under-water

When I was young I played the Gymnopédies in the bay window on the grand piano chocolate brown chipped away to the starch bone of wood as I waited for the music teacher the guitar player the book recommender to be intercepted by my parents Slow fragile fingers leveraging the sustain under my bare foot fumbling over the corner of my eye catching a silhouette of a skipped beat the thirds and fifths escaping my youth I cannot trade the dancer's legs, the little girl the slender grace twisting fragile on the naked ivory under the bitten nails Hold on to the crescendo like the crest of a wave pulling away from the sho

My legs close like revolving doors as I run from my father in the snowstorm toward the bus pulling out from the station My legs open like Chinese finger traps They are trying to reach your back as you run from me on the cracked sidewalks of the Southside They are trying to escape, to live up to the gym teacher is fat and wants to fail me My legs are restless in the sheets They are water snakes in a submerged nest I run from God to unburn his image after I walked in on him in the shower I run from my father in the snowstorm in the shoe store in the baseball stadium in the radiator room I run because I want out of the faucet I

I. I feel restless, hopeless, like a 21st century cartographer with no opportunity and no unchartered land to suit me.  I'd take off with my thumb in the air if I could but I don't want to know who'd get to me first, the men or the pigs.  The road today is not what it used to be, the frontier has ended, the manifest destiny long fulfilled, celebrations over for generations.  The road today is unidentifiable, the asphalt runs together, the concrete blends and defines streets and buildings and I would rather run from it than try like so many others pick up where they left off. I want to run from everything, from the day jobs, from the years in

I remember your face on a summer's day waking up next to you with your eyes on me. I remember the burn as my face turned red following the movements of your waking r.e.m. I was always out of breath when I was with you. We were always making our greatest mistakes. I memorized the outline of the sky around your head to ignore the darkness in the shadows on your face. These were the days we spent in the train station kissing each other "hello" and "goodbye." You made the jazz beat thunder in my chest like a cold wet blanket you pull off the fire the music of your voice pounded against my neck pulled strings out of my muscles to b

He is always white, always male, and he always looks very young, but due to the excitement he shows when he talks about how many dive bars he went to over the weekend, you'll place him at an eager 21.  He wants to be Hemingway.  He wants to be Bukowski.  Above all, he wants to be Jack Kerouac, as you can tell by his manner of dress, always completed by some vintage hat or another-typically a fedora, never a ten gallon hat.  He will downplay his interest in poetry, and will mention his lack of experience with boasting as he describes what he actually does:  "Actually, I'm in a band," or "Actually, I'm a bartender," or "Actually, I'm studying p

Nothing hurts like your mother's tears. It's wet like your daddy's hands and feet barreling you out of the bathtub into the cold tile your face hits the floor and it shuffles out from beneath you. It tastes like swallowing the ocean all on your own. It smells like the lakes around the palm of your hand. They are singeing the thread of dried blood on your wrist. They are the knife that slips from your grasp while you are chopping the onion. The edge of the paper that slices through fat to the bone. It's signal of the sound of the cave falling in. It sounds like your throat as it fills with dirt and sand and the muscles in your neck

Dear Mr. Carpenter, The District Court of Omaha has ordered me to write you a letter explaining what happened to the two-thousand tubes of toothpaste you were expecting to receive in early June this past year.  Your toothpaste was in a box in the back of a truck and would have gotten there on schedule if it weren't for me and my friend Luke.  Knowing that you're a fellow resident of Nebraska, I can infer that you must have an understanding of the restlessness that comes with being a teenage boy in the rural x-burbs, and so I hope you can understand the type of excitement I felt when Luke confided in me that he had managed to steal his mom's

When we make love I turn invisible and my mind walks through places I've forgotten about: the dark hallway leading to my locker freshmen year or the staircase of my childhood home. It has these windows. They put smile-sized rainbows on the walls. Sometimes I'm looking in from an unlit corridor on the always vacant study room of a dormitory with fluorescent lights buzzing on the other side of the glass. Other times I'm on this one beach I was too scared to return to. It's on the outside of a forest and it's the dead of winter. I'm standing fifty feet in front of this cabin I'm not sure was ever real. The wood is wet and breathin

When a whale dies, it descends- drifts downward through the salt water like a diamond ring:  lost, dropped, escaping quickly into the darkness before desperate hands can pull it back up. But no one tries to stop a whale that's dead. It's no precious stone.  It's so large humans would only see it as a burden. The stench of rotting flesh would be much more than one can bare.  So down it goes. They call it a "whale fall" for a reason. Once the fall is over, the name is kept, and the corpse continues to rot, six thousand feet under. And all around it, life spurts out. The texture of the flesh changes from rubber to dirt. The ske