oracle-of-nonsense

i.               I heard him first through the fog off the ocean, edged by salmon sunrise and singing the rhyme my sailor father taught me about red skies in the morning. I didn’t think he saw me, watching as he swung his driftwood sword two-handed through fog-wraiths and stamping night mares, but when they lay defeated, dissipating into the tossed sand, he sheathed his sword in the loops of his faded blue jeans and footprinted to me, half-hiding in the beach grass susurrus. He was shirtless, and the fragile bellows of his ribcage brought to mind the anoles my brothers caught, their terrible tenderness trapped in careful palms, but his

Pause before graffitied door. She says this must be it. Swallow hesitation like a whiskey shot and look back at that girl in white, my Mary full of grace. Then we’re sliding into the low-ceilinged dimness thick with bass and crude propositions spit through synthesizers, searching for the boy who called me there, away from well-lit places and clean bathrooms, and back into the world of the untamed working class. Luminescent hungry eyes lurk around the edges of the makeshift dance floor while that boy whose matchstick body I learned to light on a night like this rocks boatlike against our two forms, her swaying sapling well-rooted, my Pi

You should know that when he said he loved me, I only said “I know,” and when he said he wanted what was beneath my breasts I only laughed “My ribs?” because Mama always told me not to hold what you don’t own so I loved them all with fingertips and open palms, but you, you were all-nighters on that intracoastal pier, watching the sun rise between your brown curls; you were the six-hour weekend road trips just to bring me home to our inflatable bed; you were french toast when we woke up at noon, smothered in so much sugar and syrup and butter that I almost made myself sick eating it; you were the one who only pull

for the potentialities of future generations i. This century does not feel like the golden age of anything. It feels like the uncertain period between the glowing white of robotic nurses and sterile, distant space stations, or the charred-black shards of a world of lost civilizations. This does not feel like the era of sepia-toned poetry my parents thought it could be. ii. Maybe someday you, the future's promise, will begin to believe as I have begun to understand – God is not a man, a woman, or a god; God is our name for the best parts of ourselves, the bigger, brighter, eternal parts that will not die smothered by blind