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