“I’m sorry, I didn’t expect it to actually happen.”
“I know, and I should’ve known it was going to.”
A mother and her daughter,
Soaked in seawater,
Oblivious to the stranger
Who watches in amusement
As they sink into revelries,
Forming childhood memories,
Stumbling through the sand,
And clasping hands,
Shivering in their nicest dresses,
Which still bubble with seafoam
- Don’t Tell Your Father When We Get Home / Let’s Find a Towel
Like the drilling of acrylic nails drumming on clicking keyboards,
Or the popping static voiced by spinning, ragged records,
Or the dance of bacon grease leaping out of a feverish pan,
Quite roughly, metronomically:
Raindrops scattered on dim windshields,
As wipers rest, rejoin, reveal:
The dashboard canvas, an artful blur,
Smeared watercolor
Of high-beam white and stoplight red
Through squinted eyes and halting turns
-Drive Safely / Text Me When You’re Home
Almost louder than the scratching pens
Are the swiping palms on stapled test packets
As panicked essays stutter from line to line.
Defeated, we sigh over blue-book covers,
Scatter shedded skin of overworked erasers.
Demoralized,
Despondent eyes,
A few of which fill with tears during
The space between a five-minute warning bell
And the clatter of pens surrendering
To a midterm we can only hope will be curved
-It’s Not Too Late to Drop This Class / GE Courses
Whispering to her of what waits outside the window,
Slipping his storm-bearing stories
Through the crevice that the windowsill leaves bare,
Is he who howls at her,
Who hurries from hush to hubbub,
Who hauls her from homework to hallucinations, or else recollections,
Of rippling walls of silvergrass
Below a treehouse shelter for weary pirates
And mud pie pastry chefs.
Leaving trinkets of fallen branches in the streets,
And maybe a balcony strewn with leaves,
Leaving her wondering whether she fell in love with
The wind
And his whisper
Or just the ideas he brings her