Some mornings I go to class and sit flatly behind my screen,
transcribing as if that’s what I’m paying for.
You shouldn‘t trust the media, one professor warns
and my thoughts jumpstart unconsciously,
my mind on its own.

One year I decided to take a picture
every single day. I cheated on 5 days and used pictures
from days that came before, but they were nicer pictures.

Sometimes I think about my childhood
and wish I’d written poetry.
I remember looking up at floating marshmallows,
watching them melt across the sky. I didn’t know
the word cloud for years.

It looked like it would rain
the last time I cried, the clock
chiming 9 am on a Sunday, and I wasn’t
at church, but my grandmother was.

Do you ever picture yourself in old age?
Do you ever wonder if you’ll get married?

I’ll probably have yogurt for breakfast tomorrow.
Some things never change.

To tell you the truth, I’ll probably get married.
I’ll probably forget everything I learned in school.
One day, even marriage will feel lonely and
I’ll cry in front of my children, because
my mother will be dead.

Today, I lose track of thoughts and go to class sometimes and
the days pass. One day that will be my life, passing.

How short-lived it is when you see how
lucky you are, when you
know these days are numbered
and you’ve forgotten to count.

How long it must last when you’re old
and don’t remember the lyrics,
when you’re caught babbling
the stone throat-sounds of
some other language.

Are you tired? Will you remember?

            I said, Let this one be dead. –Sharon Olds
1.
The day we would have gone
to the shore I woke up nauseous,
shivering in bed in summer, the thick
sap of sickness caught in my throat.
I knew what I was missing--
you, in shrewd ocean beside me,
a salt-water amnesia in our bones,
your cool hands running like silk
through mine beneath the surface.

2.
But I did not know what I would miss
most; the small things.
The ease of touching
another. Holding breaths for more
than just the water.
Crinkled eyes, sand between
toes and trapped under fingernails.
The small things like
someone to share the
small things with.

3. 
If only I could chase a fevered morning
like a little girl, and not be afraid,
then I could wake up to the salty air and
know it too well, each cell of my body
calm as a summer sunrise.
In my dreams the ocean still waves on
with the ease that made me believe you
needed nothing as right as my life was right,
needed nothing as whole and
honest as the wood of the boardwalk
or your love for me.

You’re caught in a precarious balance this quiet Sunday,
lofting bottles from your rooftop, kept carefully by an iron balcony
from falling. Fractured glass litters the ground below, glittering

in the way only broken pieces do. I watch as you contribute,
sending whole bottles down to be halfed, then quartered, then shattered,
in the rush of mere moments from that far-enough fall.

Soon, two roofs away, the church bells’ll toll noon. If you aim right,
you’ll reach sacred ground with your keen glass, adding sharp
colors to the soft grass oft overturned. I imagine somehow from

the peak of your watch you’re paying strange homage to the bodies
buried there, that you see in its quiet land the same emptiness
you found in me, a graveyard for broken things.

And I see you in my heart’s eye more glorious than you are,
a wind chime three stories up, raining glass beautifully across
a kingdom of churchyards and empty Sunday mornings.