Deadheading
You argue the blooms still
alive when we both see
brittle ghosts hovering
over twisted roots,
translucent petals pink
as the time wine
stained our lips, bed
an excuse to day
dream a future we
both wanted, white fence
picketing the yard,
but the barbed wire
is rusted, threatening
to topple from vines
that wind through time
like the narrative
where you wanted
me enough to want
a child but nothing
new will grow
I say to your mouth—
set firm as horizon—
unless you sever
what has already died
after such glorious
color, so I cut
off the heads, careful
to save the seeds
for some other summer.
Fossil
Unfreeze me from amber and find
the ways I tried to survive the years
and pressure, the roof always threatening
to cave in, lava flow and how
I scuttled while tar was rising, dark
tide all around, sun ash-clotted
the way lovers froze at Vesuvius,
limbs grasping towards what was
already gone. I am forever reaching
for the you who still exists, breathing
even though the earth is hotter, the seas
rising over the homes of those too poor
to flee, the last glacier racing
polar bears to be the first to disappear
like how doctors predict you will be dead
before the grey parrot or every tortoise
whose name no one can remember,
the way I struggle to recall a time before
you were nearly motionless, yellowed
with sick, before I froze, dug my claws
into the moment to capture it, held
still by the threat of a world
without you, where I am caught
between survival and surrender.
Permafrost
Our permafrost is melting,
exposing the bedrock we
tried so hard to freeze,
pretend into forever
ago and never again,
betrayal best buried
far from civilization, forgotten
like the times you left
me stranded at airports on return
flights home and searching
empty terminals only to discover
my own reflection staring back,
breath fogging up glass
windows and now we know
what arctic explorers found
when glaciers retreated from the ground,
something never meant to soften,
the kind of thaw that leaves
us exposed to all the ills
we’ve only yet to imagine,
viruses ancient like the sound
of slamming doors or the shelf
of ice cracking in two,
drifting cold and unaware, further
apart in the unrelenting dark.
[…] Review. Published the poems “Deadheading,” “Fossil,” and “Permafrost” in the magazine Sweet Lit. Published the flash fiction “Leap” in Necessary Fiction. Interviewed by Jacqueline Doyle for […]