Red Orange

I do not know the word for the way
I feel about you,
but you are all I can think about
in a sleepy half-empty cabin
30,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean,
in the quiet jurisdiction
of the most beautiful
sunset in the world.

Falling in Love with a Scientist

The day I fell in love with a scientist, the clouds were thin veils of smoke strewn across the sky, which was blue and clear and smelled like detergent. “Cirrus,” she said, while grabbing my hips and leaning close. “This is how you use a microscope.” And when we held hands, I was self-conscious, because maybe she could read my mind, my body? She knew what my pheromones were thinking, and the route my fingers would travel down her spine. The day I kissed a scientist, I lost myself in the universe of her mouth, in all the things she did not yet know, in all the things she never would. I told her she knew nothing about me, but I pulled her close anyway, all dry and warm against the pouring rain of the outside afternoon. In bed, it was always morning, bodies tangled up in knots, like anatomical vines growing into each other; all careful words and tiptoeing around terminology, like a cat and mouse chase between logic and beauty. Our minds ran in different directions, but we both wanted to save the world. And so we laughed some nights, hard and loud, setting fire to all the restaurants we could afford, voices ringing up and down the streets of the city we put up with, the city we learned to love like each other. Like the people we knew we had to become. She had a beautiful smile, like the light of God after rolling open the heavy stones of a cave, and touching her was always, always, like unwrapping a present; did you know that scientists had bar codes in between their thighs? Had hands that shook secretly whenever your lips were so close? Were so good at goodbyes, for the grander scheme of things? But we both wanted to save the world, and good people’s hearts break the hardest.

The day my scientist and I left each other, the world was poetic. The sky was black and white, and I found out that there had always been a great shining lake behind one of the city’s ugliest shopping malls. I thought about how she maybe would have wanted to go, or how maybe she wouldn’t, about how I didn’t know. About how maybe she isn’t the type of girl I’m supposed to write poems for. I still love her.

The Revolution

They have changed our standards of beauty
to include all the sharp and shiny things
that have populated our world.
Skyscrapers, jet planes, flying cars,
forests of telephone lines and electric posts.
They have 3D hologram ads
directed at the insecurities of robots.

To live longer, we have had batteries
implanted beneath our hearts,
and have mapped
the remote wildflowered hillsides
of our minds,
which now remember long, automated
pin codes and pass words,
and can instantly forget everything
about the ex-lovers
who have broken our hearts.

We can stand longer
working massive assembly lines,
and have quietly mastered the skill
of doing nothing over and over
again.

Indulgent speaking was banned
for not being a hard science,
and a machine was invented
to take all the warmth from our bodies
to melt the city’s frozen streets.

But there are dreams of heat
and pictures of trees
tacked up inside school lockers
and taped to the backs
of secret notebooks,
and on Sundays,
when the sun is allowed to shine,
there are rivers of gold
in my brown hair. (Run,
your fingers through them.)

It is midday, and we have just taken
our lunch capsules.
The lines are silent
and we have learned to breathe
without taking in air.

(We kiss with our eyes
open.)

The revolution begins
because of a broken window
at the far end of the factory,
and a young boy’s stash
of floral photographs beneath his bed.

We break everything beautiful
into smaller pieces
the way the poor broke their bread
when they still lived around here.

(I have crushed your hands
into the sands
of time.)

Nobody knows we have dynamites
beneath our feet,
that today is the birthday
of the end,
of the world.

You turn to me, and break
our loneliness into tinier things.
Girl with the dark eyes
and a secret love for trees
(we make love with our clothes on
the floor)
touch me, and think
as far back as you can.
Do you remember the smell
of wet leaves?

Pacific

When I lie in the sea
it is a prayer, like a dance,
a secret overheard
between gods and mermaids.

All the love in the world
will never be enough to marry
the ocean
or hold it down long enough
to graze one of its hands.

“How can you run away
with a face you’ve never seen?
How will you live through
the colder parts of the year?”

This whole planet is lost in water,
and when the clouds pass
between us and the sun,
all things fall apart
into place
at the foot of the sky
and the mouth of the ocean.

No matter how many times
you fall sleep on the sand,
the sea will always be a stranger,
never breaking your heart;

the water, a beauty,
no matter how many bodies
it has washed away.

Nice

I know you hate this word
(so did I),
for being so plain
and for being okay with it,
but please let me use it
just this one time?
Because I don’t mean fireworks
and explosions,
or beautiful old actresses
who looked too good
to have ever been alive.
I mean a blue sky,
soft rain,
never running out of reasons.
I mean this quiet, laughing,
not going anywhere
but in circles.
I mean being okay with it.
So when I say, “This is nice,”
that is
inexactly
what I mean.

Joyride

You might want to go for a quick spin,
winding through steep mountain streets,
or speeding across the empty plains,
cold highways like haunted aisles
between two retired points.

Roll down your window and let the air
dry your mouth.
Do you hear the gravel crunching
beneath the tires?
Are you driving because of sadness?
Anger? Loneliness?
Or is it just one of those nights
when all the lights are a little brighter,
and the tired colors of the world
are all a little sharper,
and you’ve never felt
so alive?

