Pallets
of palette knives
go missing in the night
with fire and other palate
cleansers

last night
wind or lightning
split open an old tree
so grand how can we live without
its shade

what if
burning forest
understories could clear
out the decay for everything everyone
to grow

listen
listen listen
listen listen listen
I need to shut up and listen
to you

We were
so immortal
we would jaywalk across
Washington at night defying
our fear.

Playwrights
knit their stories
to a high chain link fence.
Who knows how or when it will fall
apart.

I’ve been
dining with one
mannequin for decades.
She wears that old vial necklace
he made.

Remove
all the mirrors.
Turn up the radio.
Admit it, you do miss them. Damn
skyways!

Refuse
to dine inside
together till you see
plexiglass pendant head surrounds
in place.

Halos.
Helmet shields. How
many boys did you kiss
in those couch graveyard cellars
back then?

I don’t
remember what
happened to the front porch.
Gone overnight, wood railings, steps,
and all.

And that
whip-its mishap.
She said she’d never seen
anyone with singed-off eyebrows
before.

Smeared-ink
past lives collide
inside a tank covered
in tally marks I drew without
thinking.

I wish I could be there
for the seahorse
when she growls.
Build a coral cave for privacy

when she and her future
mate begin to click.
I wish I could propel myself
slowly through eelgrass beds

and sing of sunken nights
as I reach the next
stratified layer
in the water column

without choking on the wait
for a miracle.

If you think you are an impostor, I am
the swindler hidden in the weeds
wishing to become a dandelion
before the earth swallows us whole.
I play exquisite corpse by myself,
folding thoughts from view quickly
as I breathe in new fabric particles,
a smear of blue across the upper lip.

A stack a half-filled Mad Libs books
piles up, handwriting slanted
backwards and filled with rust.
Which one of me demands parts
of speech from the other?
I look to the mannequin
for answers. Then we silence it
on a bed of iced petals.

We straighten our tongues,
kicking up wire along the way.
Imagine painting a miniature bicycle
on your knuckles to blur the line
between art and windows.
Imagine all the blanks
where words might have been
to spill laughter into the darkness.

Gone. Suddenly blooming,
prairie smoke and bloodroot,
a smattering of violets
tucked between blades of hillside grass
from yesterday’s walk
stay fresh with me
into the second day of May.
This fractured year. Props

refract light on a window sill.
Gifts from my mother, Baltic amber

frog and cat figurines glow into late morning.
Trapped in this moment, I swear

I can hear those ancient trees
moan as they seal their wounds.

who do not know how to
measure six feet apart

we’re all vulnerable
to routes six feet deeper

dirt disguised as escapes
beyond the fathomless

I found it tucked between
pages of a used paperback copy
of Charles Simic’s
The World Doesn’t End.

Between “The dead man
steps down from the scaffold”
and “My guardian angel is afraid
of the dark.”

A color snapshot. The 70s?
The shallow end
of a motor lodge pool
sparkles in the background.

Married? Siblings? Friends?
Strangers who have come together
to squint away an afternoon
under a warm sun

without having to look
directly into the camera.
Reflections of reclining
chaise lounges in the mint blue water

match their half smiles
and a memory of almost getting away
with drowning in another pool
off some other highway

between the Midwest
and East Coast.

When Simic says,
“It’s so quiet
in the world,”
how could he have known?

I return to the photograph
of those two I can never know,
realizing how they are nowhere near
the deep end yet.