Day 7, 40 minutes, 40 poems, 40 days

This is a true statement

I watched a man die today,
deliberately and by choice.
No longer
able to gauge
how heavy my breaths
had become,
I needed to know
how perfectly
still the chest becomes
when all the beautiful
things are gone.

Day 5, 40 minutes, 40 poems, 40 days

What My Dog Must Have Known at the Moment of His Death in Five Lines or Less

My girl--
muddy, like the creek bed
like walks through wilted hay fields
and at last
salt.

Day 4, 40 minutes, 40 poems, 40 days

Form Exercise

Day 3, 40 minutes, 40 poems, 40 days

The Benefits of Godlessness

Prayers will not matter when the world ends
—sun swallows his planets; earth turns herself inside out—
we cannot be transcendent
ushering in the forgiven.

How beautiful, the countless bones
decorated particles, diamonds
created
to tempt the keepers
or destroyed,
to absolve our sins
against the gods
we once called stars.

Day 2, 40 minutes, 40 poems, 40 days

The Poet's Wife (Ars Poetica)

She wonders, some mornings
as she does now
if today he will
find the words to sculpt her
slight hips on the page. Hopes
he will notice
the lyrical rise and fall of breasts
and the crescendo of her exhalation.

He struggles most days,
to find words enough
to accurately describe a fern, let alone
convey the godliness of
her hip
pressed against his side or
the breast,
unassuming in its curve, rising.

Day 1, 40 minutes, 40 poems, 40 days

“No more dreaming of the day, as if death itself was undone. “

I always imagine my death in a bathtub.
It seems only fitting that
As I entered with beats and breaths
I should leave in deep gulps—water and lung
Counting backward to zero.

Hello, Moon.

A college professor of mine
often referred to herself as “lugubrious”
As if it were a state of being—instead
of an adjective.
A preexisting condition.
As if the admittance were a disclaimer—a warning
that she may at any moment slip
into what Charles Darwin would call, “the fits”
and we would be left to fend for ourselves.

Still, I cannot separate her –
confident thighs (perched atop small rounded feet)
holding up the curl of her hair
the sound of her reading
heavy words, husky words--unlike languid, fleshy, sinewy
I cannot separate her from lugubrious.

And not until the darkness appeared, did I
understand.
The winter
months
were
long
this year.
I blamed the moon. His unrelenting absence.
Nestled somewhere on the other side
of the world, wooing strangers with his
many faces, his many lives. While
lovers like myself wasted away
collapsed into “fits” and marveled at the
ease at which our skin made
way for muscle and bone
to meet air.
The winter
months
were
long
this year.