Every time I try
to do this I always
end up losing it.

I take deep breaths and
in and out I count the days
but really I'd like

to have something else
distract me, something bigger
and smaller at once

than I - like the idea
of you, held. That roll of film:
sand, dune grass, birds.

second grade is my favorite class this year and it was my favorite grade in elementary school. I had Sister Mary Margaret Louise! not Margaret. S.M.M. was my ninth-grade religion teacher. S.M.L was The Queen.

For Miss Rebecca B., who has been having trouble with Q's lately:

"He picked up the letter Q and hurled it into a distant privet bush where it hit a young rabbit. The rabbit hurtled off in terror and didn't stop till it was set upon and eaten by a fox which choked on one of its bones and died on the bank of a stream which subsequently washed it away.

During the following weeks Ford Prefect swallowed his pride and struck up a relationship with a girl who had been a personnel officer on Golgafrincham, and he was terribly upset when she suddenly passed away as a result of drinking water from a pool that had been polluted by the body of a dead fox. The only moral it is possible to draw from this story is that one should never throw the letter Q into a privet bush, but unfortunately there are times when it is unavoidable."

-- Douglas Adams, from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

That's just the Q's and not the P's (although she does seem to fall every single time she heads toward the bathroom - it's a sharp turn through that doorway at a full run) thankyouverymuch. They're weird when they're seven.

Seventeen when I met. Looked. The second time.

Invaders

1.

She climbs in
while we are making
love. Pinpricks
of desire fatten and balloon
into anger, aimless,
bleeding from her pores like heat.

She wants to push
his hands away and crawl
under the mattress,
press her cheek against
the tiles and feel the weight
of God on her back.

She bitters at the tricks
in the man’s bright teeth,
his bow-tie mouth, the euphony
that can pour out.

2.

I am stronger than you, and better
at holding the edges of events together.
I order gestures and ripples of skin into sentences

while you are waiting for the clang and brattle of love
or danger. I cannot stomach the confusion of your body,
how your skin mistakes a sweat-cold wisp of his hair

for a spider scaling the slope of your cheekbone, or how your mouth
won’t open, though I fill it, fill it to bursting-- you are my
cornucopia that holds abundance back. I am your abundance.

And how I hate the cool stranger
who claps her hands over my eyes,
who unfurls her arms and blooms
a wall of light, barring me from you,
unraveling me from your senses,
leaving me curled,

a dark, hard pocket of her light, when I would bid you
take me with you everywhere.

-- lessmess