Jblottingink

I He hadn't seen those eyes since they turned from his face to stare at the back of a Greyhound bus. And yet there they were, looking back at him from their framed and matted vantage point. Fighting the panic rising in his throat, he asked the museum director how much she would charge him for the painting of the woman standing before the firing squad. II She dug her toes further into the wet sand and prayed that the ocean would kidnap her; would drag her from where she lay on its shore, keep her in a cave somewhere and give her little fragments of kindness like seashells, which she would treasure and cling to. Perhaps she would wear them a

The air is thick with violence. Outside my window, the thunder groans, the lightning screams. You and I have fought in similar battles. Together, we made ourselves a storm. In the turbulence of our togetherness, we got lost in the roar of intimacy and the flash of anger. There were times when I needed you. There were times when we were entangled so completely; we were indistinguishable. There were times when I wanted to love you. But just as violently we sometimes growled and sometimes snapped at each other, when we let loose the animals we once had kept hidden. One way or another, being with you tonight would on

Being a poet is a funny thing, Sometimes words and minutes flow at the same rate and it's all my pen can do to keep up. Other times I roll myself up like a tube of toothpaste, Trying to squeeze out those last stubborn sentences. But every now and again,  my mind is flattened by some falling phrase, Something random and uncomfortable, Like my muse just sent me a drunken text message. "Your pulse runs parallel to the Earth." I have no idea what that means. I keep turning it over and over like a locket rusted shut, One that I discovered, but could never create. Poetry is the verbal expression of perpetual motion, but not everything is

             i watch                                help    less                          ly        as                         &#

paper cannot hold your ('e)                                           ex planation in the same (wayyouonceheldme) with                                                out my skin so much as my s 

robbed of everything, i give you only a root, the moon, and my body, for i cannot make pearls with stone. i have nothing between my fingers but the sound of the wind and the singing of a gull. i have made for you an embrace the colour of journeys with strangers. i tell you because to claim your love, i will travel miles of strangerhood, or go nowhere. the gulls are speaking to you slowly; the river is writhing in you, close to ecstasy and private agony. your necklace is trembling with words, (so the sky responds, owning not the dark or the bright moon above the gate, only trees, and the sleep on their iron branches.)

Lately I've been thinking about last Halloween, You, grinning like a jack-o'-lantern at a party full of people who didn't know me, Their eyes appraising our lack of mask or makeup, When, for no reason at all, you reached over and took my hand. Our adolescent world is laden with tradition, And that one, that minor entwining of flesh, Was forbidden between us. There among girls in shorter skirts and lovelier bodies, Their faces covered with confusion, criticism, or caked foundation, All of them caught on the vertices of your diamond cheekbones; You were the most beautiful boy in that room, And your hands claimed Me. Shall I now cal

The girl was seated on the bench again. For two weeks she had returned, again and again, and always she sat in exactly the same place. The bench she sat upon seemed altogether ordinary, it was a simple wrought-iron with dulled black finish and a back at precisely the wrong angle for comfort. This did not appear to affect the persistence of the girl's visits at all. For it was not the bench she cared for. The girl hurriedly turned the page of her Algebra textbook. She had no patience for numbers. In truth, when she sat on the bench, she had patience for very little. She reminded herself of the pace she had set for Algebra. Five problems in be