Voicemail from the Ex- Poet to the Ex Girlfriend

This message will be too short to encapsulate how long you wish your relationship had lasted. You will think your life has ended like a poem ends as soon as the last line has escaped from the reader’s mouth the same way jet trails mark everything that has been left behind.

But there is still your own body language to learn, to become fluent in, instead of concentrating on all the syllables the soft underside of someone else’s thigh makes when it falls over yours- there are still so many words to decipher that only you alone can make.

He may have fled through your window or left directly from your bed, he may have left a thousand wounds inside your head, but you were never anything less than an entire poem.

You are not unfinished just because he has finished with you. There is something about the way owls call out in the middle of dusk

that reminds everyone on earth that “who” is not always a pronoun but sometimes a question. And yes, without him there will be twilights that feel like the perfect time for cops to arrive and file a missing person’s report for the one half of your heart that belonged to his, twilights in which, like the owls, you will call out to ask who you are without him.

We all feel like when one part of our lives has been lost, we are “something ex.” Ex-girlfriend, ex-poet, ex-ballerina. So please, before you erase this message, remember this: you are not his “ex marks the spot.”He is not on your map anymore, just as poetry is no longer on mine.

You will make beautiful geography alone. There is beauty in an Island.

SOULMATES

Once, my grandmother was convinced that soul mates only met in the afterlife, the kind of belief that sent her baking endless loaves of bread filled with rain and yeast in the days before her death as if each slice contained every thunderstorm she would encounter when she chanced upon her soul mate for the first time.

Today, I peel oranges in the morning light of the kitchen with my bare hands until the syrup stain the top of the counter, lick the knife used to carve out the wedges until all that’s left is salt.

There have been so many women between my sheets but every day I grow hungrier since none of them are actually “the one.”

They kiss me with tongue, bring bottle after bottle of red wine, but after all is said and done and they’ve walked the long stumbling walk back to their apartments under the gaze of a single street lamp,

I gorge on the bags of nectarines by myself. I wonder if when the time comes, my spine will fill itself with birds whose beating wings will carry me all the way through the afterlife and into the arms of the only person I’ll ever truly love.

In the meantime I settle on feeding my emptiness with the spines of men, bake loaves until my hands grow sore and almost forget how my grandmother died of indigestion.

GRIEF

As a child I was constantly sticking my fingers in sockets and trying to figure out if grief had its own color

So my mother sat me down on the sofa and took out the Pantone book, paged through it for an hour until we found the blues. There, I said, that one, and pointed to cerulean. Oh honey, my mother replied, That’s not grief. That’s just a paint swatch and it will never amount to all the pain in your heart.

Sometimes I feel the urge to go wade out into the lake after filling my pockets with stones, but then I remember my father and how he wore his grief like a too-tight sweater, something given to an awkward child by a grandmother who doesn’t even know the right size, so I take the stones back out of my pockets and I place them on his grave instead.

AT 19

AT 19

“At 19, I read a sentence that re-terraformed my mind: “The level of matter in the universe has been constant since the Big Bang.”

In all the aeons we have lost nothing, we have gained nothing - not a speck, not a grain, not a breath. The universe is simply a sealed, twisting kaleidoscope that has reordered itself a trillion trillion trillion times over.

Each baby, then, is a unique collision - a cocktail, a remix - of all that has come before: made frommolecules of Napoleon and stardust and comets and whale tooth; colloidal mercury and Cleopatra’s breath: and with the same darkness that is between the stars between, and inside, our own atoms.

When you know this, you suddenly see the crowded top deck of the bus, in the rain, as a miracle: this collection of people is by way of a starburst constellation. Families are bright, irregular-shaped nebulae. Finding a person you love is like galaxies colliding. We are all peculiar, unrepeatable, perambulating micro-universes - we have never been before and we will never be again.

Oh God, the sheer exuberant, unlikely face of our existences. The honour of being alive. They will never be able to make you again. Don’t you dare waste a second of it thinking something better will happen when it ends.  Don’t you dare.”

