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.