In January, 2024, Wren Jones and I decided to trade daily poems. I'd done this once before, in January, 2007.
The ones I didn't hate are posted below.
January 31
She was fine when I left last night, but this morning she is raging and I wonder what I did in my sleep to anger the sea. Is it possible it has nothing to do with me? Can the planet be disappointed in someone else for a change?
No.
January 30
Before surgery
my mother tells me
she's left a key
in the mailbox.
"Don't let the cats
starve if I die."
I tell her they'll
be fine 'cause
she'll be fine
and wonder what
the proper expression is
to comfort
frightened patients.
Good luck seems
worse than break a leg
or kick ass.
Then,
I can do nothing
but think about
those shaved cats
reacting to me
coming through
that new
fifteen hundred
dollar door.
January 29
Like with people,
not all poems can be
winners. I rip up
the paper and tape the shreds
to the blades of a fan —
perhaps it'll be good
for keeping away
mosquitoes.
January 28
After I'd left her
she screamed angry messages
to my machine for years.
And when I ran into her on the Danforth
when we were both 44,
with her new boy,
bald and with all the style of a
Stereogram,
she treated me like a stranger
and I couldn't have been more
relieved. It was one of those
What did I see in her?
moments
we've all had, but it wasn't mean,
it wasn't cruel,
it wasn't petty,
just pure bewilderment
at who I'd been
all those years ago.
January 26
She vomits stunned birds
who call to their wings
and leave her retching,
birthing their brethren.
January 24
I cannot get past my friend’s
betrayal. When her name lights my call
display, my heart becomes a
hissing swan.
January 23
My heart swells
to full tide when
she stretches
next to the river's
green lawn and
I glimpse the
ghost-white laugh at death
beneath her cotton shirt.
January 22
Each lightning bolt is a posse sent by God to find me. Be still and quiet. Live another day.
January 21
The perpetually tanned
that walk the beach in Pile
see him asleep on the sand
and imagine he's washed
up from a distant land.
They comment
in Spanish that he has
the body of an American
who needs to get more sun.
"How can a man let himself
fall so far?" Oh,
Spaniard! He's fallen much,
much further.
January 20
She speaks to me not from the sky, but as the sky. In the Pacific, she caresses me as stones & salt water, barnacles & broken shells. In the woods of Griffith Park, I witness the pulse of her breathing as the earth. With my arms 'round her trunk & my lips to her bark, I whisper.
January 19
tears and breaks
stabbings and scrapes
ulcer and stone
memories gone —
punctures and sprains
a snap in my brain —
shortening my time
to the finish line.
January 17
Forget love?!
She laid eggs in me
when delivered
cradled on your breath.
January 14
Burn it down. Torch everything. Firs and oaks. Sequoias and willows. Pine, walnut, and birch. Make the wildfire outrun every land animal and the flames higher than any bird can escape. Boil the lakes and oceans and run the creeks and rivers dry. Turn the beach sands to crackled skin. Crumble the mountains, split the rocks. Melt the asphalt. Let gravel jump like popping corn. Choke the mycelium. Devour the sun and stars. Blacken time and smother the universe in a blanket of quiet nothing. Tuck everything in for good. My baby doesn't love me anymore.
January 13
just before i fell asleep
the birds would darken the sky
not once did they ever make a peep
not once did I question why
then when i was swimming
a grizzly ate me whole
he must have thought me salmon
I laughed to play the role
my mother made me hug the earth
dressed in my new school jeans
my arms completely 'round its girth
i squeezed it to smithereens
January 12
She sings tizita
while I watch from
a table at the front.
There is sorrow there
and heartbreak
of course
but there is hope
and independence
too.
On this night, the Eritrean
air is hotter than on most,
and while we lay still,
body-to-body,
steam rises from her
skin like a lullabye
from Mekurya’s
horn.
Tomorrow she will
head west to
Senegal while I stay
with our children
who understand better
than I that only time
can bring back
our beautiful
mother.
January 10
You could have learned piano.
You could have picked up a new language.
You could have taught yourself to draw.
You could have danced.
You could have made a new friend.
You could have memorized a sonnet.
You could have written a song.
You could have made a lover proud.
You could have climbed a tree.
You could have gotten fit.
You could have tidied up.
You could have taken a bath.
You could have eaten something.
You could have lived.
But then, you would have had to get up.
January 8
My daughter practices her female voice
while I make chicken congee from
a recipe passed down from my mother.
There isn't anything else she left
besides the recipes — but
that's a form of love, isn't it?
I wish I could have told her that
she was pulling what she was
running from, but
I was 55 when I learned to
put those words in that order
and she was already long gone.
Now, Adhara, who'd never
met my mother and barely
knew her own
has stopped talking to the mirror.
Knife in hand, she asks what she can do
to help prepare our meal.
January 7
On Safari
we saw the pink lion
named Gabriel,
translucent as a ghost
and just as frightening.
And I remembered
that as a child
I had an imaginary
friend who
ignored me,
but always laughed
at my father's jokes.
January 6
When she was new and
could fit in my hands,
I'd whisper truths about
her mother
into her fontanel.
"She could cook the flavour
out of anything." &
"Her love plugged me in."
& "We were bashert."
Now that she's older
I sometimes see a confused
look cross her face and
imagine she's remembering
something softly spoken
confused at how it got
into her head.
January 5
Marie Boe
made delicious laplap and
was aces with a machete —
working all her life
to raise her children,
extra hard after her husband
died from a love of kava.
She found me intimidating
the day we first met in
a hut in Pango Village,
Vanuatu, but over five months,
we became fast friends, me
teaching her english and she
trying to teach me Bislama,
both of us stitched up at the
other's difficulty. "Me likem you!"
and "Lincoln blong Marie."
I was Numbawan Dog Sitter
and she was Numbawan
Housekeeper. Together
we pierced coconut eyes
to take begonia flowers
plated with cassava chips
and the best grapefruit
you've ever tasted.
January 4
I wake to the unmistakable report
of an Olympia typewriter —
crisp and certain!
Each pounding letter
meant to woo me.
I feign disinterest so
she never
stops.
January 3
Give me a current to swim against;
I am drowning in these placid waters
January 2
The day I learned
to snap
bottlecaps
across the room
my mother said she
didn't know any wonderful
men. There was iron
in the New Brunswick air
and the taste on my tongue
brought back fleetings
of my time in the womb
and the sound of her blood
clicking with certainty that I’d be
different.