WINTER

On the nights when the moon is more a word on the tip of the tongue than a saving grace positioned at such an angle in the sky that for a little while it almost seems believable that light is alive and well

and will once again enter my own life,

I learn to love the language that rises like a phoenix from the ashes of my burnt-up hope.

They say it gets better, but who they are and what it is are never clear. Still, I hold on to those syllables like each letter could suction cup itself to my windpipe and remind me to breathe even during torrential rain. I learn to love those three words like I learn to hold on to my own body the same way scared swimmers hold on to a life raft. I may be the scared swimmer metaphorically, but it will get better literally. That’s the beauty of language.

My heart has so many fossils full of dead feelings that an excavation would take centuries, so every time the darkness comes I try to remember to be my own paleontologist. I unearth the bad; I dig up the apologies and replace them with the fresh bones of love. I bookmark my own spine like a favorite reading page as a reminder for how many times it’s held me up and will continue to do so.

I remember that it gets better. I remember that all poems must end eventually, but that doesn’t mean I have to finish writing my life story before it’s even begun.

Therapy

The therapist told me my heartbeat was rewired to kill itself

instead of keeping me alive, that the light found in most peoples’ eyes

had shut off in my own from lack of electricity,

and my back was bent like the spine of a much-loved book

after years of putting myself down.

The day I sat in the therapist’s chair was the same day I realized

that I don’t need someone else to tell me what’s wrong with myself.

That no one knows me better than I do,

knows that underneath my skin there are ruby summer skies

just waiting for the storm clouds to pass,

knows that there are fault lines in my bones trying to break me open

but I will never let them tear me apart and shake me to the core.

That day I realized a licensed degree in therapy, combined with a couch and pen,

will never be a magnifying glass into my soul.

That I just need some time to work things out on my own

without the help of a person who doesn’t even know my middle name

and only wants to dig me up for inspection.

So when I went back to the therapist for my second session,

I left a note face-up on her chair.

“You don’t need to fix me.

I was never broken.”

Therapy

The therapist told me my heartbeat was rewired to kill itself

instead of keeping me alive, that the light found in most peoples’ eyes

had shut off in my own from lack of electricity,

and my back was bent like the spine of a much-loved book

after years of putting myself down.

The day I sat in the therapist’s chair was the same day I realized

that I don’t need someone else to tell me what’s wrong with myself.

That no one knows me better than I do,

knows that underneath my skin there are ruby summer skies

just waiting for the storm clouds to pass,

knows that there are fault lines in my bones trying to break me open

but I will never let them tear me apart and shake me to the core.

That day I realized a licensed degree in therapy, combined with a couch and pen,

will never be a magnifying glass into my soul.

That I just need some time to work things out on my own

without the help of a person who doesn’t even know my middle name

and only wants to dig me up for inspection.

So when I went back to the therapist for my second session,

I left a note face-up on her chair.

“You don’t need to fix me.

I was never broken.”

Therapy

The therapist told me my heartbeat was rewired to kill itself

instead of keeping me alive, that the light found in most peoples’ eyes

had shut off in my own from lack of electricity,

and my back was bent like the spine of a much-loved book

after years of putting myself down.

The day I sat in the therapist’s chair was the same day I realized

that I don’t need someone else to tell me what’s wrong with myself.

That no one knows me better than I do,

knows that underneath my skin there are ruby summer skies

just waiting for the storm clouds to pass,

knows that there are fault lines in my bones trying to break me open

but I will never let them tear me apart and shake me to the core.

That day I realized a licensed degree in therapy, combined with a couch and pen,

will never be a magnifying glass into my soul.

That I just need some time to work things out on my own

without the help of a person who doesn’t even know my middle name

and only wants to dig me up for inspection.

So when I went back to the therapist for my second session,

I left a note face-up on her chair.

“You don’t need to fix me.

I was never broken.”