and do they come out: 
erase.

we were caught up
in our own nets & traps
the tangling and the strangling cinched us closer
 

and so i took it back. i took back our telling
and my dwelling on the missing
and the need to analyze and finalize and file our things dissolving.
i took back the time, the mystery, the references to things unspoken in terms of terror and plight
and though your gaze becomes my starry night, in the day, i stole away with them.
i took my opening to a desire once disintegrated,
and hid it away so you won't find it, again.
i took back my first hello and the lonely pause of waiting for another in its stead.
and i turned around, and away, and the further i distanced myself from the outer edges of our amounted things, 
the easier it became to grab hold of the pieces and work my way inward,
recycling each to the kind resolve of unmemory
and i took it all back--every last piece--until i arrived in centro, again.

what i've done has never burdened me with many regrets,
it's always been what i'm capable of
that causes me great despair.

She is Supernova and he is the muse.
Were it not for the writing he's lavished upon space of stripe and sound,
were it not for the gentle gradient of expectation
and evidence as it manifests, in colors of frightening potential,
the devastation of chance and the taking,
she'd again find herself ensnared by entanglement and treason
and seared to her coeur.

V.
I'd contracted chickenpox. After a bath, I stood on the bed so I could see my naked body in the frame of my dresser mirror, covered in pox, curious at my flesh's scheme to plot the spots like destinations on a map all over me and without my knowing, without my approval. I stared longingly: a mature admiration of the rosy specks spanning across my youthful and pale skin--meaningful, intentional, romantic, even sexual--too, so for a nine year old. That was the first time I ever really saw my own body, a part of me I had no control over, a part which had its own desire and will separate from my own, in full.

i know i'll experience electricity again and i'll experience more. and it'll surprise me. it will. it won't surprise you; i've felt your hoping for my hope (this time of whole, darling). remember, we took a drive, windows down, and set our nightsecrets free and you said you'd never regret me. it doesn't get any sweeter than this--to bless my finding with our letting.

(thank you)

your wayside way days are not wasted
they're boding telltales of what will
and has yet, yet given chance
entertainment: the possibility and the holding on for a deer's life
thrill, the bloodspill
though you've been spotted
and remain stillframed
between wolf kahn's trees and hues of enddays' news dripping you down into the thorny weeds
that you'll be hidden from sight
from the hunter, the despair of up-in-the-air, the precarious curiosity of darkness
by their hung-by-string lights

 The More Loving One - W.H. Auden  

"Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
 That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
 But on earth indifference is the least
 We have to dread from man or beast.

 How should we like it were stars to burn
 With a passion for us we could not return?
 If equal affection cannot be,
 Let the more loving one be me.

 Admirer as I think I am
 Of stars that do not give a damn,
 I cannot, now I see them, say
 I missed one terribly all day.

 Were all stars to disappear or die,
 I should learn to look at an empty sky
 And feel its total dark sublime,
 Though this might take me a little time."

I.
My parents are retiring soon. They’re talking about buying a house somewhere away, somewhere like Costa Rica, somewhere Like, Where. I’m happy for them, really. But, I guess I assumed their home would be my home for always, no one else deserves to be there. The thought of their moving makes me feel off-kilter.

When I was little (my sister was a baby), we moved to Milton Freewater on the border of Oregon and Washington. Our babysitter put us in corners and once, she lost my sister who was sleephiding underneath her crib. After three months, my dad put in for a transfer and we just ... moved back into the same house. We were drawn back into our center:  the half-way-point between the farthest reaches of anywhere I’d long to be and anywhere they’d need to go. Their house has always been my center; I always thought it would be like that for all of us.


II.
When I was a baby, my mother tells me, I had a nanny. Nine months post-partum, my mother decided to return to the job she left behind to have me, working as an assistant for a lawyer in town. My nanny’s name was Jeannie and I can’t decipher if my memories of what she looked like and how she acted--her brown, thick, long hair tickling my neck as she held me up to her grinning face--were truly my memories of her or, simply, puzzle pieces of what my mother’s told me about her which i conveniently assembled into glimpses.

When I was in high school, Jeannie, then in her late twenties, passed away. Three weeks previous, her first daughter was born. I cried. I’ll be turning twenty-nine in a few months.