Not everyone you love will grow old,
and whether this is a tragedy
or a kind of salvation
depends on what kind of gasoline you buy.
A red car means turn around.
A ten-wheeler truck means
she never really loved you.

Maybe there’s something good on the radio?
But on nights like this (when there is
nothing to hold),
an amazing new song you don’t know the words to
is like a beautiful person you can’t call by name,
and all you want to do
is sing a song you pretended to forget,
dial a number you can’t remember.

But where are you going? Towards or away from home?
Does it matter? Speed blurs.
Trees are people are posts are houses are cemeteries.
Does this drive mean anything at all?

Fasten your seatbelt.
You could be the sign
someone else is waiting for.

Magic Jack

We talked about what we had for dinner.
We talked about the size of our hands.
We talked about two-headed dogs.
We talked about the current state of Philippine media.
We talked about dirty old men.
We talked about the right way to wear denim on denim.
We talked about our favorite colors.
We talked about the height of the sky.
We talked about the rising prices of public transportation.
We talked about earthquakes.
We talked about first kisses.
We talked about how we felt fat.
We talked about the hungry people in Africa.
We talked about the hungry people right outside our doors.
We talked about forgiveness, and Japanese watermelon popsicles.
We talked about World War II.
We talked about bombs.
We talked about poetry.
We talked about Megan Fox’s tattoos.
We talked about how we would all laugh at gilded butterflies.
We talked about Shakspeare.
We talked about poetry some more.
We talked about sex.
We talked about condom flavors.
We talked about Ani DiFranco.
We talked about the nineties.
We talked about the disappeared.
We talked about the time it would take to get from there to here.
We talked about time travel.
We talked about shopping malls and magazines.
We talked about courage.
We talked about high school.
We talked about the depth and girth of loneliness.
We talked about the existence of God.
We talked about things we couldn’t explain.
We talked about climbing mountains.
We talked about tying cherry stems into knots.
We talked about wisdom teeth.
We talked about the movie, Teeth.
We talked about brothels in Eastern Europe.
We talked about our mothers.
We talked about dolphins dying in Taiji.
We talked about dolphins smiling in America.
We talked about how dolphins dying in Taiji reminded us of our mothers.
We talked about how it was one of those things we couldn’t explain.
We talked about what we would name our children.
We talked about losing our virginity.
We talked about finding it again, in a poem, or a movie, or a quiet song.
We talked about telephone lines, and time.
We talked about how it had passed, but we didn’t mind.
We talked about the spinning world.
We talked about how what kept us alive kept us apart.

Names II

Would you mind if I went up to you and gave you my name? And maybe watched as you repeated it, careful not to get it wrong, your tongue rolling across your teeth, the roof of your mouth? How about the fact that I name everything I have? I hope you don’t mind that I talk so much, or that I celebrate Christmas the entire second half of the year. It’s because I like waiting– for good news, for dinner, in fancy doctor’s offices with aquariums and magazines. I hope you don’t mind that I name the things I don’t even have yet. I told you, I like to wait. The camera I’m saving up for will be named Rebecca, and I’m calling my first million Donald. I hope you don’t mind that I’m not very original. Someday, I will have a quaint little house in the middle of a forest, with vines creeping up old ivory walls, and it will be called something pretty and romantic. And there will be a lake not too far off, a living one, where we can jump off the dock and bury our toes beneath the fine round stones. And maybe you can help me name every last fish and snail and water lily, because I trust your laughter, how it sounds like warmth, and the sun. And I like how your silence is a little bit cold, not like a stare, but more like a dark blue night sky, covered in trembling stars. I will name every plane that passes overhead, one for each letter of the alphabet, until we reach Z, because you and me, we have all the time in the world. All our children will be named after songs, ballads of sighs and silent power. I can name this country, this feeling, this movement of my body, but you? You cannot be encapsulated in a name, like a wave washing through the entire world, before disappearing into the sand.

Sisters

For Maita

I can say that the air is too humid,
this room is too small,
all your papers strewn out across the floor
drive me insane.

But it’s this little mouse space,
this burning white light,
all the fortresses we ever built
out of cassette tapes and toilet paper skeletons,
that tell me
I’m never going to be alone.

And so we listen together, to the world
through the cracks in the walls,
and I know: I will still want to see you

if there is an other side.

We Sink in Different Directions

All ends are loose,
like a fading, or a plane receding
on the runway,
never ceasing to exist
but beginning not to matter,
as it moves
further and further away.

Even closure is a shaky construct,
like carbon monoxide that seeps
through the cracks beneath the doors
of a kitchen,
covered in flowers in broad daylight.

This will not end
the way I want it to—
clean, quick, painless,
a blank slate in a matter of seconds,
an open heart just waiting
to be picked up again.
Slowness is in the character of everything
within the heavy turning of this world,
and what we share
is more like the gradation of night to day
than the systematic ticking
of the second hand of a clock.

Death is not always so grand,
and so all I have tonight
are the sweetest words
from a tongue I cannot trust,
and a sinking feeling
that somewhere, the world’s last polar bear
has silently taken its final breath.