autumn poems
bones, birds and murder
I’ve lost the ability to speak to the seasons. What the wicker weaving in the air could say about me, reflected in the tilting sky. We were offered a form of synchronicity to tether our hearts to and then we beat it to death. We’ve beaten ourselves to death.
What autumn has maybe meant to me: a convergence of time and place like a sudden hearth from which to observe change outside the self, change so grand that it makes our own constant change small enough to hold with gratitude. Beauty in death. A sense of sighing ease, releasing the pressure built up in the summer. Shifting perspective, a reminder to look up, that always you could have been looking up. Bony fingers tracing the outline of your jaw, grinning my oh my you’ve grown. Autumn like a grandmother.
What has been taken: change no longer brings comfort, instead percolating through a deep and aching grief. Change which has fallen out of sync. Change which unsettles the soul, swipes the very earth from beneath. I no longer see myself reflected in the mirror of the seasons. I’ve lost the ability to speak. All I’m left with is a primal instinct to make preparations, to hunker down for the cold months—if only the cold months weren’t warming in an ungreased skillet.
I’ve seen, in my short lifetime, the regression of the seasons. All the world a melting pot. The days get shorter still, the illusion of normalcy, merciful distraction. As I’m writing this in late October it is eighty degrees. As I’m editing this a few days before publishing, a late wildfire is blazing a scar tissue trail across Salem and a thick shroud of smoke hangs over my city, permeates the very pores. I’ll live to see the deepening of the pattern, which is not a pattern at all but a warning like an air raid siren on the top of your head.
These poems are a mourning of sorts. A love had and love lost. An affair shared with the miraculous Anthropocene or maybe even a man, and the end of the affair as all imbalanced trysts must end. How to celebrate that we are still somehow here despite our betrayal, and how to accept our own defeat. Autumn isn’t like it once was and so neither can an autumn poem be the same. Everything changes.
Mutualism
I make myself a trellis to wrap your legs around my thin ‘til the sun stops stretching without me within together alone come too close and wither on my bone
take / get
we’ll take 75 where
we can get it
says the news,
in control of
public panic
i’ll fuck you with
a hatchet is what i’m thinking—
do you believe in anything?
i must be seething
the insides of my teeth i’m kissing
calcium white which will outlive my skin
like a drought laid
over bracing bones who hold
no empathy for cowards—
my down payment is your power
I want autumn,
let the rock become rubble
at the bottom
sinking teeth into comfort
temporary, incendiary
these moments dismember;
when your thirst
turns permanent
the trees will remember—
you took where
you could
what you get
will not be tenderthings i am learning
birds don’t know about weekends i think i might be stupid
Clapping at the sunset
tuck me in that memory
just shadows on a hill
holding the day’s diluting light
when love was still
a thing so cradled
not if or but or might
a bird thrashing
between fluttering palms
the swallowing night
a numbing balmout of storage
there are flowers still pushing through the ragged earth for what's left of the light I could learn from them, a thing or two I mean I could, and I might
Moving Target
today I am what I am, something like a settlement— what’s all this change meant? chasing stability like the hound after the mailman these things move in circles and I haven’t made a dent
Skeleton dance
the trees bare their bones like flesh peeled back; i cannot remember a feeling quite so awful as begging to be more seen by something i am afraid of
In a park
and above the sun strokes the green from the leaves so below I’m reaching again toward formless things— you and you and you; past made present in my chest pressure like a valve I keep screwing tight keeping close with the ghost of something barely shared a passing proximity; glance your arm between careening buildings you’re telling me I’m strong I tell you people keep saying that, but structurally I’m weak all these joints form faulty angles. I’m standing but, future in present, I’ve fallen to have known love like that to contain it where it rose and fell like steady breaths slotting ribs into ribs memory makes it true or otherwise I’ll slip present in present, the stream that never ends and above the sun strokes the leaves so below I rend
Hunt
fox in the brush you know I’d kill you if i could sweet hare trigger scratching at my spine sometimes wish you would flash in the pan ain’t got legs to stand but here! is the power of the persistent stagger rustle the breath of the trees press my fingers to your windpipe if you please that's your blood! caressing my fingers, that's the flood of memory, me! the gate to cleave it clean pretty thing, I cannot look at you looking like me, a thing I'd like to kill
ok but Skeleton Dance really got me
Lovely! Some gems in here.