a pocket-sized loose-wrapped tea bag smattering, this lucky charm was made for scattering. made for swirls and repeating mosaics beside the soil plots bringing rememberings of speckled herbal spots. where was the garden past where we saw it last still breathing purposeless and whole? the pots have broken into loneliness.
My cousin used to barge into my room and flop like a seal atop the bed, her hair fanning out over the sheets, jet-fire black, coals in her eyes. Maybe it's because I'm a prude, or I have feelings too. But I can't let someone in here who doesn't knock. I hold this memory like a pebble in my hands, which I skip on the roiling seawater surface to see if the waves rise, or sink. Maybe I’m not meant to host every wandering walrus.
dog-eared pages of images
rusty green
playground slide
and see-saw
between the last time i wrote
poetry about the past and
now.
now whittles away
between my fingers,
like a speck of dirt crumbled
and flicked to the side
blown by bustling breezes.
i leaf through pages
with a guitar strummer
crystal clear, and
clearly never used.
how many dreams
i spin will end up the same
a dry, dusty museum?
but spring-cleaning
without the spring
is just self-sabotage.
i keep my precious things
inside an album.
I heard that you were grasping at straws, struggling to convince yourself the dry grass was made of gold. Gargantuan shadows shivered beside you in the dim moonlight, demanding that I pity you. You didn’t want to be pitied. I saw you playing the toy bells that dangled from either side of your head, which made the ringing sound that hurt your ears so. I walked over to the other side of the fleeting half-halcyon hill, where the grass was an ocean, the air quelled and quiet.
When I stopped answering your call, seems ages ago, steeped in deep blue waves where sound travels strangely and your voice irritates me. Why is it you have to speak in red-crested sailboats? You are as impractical as most tropical fish. But let us not be distracted by colour, by contents of conversation. Explain the eyes averted, the maps rerouted as lightning, avoiding my path to small benches, hoping for quiet sits in simple company. Futility. I have never seen friendship this intangible.
Small slippery memories stick to your teeth, and resist chewing. The float of gold dust in your first home and an ambush of jelly in an orange popsicle. Translucency in the mirror of your face where you could see your father’s fear of crowds and your mother’s distaste for clutter both cluttering up the image of yourself. Pomegranate seeds are good for you.
Hand-wash warm pulls up a memory
of sweet bubble bath, water silky
on the skin of a time before picking
at specks of dirt on the shelves before
shower water was contaminated.
Hand-wash cold, remember the smell
of clinical cleanliness, the water
is a stagnating puddle in the swamp
so maybe I will
rinse and repeat, after all.
Glass keeps the mould out
Where my family sits, and I
Not quite yet myself
In the off-white dress.
My cousins smile,
Their parents all are smiling
Grandparents are, too,
With a boy cocooned in the centre,
Feet dangling off the ground.
Many ghosts linger
From a pale and mouldless past
A picture tells a thousand words
But which ones, which ones?
On the last day of my yearning, we slipped gusts of air
in and out of our mouths, hand-feeding each other
words that were shadows of silences.
We slid through rings of fire, sifted opinions the
air-conditioning could not quite extinguish,
then left them with handwritten thank-you notes.
We settled on compromise.
Wanting to change my mind,
you changed my heart, you
replaced the one used
like replacing a roll of toilet paper
at a well-loved friend’s house,
without the knowledge
of the well-loved friend.
Wanting to wish away these wills of ours
that stand by certain points of view,
instead you wished,
out loud and ineffectually
that I would sit down. And I sat.
Who wouldn’t trade a girl
for a God?
No bullets raining down now
on this precious wisp of a forgetting.
Peace talks were wrapped up at the withdrawal
of pulses estimated to be deadly on explosion;
of thoughts postulated for blasphemy on expulsion,
postulated.
(Wanting to lean my arm into the back of your chair and then
leaving it there on the table) I thought how
so much of civilisation rests on
women preserving
the reservations of women,
like the sewer system – an interweaving underground labyrinth of canals – all
so no one must see
the shit in the sea.
And we were not even women yet.
Sitting adjacent to each other yet
self-destructive, the sand and the sea,
I could see the
disinterest cooling in your face,
otherwise a mirror:
four pairs dark eyes,
both sides black of hair,
if we touched noses, and held hands,
we could have play-acted the beautiful monsters
of shadow puppet theater,
but we didn’t. This was real life.
Our fingers touched
the same paper,
never on the same page.
A Teeming Desk Drawer 