Adagiobunny

the purple night nests under my tongue & i hide from lamplight, afraid of the shadows it casts. there's a book hiding too, with snowy bones: face down beneath the bus stop bench like a waterlogged crime scene. i pretend not to notice the things that need saving. at the red light, holiday music cracks through windowpanes: tonight, the world has chosen to be loud. i hide my hands from the weather in worn mittens wondering why people bottle up blizzards in their throats. ten blocks ahead, there's a broken bottle by the side of the road. glass glints dark & dull against dirty snow. an empty skeleton: the words it once housed are long gone s

there are valleys             in your earlobes and jungles in your irises, but i       was never one for love poems                      words fall from my lips like       cloud-happy pebbles drop to                an ocean           wave-tossed & then sinking through the thin                          liquid miles     & we, we two            miles of skin & bony fingers stretch between our        hearts               beating calmly within our dark, cocooning chests the darkness presses upon our arteries like          sleep on heavy eyelids     weight like watery fathoms, leagues of             conscious lulled to lightless

, the skin dripped from his fingers & the blood beneath was clearer than the truth, rivulets of rainsong pouring down the storm drain straight to the pacific ocean ; he never needed to cry. "the clouds shed enough tears for all of us," he told me once and i remember when i first met him, those arms outstretched & palms like little pools, oases running through lifelines. the fortune teller told him he would only live as long as the storm "it's the water in my veins," he said; "it washes away the stardust & we are all drinking our ancestors' ashes, did you know my grandfather tasted," he said, "like raspberry cordial & did you know that fre

amidst a copse of pines - dead carpet breaking branches.

one. she walks down the street five mornings a week, but the pavement is still a stranger (her hopes fall in between the cracks in the sidewalk when she swings her satchel too high.) little-girl feet hopscotch through imaginary chalk squares – she kicks off her sandals and runs barefoot when her mother isn't looking (calloused soles love sockless grass-between-the-toes days) [two.] gnarled fingers trace distorted windowpane glass seven mornings a week (old eyes hide behind glasses perched on an aquiline nose – they have seen many childish thoughts skip by.) she hobbles down the stairwell with a lion-footed cane

i used to hide behind pages, hide in between the three-punch holes and the too-straight blue lines on looseleaf paper because that's where i thought i belonged: among the blankness of ideas i felt but didn't hear, touched but didn't see – oh, they touched me, they brushed against my eyelashes like dandelion seeds tumbling through the ether, and the wind ripped them from their stems and flung them into the world and then they finally realized: this is who i am supposed to be, no, this is who i am and nothing can change that, not even when i find myself pummeled by tsunami waves that crush houses like we crumple all the w

falsehoods leave me wrapped in my foundling shroud, waiting sightless self-born tossed along the wandering shoreline like driftwood.

little bird has the key to fly from her cage, but she's too afraid to turn it in the lock. she is a sleeping beauty, soul taken for a ride on the spindle, and now she can't unravel her eyelids. (i wish i could teach her how to turn back into flax…) clipped feathers grow back, but leaving those metal bars behind will take a hundred years.