water comig from eyes, when faces
were thankful for night to hide tomorrow
while it clung to the pressed corners of their mouths.

I found myself reciting back all the moon hymns
that I could remember, looking through the glow
of your cell phone, catching you with streak-lines
and the skin of your brow crumpled down
to the bridge of your nose.

I followed the blood-rush with my fingers,
up from the tops of your ears
to the bottom of your cheekbone,
seeping into the whites of your eyes,
stinging the coffee brown around the black
while reflected streams of light suck
to the edges like fast drying ink.

I told you the silence as you pressed
your ear to the bottom of my collarbone,
so you could feel the poetry under my skin,
crawling up the strings of my spine,

so you wouldn't feel so much
like we were burning.

A New Year, A New Together

He dipped his middle finger into the holy water and touched it to his face as we left St. Paul's Cathedral on New Year's Eve. I smiled to Father Charles and passed the baptismal without a second glance. The water was still and shining in the marble bowl, but when his fingers breeched the surface it rippled and swirled like any other liquid.

Must you be so holy? Must you, to be able to touch the water and make it seem so ordinary again? I was sure he was holy enough, good enough, but not me.

We laced our hands together and blessed water wet the spaces between my fingers and his. We climbed down from God's great house and I admired the structure from the sidewalk. Our breath made ghosts around us but neither of us said anything. The wind whipped through the space between our bodies, sending shivers up my bare legs.

I let the silence sink in for a moment as I pondered deep in my heart. Mary's motherhood, Joseph's disconnection with his only love, his helplessness. While Mary shined in God's hands, Joseph passed by, admired her with reverence--and shame.

Was it shame? What was in Joseph's heart as he looked at Mary? Did he see how pure she was? Did he see how she smiled and moved and how blessed she was? Did his heart sink like a rock in his chest when he realized that she was good?

What did Mary see in Joseph when she looked back?

We walked the next three blocks to the car. My shoes made the only sound between us, counting my steps against the cobblestones. I counted with them and wondered at his warmth next to me, avoided his gaze.

But, Joseph loved Mary. Of that, I was sure.

He opened the passenger door for me, smiled and his eyes were thankful. For what, I can't be certain, but I knew he saw my shame, my questions, and he told me I was wonderful.

Wonderfully disconnected.