She was a boring woman with a boring cat. She knew that.
Her favorite color, if she were forced to name one, was brown. Plain brown.
Or maybe, on the third Friday of every month, gray—gray with an A,
Not grey with the exotically European E.
Breakfast: dry toast with a glass of water, room temperature.

Her kind was never meant to reproduce,
Except through poetry
of perhaps the existential variety.



Woman whose name begins with
M or J or both,
writes a letter to no one,
meaning, she's writing a letter to herself,
something she may or may not keep but will eventually be discarded of anyway because it's too quiet to be made curious.

It is an imaginary letter to an imaginary person she would like to be her friend.


Dear ----,

I changed the cat's food from dry chicken to wet tuna, and she liked it at first. But it didn't agree with her. I should have known better than to change it.

If you need a companion on a trip into town for groceries, I might be able to come alone, if it's between suppertime and 7 PM.

If you think of it some time, please visit. I'd love to show you my marble collection.

Yours,
MJ

--composition in progress--

...

The End

When I met you, out went the memory blanks,
replaced by memories banked for triumphant times like
births and exotic vacation resorts. Before that, though,
we had to navigate smoky carpets and dirty dishes
catching downward messages of how we
recovered each other from our old lives
gone black.

Investments, now, will save us
from not having that RV life we dream of,
where we will drive across statelines to our
next destination of together forever, beyond.

Whichever way his mischievous grin sat on his lips,
I seemed to disappear into barely audible whispers of caution and resistance.
Then reemergence. Then relief.

(Peek-a-boo is more than a sexy grown-up game of lingerie beyond innuendo.)


The sudden tragedy of newness is the realization that it's no longer new, but now,
something else must be kept and held close.

To disappear hesitation,
to reappear a smile of certainty.

We were typical,
the story of how we folded into each other during a time
when love was all that was around
to be given. Honestly, neither of us
was smooth, stuttering
to ourselves under our breath, trying to
stand casual. I tried to wipe away tears,
you tried to stay away. Typical.

Now, not so.

Every morning, an I-love-you.
Every sneeze, an I-love-you.
Every night, an I-love-you, seeyouinthemorning.

We've dropped these pins of ourselves from California to Canada,
with this vow: We shan't live alone again. Til death,
even that will never us part. Together,

our light will rise softly,
filter through the blind,
young new lovers folding into each other will linger
on our soul's embrace.

You believe that this moisture beading on my palm
is the Universe evolving us into fluidity. We’ve been made
to melt.

I catch the tear before it slips from the corner of your eye.
My salt on yours.

anxious

calm

breathless


We’ve recollected all our clichés and built a solid foundation with them.
I found a stray one in the corner,
under dust and hair, something my sister taught me
on her wedding day. I was her flower girl, and I carried a plastic bouquet.
I kept it on my dresser in a white vase,
until the day she found out
and hid in a basement full of rats so she could find out more.
That day, I became older, and I put the bouquet in my mother’s closet
in a box of Christmas decorations.

There’s my cliché.

We can beat the odds.
My salt on yours.

Control formations in the sand. Dunes and dips meeting on an uneven line, drawn by a breath, a breeze. Sound at a distance carried by the crest, a flare for that second, a memory in the next. Nothing else but wonder.

Posted via LiveJournal.app.

How to keep it in--
the wave of needing release,
a swell, being full.

Water stain on my wall
bloomed like two passing clouds over sunset
above my boxes of essays, drafts, and other anonymous important stuff.
The brown outline hangs over files not filed on time,
pushed through with backdates and anachronistic signatures.
It is so heavy, that stain.

Stretched out over a line where the drywall grew out,
impatient construction seeping denial over inevitability.

A broken air conditioner keeps guard.
An empty plastic container waits.

I can't think of how to scrub it away.

The city has separation anxiety over the sun.
A steady cadence of remembrance of long days,
stretched out over mountains, condos, sandy banks,
and tattered volleyball nets, and paths wrapping around
feet pounding from shade to shade.

Where did it go? What will we do
now that we live with water resistance all over?

We clean ourselves. It is time.
Back to watching trickles into gutters and drains,
waiting under awnings til it's safe to come out again.