Tag Archives: homesick

63. She Lost Three Lovers in Texas

She lost three lovers in Texas

it is such a big state

full of tall hair,

women with trinket cars,

attorneys at law doing Dallas.

Everyone has two bulldozers

called arms.

.

The U.P. is home, frozen 

with trees on top.

Birds trickle out of September

and all the love you have

you know you will need.

December is longer than

cars crashing.

.

In Texas,

flint stars

big as her pupils and

she shaved the right side of

all of her head.

On the U.P. that hair grew out.

She rattled borders of her mattress

until northern home frost 

settled her down.

.

42. Homesick

The sagebrush and tules miss me.

The cacti cry.

The mountains moan

huddled under white blankets

stained with blue blood and

ripped by treetops.

The dust has cried

until its own tears

have settled its dance.

The wind keens and 

howls across earth

trying to find me,

not finding me,

running east and south

searching the land

for me.

.

I am here,

I whisper–

here I am,

so far north.

The sun, tired of shining

upon my sadness,

climbs only a few feet

above monotonous spruce oceans

before settling back down.

Night is longer than the knife

edge of a sand dune

streaming off toward ribbon clouds.

38. Homesick

Holding steel to their eyes

men walk upon the earth.

My hands atrophy in their thin space,

trapped between earth floors

tiled with squares

the size of 

their hearts

and ceilings of sky blue, even

rain seeds of men’s convenience.

Attending to my birth

in trees’ wind-switched limbs

my swelling maturation

in ruthless floodwaters embrace, I age

under earth’s continuum, within

the blood soil fortitude

of all my relatives, yet

hands prisoners trapped in steel

jaws of a civilization I so rarely

comprehend.

I am merely an embarrassment

I do not speak of

in the company of my ancestors.

My hands I try to draw back to myself

where they belong.