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

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.

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.

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.

12/14 trees and things

Snow

I found you in a cotton shirt,
lying long ways in the living room floor,
while the ceiling fan slowed to a crawl
and December chill crept in from the window.
You dropped your shoulders into the Saxony carpet
while the fibers bent around you like perfect eggshell sand.
They cradled the base of your neck, reminded you
of a time when summer filled the room, filled
our mouths, tasted wine thick between us.
And you didn’t seem to notice
when I said your name.

~

Oak

He looks at me with oak tree brown,
wise, like the crimson rings in the whites
of his eyes count the age of his soul.

He sways but does not sleep.

If I broke apart his skin and searched for green,
I wonder if I would find wilted leaves,
if I would find bark running between
veins in the branches.

Wise, like the crimson rings in the whites
of his eyes count the age of his soul.

Earthly Swallow

Pages turned to grey
as each moment lost itself
in sand drips of hourglasses,
in floral couch cushions
and in lightless stars
of the Kuiper belt.

Ink ran down our fingers,
bled from the corners
of our mouths, around
mason jar glasses
full of communion wine,
around planetesimal forms
standing eclipsed in our pupils.

Words erased themselves
from Earth's history.
Syllable by syllable they fled
from the underside
of a billion tongues, escaping
off the edges of open umbrellas

and became memories captured
in a firefly's tail, burning out in summer,
setting the space between your fingers aglow.

We were zeroed in,
back to black-skiy square one
when our languages never breathed
and eyes told our stories
like windows thrown open
to rid our minds of all the smoke,
when open mouths were pressed
in lines and bodies learned to say
I need you.

Pages turned to grey
and skies consumed my goodbye,
wrappped themselves around like wax paper
and banished sound
from our moment.

Atonement

When the moon swells, we’ll all die.
It’s just inevitable, in fact she’s been
bloated these past few days.

She sucks in the night sky and chews
up the stars between her teeth.
And her belly laugh sings us all to sleep.

When the moon swells, she pines
for the ocean’s touch and she’s reaching
out for him to take her back where she belongs.

Moon from water, earth from water,
we are all in love with liquid, longing
to be blanketed in soundless glide.

Shale

The sheets are stone against the bed,
crumpled in a mountainous rock face
by the footboard, and the blankets
lie spread out on the floor like
a valley at the foothills.

Something in these sheets pricks
the edge of her mind in the night,
a chronic tautness in her muscles
to fuel the insomniatic twitching.

She covers herself in earth each night,
buried alive beneath quilted cliffs.
She hides her face away
in ruffles of eroding lace
while day kisses her one last time,

as he turns out the light,
and locks the door behind him.

Fall Break

We were passing white nights under black skies, and the air froze as lungs expanded, leaving open mouths wide, heads turned to heavens searching for starlight to illuminate the vacant spaces linking our teeth. There are no goodbyes between the half hours around midnight and the layers of 2 a.m. slumber, blue ivory feet sticking to frosted concrete. Winter consumed Lady Fall while night leapt from behind the streetlamp, catching us without headlights on a winding road. Let’s get lost, you said, let’s get lost; let’s find the stars again. But, honestly, I might run away with Orion if you can’t find a more dazzling belt. I’ve always been mesmerized by open sunroofs, night air caught mid-breath, and the prospect of losing our way exactly where we meant to be. I tried to tell you, but when I said goodnight, my voice turned to whispers and the sun dipped behind the trees. I tried to tell you; I found the starlight between my teeth. I told you we don’t have cliffs where I come from, just flat fields and these rolling hills, trying so hard to build up to a wave big enough to earn my suicide. These canyons you brought to me, wrapped up in paper, cuts of land you carved with the groove of your hands, are begging me to be the one who discovers flight. I always knew I’d jump, but I never dreamed it would be off the owl’s eyelashes, from the tips of her talons. She promised to watch over you while I slept backbone to drywall, and I promised to teach you how to fly. I only wish we could both have hollow bones.