small confessions & pebbles of regret

jenna, our wonderful rubicon press editor, sent a note last night to tell alex stolis and me that our chapbook small confessions & pebbles of regret is now available! yay! it's taken a while longer than planned, but it's actually better this way, because otherwise it would have been out at the same time as my secret meanings.

you can find (and buy) the collection at rubicon press, or you can wait and get a signed copy (possibly even signed by both alex and me) from either one of us. i'll let you know when i/we have some copies. watch this space.

here are two poems from the chapbook - the first one by alex and the second by me:

Dear J_______

I want to forget you ever loved me, forget that time can stop the bleeding
and it's possible to walk again after my legs have been broken.

Let's go back to the city where we met—I'll wait in the restaurant
where you watched me make a fool of myself with that dark Rapunzel.

If it were possible to fly and watch stars waver in place, teeter on the brink
then topple down a mountain—I wouldn't want to change my name again

and again. I should know how this works—there are only so many miracles
to go around and mine have been pawed over by too many greedy hands

and now I find I have nothing. I think about waking up godless and hung-over,
waiting for ocean waves to collapse on the beach, hoping for someone

to fish me out of the sea. We are supposed to believe that death is bold—
a loud noise from behind, the roar of a train, the sharp crack of a gun

and beginnings are never sudden movements, they're soft and unobtrusive.
Last chances are smoky bar rooms overflowing with harsh consequences,

consequences that will cut you off at the knees and leave you blind.
I rearrange the faces of lost friends and lovers

until all that's left is a punch-drunk Sisyphus, stranded on a hill—
disenchanted and ordinary.


Ever yours,

L_______

* * *

Dear L_______,

Unlearning to love you is like sucking back sand through the narrow
waist of an hourglass. I already have a desert in my throat, a desert

crossed and recrossed by words that have begun to shape my mouth:
never; again; your name. Sometimes a question slips from underneath

my tongue: Did we let it die too quickly? But we both know that death
is not bold. Death grabs what he can get, strangles his victims from

the shadows between streetlights. He chooses wisely—never anything
that will put up a fight. The end was like the beginning—a moment

we missed, the way you'd miss a landmark from the window of a train
that moves too fast, eyes aimed too high, too low until you realise

you've already gone past, and you slam down the window, crane your
neck and hear the air rush in to push all words of loss and longing

up your windpipe. There is no going back, not to a morning of soft
sunshine on unfamiliar skinscapes, not to the city where we met;

it no longer exists. Its roads have moulted, the pines shed needles
like flakes of dry skin. Everything we touched, has been touched

a thousand times since. Rapunzel's hair has fallen, again and again,
like a rope, like a ladder; the streets to her tower echo with laments.


J_______


oh and the cover photo is my dad's. :)


song of the day: iieee by tori amos.