You could tell her
You could tell her that someday she'll be standing at a sink
scrubbing the three-day old pot, thinking about a boy
she used to know but doesn't dare mention.
Daily news
Last night Sir James came upstairs for the first time. In life, his bad hips prevented him from making the climb. At bedtime, I gently carried his floral tin of ashes to my room and set him by the bed. I placed one smooth black stone from Iceland on the tin.
You don't come around
You don't come around,
she says
over her basket of clean laundry
below the horizon of clothesline
and rose gold. She doesn't know
what tone to take anymore so
her fingers do the talking now,
sifting through her apron pocket
of wooden clothespin soldiers.
C'mon talk
Oh, Jarle, my Norwegian earworm!
The not-asking
When you ask her
where her shoes are,
she tells you finally,
haltingly
that she's outgrown
them all.
Turns out she's been wearing her
battered, torn snowboots to class
for two months, maybe three.
She's been wearing them
all the time, whatever the weather.
Valentine to my songbird
"Are you crying?" asks my songbird.
She leans in my bedroom doorway wrapped in a bath towel. Damp and pale and shining, she has just emerged from what she would call an "epical" (epic + magical) shower, where she's been singing for 45 minutes.
Argument against a virtue
Blonde ambitions
More fun, please, with a side
of ombré and razoring.
Tell no one of my dark past,
my ashy roots, mined silver.
It's my hair and I can curl
if I want to. You know what
they say about the little girl
with the curl in the middle
of her forehead, or you don't.
Chopped, cropped, ready
to co-opt stray laughter,
impertinent glances,
insouciant thinking, even
a bit of winking. Bring on
the parade of unremembrance,
rainbows all bows, no rain.
Dear
How to keep moving
Try blasphemy
Give blasphemy a whirl.
Breaking news
King Richard III has been sleeping off
the winter of his discontent just below
the concrete of a municipal parking lot
in Leicester.
The whiskey bottle
I could not find the bone you insisted you'd already
thrown my way, or I'd have gnawed on that too,
to take the edge off—or create one.
Green light
(every time)
to fall hard for the red. No matter what I do, no matter what
I say, the green's on its way and my job is to move along,
(every time)
quit my staring.