When the New People Came
published The Blue Nib literary Magazine

When the new people came
my box painstakingly packed and labeled with the threat
Touch This and Perish

full of words I wasn’t done using yet
words that stuck to me
begging for me to find the meaning

sought asylum
any haven
among the detritus

the piles of self-replicating hangars
the lidless Rubbermaid containers
the socks and hats no one ever wears

the substance of survival
a matrix for participation
but not of existence

trailed behind us
leaking from us for months
into ever shifting piles

When the new people came
drawers were cleared of cries and calls
sorted to donate or to keep

as I sobbed
and breathed the scent of Brogan clinging to a
GAP 4T sweatshirt I found shoved behind

the shattered drawer of the changing table
warped and dinged with
resolutions I cling to still

When the new people came
there scrapped by the side of the road
were the sliced up 4 feet by 4 feet remains

of carpeting stained with Eamon’s blood
a monument in defense of letting kids learn
to handle sharp pointy things

and adult things silly and destructive
needing to be hauled away to
the cemetery of illusions

that you can manufacture a child
that normalcy is peace
that someone will tell you the way

When the new people came
our shelves had given over
unpolluted remembrances

without blot or contamination
grains of sand, shark’s teeth, postcards, hundreds of fossils
sanctuaried and padded by the four

handmade blankets crafted by the Women’s Guild
for kids hospitalized at Christmas
for our kid who fought off campaigns of hostile takeovers

by domainless viruses
by misdiagnosis
by medication side effects

When the new people came
our walls were bare
exposed and that jagged hole in the upstair’s drywall

from the hard-plastic oversized hippo
I chucked
in anger over my insufferable inadequacies

had vanished
mended and remedied
understanding the need to retreat

rather than to fight
left scars though
and a hard memory

When the new people came
our rugless hallways creaked
unfamiliar messages

echoey and sticky with paint
the scent of our soap and our food and candles
and our sheltered seasons

crammed in the oily garage
stacked and labeled like you can
ever name a life

or gather it
or accumulate it
or capture it

When the new people came
my Roses of Sharon
witness to 4 am nursings of all kinds

eavesdropper to hot tub convos under Orion
victim of airsoft wars
supervisor of the time the shed nearly burned down

consoler during the death of my beloved willow
bystander while I didn’t lie but
made the truth, begged me to be resolute

When the new people came
the wooden stairway railing worn smooth
and warm under our grasps

Held me steady for the last ascent
the last descent released my hand a final time
while my husband urged me to leave

admitting that we could not complete
the move in one day
we were laying in piles everywhere

I was sent on

When the new people came
I was gone
fumbling around in the new darkness

for light switches
for boxes of extension cords
for bags of goldfish

in rooms with no memories of us
and wads of cat hair
free floating everywhere

a flashlight in my hand
My Touch This and Perish
box under my arm

and nothing more than
my name
in my mouth.

​

Published with Impspired Literary Magazine July 2019
Out by the Shed

Out by the shed I burn
a year and half of mandatory
chemically induced menopause.
I’m a bonfire of release
crackling with a decade of

abundant off label over prescribing of
fentanyl patches, gabapentin, and each new pain pill on the
market. My hair is covered in charred pieces of
my Defiance and Non-Compliance
when I had the nerve to tell you

that getting pregnant again was no cure
for Endometriosis, for someone heavily
medicated and in pain and with two special needs kids.
The ashes of your fire of authority
are sucked straight up into the moon

a swirling snowstorm of
involuntary therapies.
You used to line up the objects
on your desk over and over
thinking you were the source of light

and heat and order but now I don’t need to stand
by the flames of your misguided treatments
and your habits of disbelief.
I stomp on the parts of you still moving
then I cremate you

and you drift over West Woods
your ashes silhouetted against
Sirius and the rings of Saturn singing.
I hid things in the dark
and yielded to excruciating pain out of deep love

and self-imposed expectations that because
I could tolerate anything I should.
The blaze of you coats my mouth.
You diagnosed me into pieces
that took forever to collect. Now

​I’m a Firestarter.

Published with Prometheus Dreaming January 2020

The Man with the Round Tomatoes in the Square Baskets

The man at the roadside stand with the round tomatoes in the square woven baskets is re-arranging every tomato we pick up to scrutinize for maximum summer freshness. And he is scowling while we sniff his produce. He is shuffling and pacing behind his folding table grimly eyeing us with a muttering sort of agitation that rolls right off him and onto me.

“Are any of these riper than others?” Dennis inquires making an obvious effort to be neighborly.

​The man snatches the tomato out of Dennis’s hands and replies angrily, “You’re lucky to get any at all with the growing season this year. And don’t touch my tomatoes. People keep picking up my tomatoes and then putting them back down and the edges of my tomatoes are getting smashed and bruised. Don’t do that.”
I feel like this man is not sure he likes the ending he is being given or he is mistaken that he has reached his ending. Maybe he’s agonizing over his diminished cosmic presence or maybe his farm was slaughtered by the tariffs and the #NoPlant19 season that ravaged Ohio this year.

This man is not for keeping and he is determined to ensure that his little woven square baskets stay balanced and overloaded each with four huge tomatoes. His hands are for wringing and his brow for pained furrowing. He is quick to tell us that the baskets are his and not ours for the taking and he immediately fills the empty little basket with four more large tomatoes whose edges will need constant guarding from the people who come to touch and smell the fragrant tomatoes he nurtured and tended to and hovered over.

I am not born all at once. I come into the world through a series of moments that are like the hours in which I sit up in bed like someone has called out my name loud and strong and with urgency. I swallow the silence while we stand here at this farm stand and listen to the man add up what we owe him for our corn, peaches, and tomatoes and I know why I always think that midnight smells like paper and why I cannot manufacture certainty where there is none and I know why I can tell that I am real.

When my hand reaches for him Dennis receives it like he always knew I would be reaching out to him in that moment so he could remind me that, no, we were not consumed by the combustion of things we could not change. I squeeze his hand back telling him that he did not turn me into things he needed through it all. His hand swallows mine and I pull my fingers into a ball, the press of my touch saying that the next time we see the face of the man who keeps four round tomatoes in teeny square baskets it will be a cliff, a permanent edge.

Dennis holds my fingers in the way he does and I think he disagrees with me. When he strokes my wrist the trace of his convictions reminds me that humans have a tremendous capacity to rearrange the same things over and over to seem different. While we walk to the car the warmth of his palm assures me that salvation is usually a last minute business.

On the way home, What’s Up by 4 Non Blondes sails on the sweet, humid air and I know why my edges are not permanently smashed and bruised. Here I can see what I love. I know I am for keeping. Even if I rearrange things for a good long while or go a painfully long time between moments in which I am born.

“That. Was not about tomatoes,” he states like he’s telling me that air is for breathing or that, of course, he sees the same color blue I see. Like we are fact.

“No. It was not about tomatoes at all,” I agree.

​The rest of the way home his hand holds mine as if he’s certain that midnight will always smell like paper to me, as if certainty does not matter, as if I am real.