When the woman with the blue eyes arrived I created a deliberate silence in hopes to not break the spell that she danced with. Each year she got closer in age to God as brilliance bled into her New Jersey bones. The world was hers for the taking so she took all of it. But her baggage was so full of insecurities that she had to sit on it to get it to close.

She was 18 years old and some days she wondered if she could see the universe from her bedroom window. She hoped this town could teach her everything. Like how to let go.

There were people inside her arms. They were the ones who’d died. They were the ones she’d loved. They helped her spread all the compassion that she kept piled up in corners. They spread it through embraces that never seemed to last long enough to take all the pain away.

The rain carried her home while her arms searched for a forever kind of freedom.

Venus

I stared wild-eyed at a painting of the Birth of Venus
And remembered the first woman who told me
I looked just like it

I wonder how she’s living
I wonder if her ears are ringing as I write this

Yeah, I remember her
She was a free-spirited youth,
Passionate with an edge of crazy
In the body of a forty-six year old Spanish teacher

Her imaginary friend was named bird
And her eyes sparked with the same caged freedom he flew with

She was never very good at standing still
That’s why I took a picture of her
It was the only time she wasn’t weaving her way in and out of history

When sleep came for her,
She fought it
She fought everything

There was never an angel inside of her
She was always inventing her own rules

The only things she believed in were freedom and adrenaline
So she made sure they found her
On the edge of a cliff,
In the place between a plane and the sky,
In the motivated arms of a dangerous boy

I knew her for twenty minutes
During the third, fifth, and eighteenth she told me I looked like Venus
During the nineteenth she said goodbye
By the twentieth I knew I would miss her

She’s the woman who always leaves first

Living in New Jersey, on the boarder of Asshole and Unproductive, I can hear the quiet hum of suburbia. Strangely enough, I like it. Sometimes I forget how beautiful this town can be when you look past the clutter of lacrosse sticks and beer cans. It’s easy to feel like you’re drowning in all of it. It’s easy to bury your head in million dollar homes and the dreams your parents forgot about in order to buy them. It’s easy to hate this place. But it’s worth it when you remember how gorgeous the asphalt looks in August and how many birthday wishes came true during recess when you were busy catching butterflies.

“You’ll never escape this place,” they tell me. I know it’s true. Thirteen years is too long to stay anywhere, but I’ve done it. I’ve endured the green and gold walls in this town along with seventy-one girls…seventy-one women. Somehow, I’ll miss it. I already do sometimes. I’ll miss the comfort in daydreaming about a life far away from a town much too small for me. I’ll miss the smiles and love that interrupted so many conversations. I’ll miss the friends that I loved far too late, sitting on cars outside of Magic Fountain watching our memories in light up sneakers. At the speed we’ve been going, we just may escape the fears.

Uncle Steve (edited)

I never noticed the glimmers of evil hiding under my Uncle’s fingernails. Don’t get me wrong, the construction work and bad decisions were evident, but the evil—that he became good at hiding.

He was so human.

I was born to believe in him. He was awfully beautiful some days. But someone must have been playing with his clocks. A minute would pass and a new year would begin. No time for resolutions. No do-over’s. No second chances. Just dirty work. Just a dirty man too full of regret to consider himself anything more than a boy; A dirty boy with evil under his fingernails.

There was suburban silence in his backyard. Even the crickets feared him, echoing speechless when his feet met their home. I never saw his evil, but I could hear how the pond in his backyard cried when he stepped in it. Handkerchiefs hung from my ceiling to catch every other drop that suicided from their home to mine. I never congratulated myself on the ones I caught. I just summed it up to luck as I memorized how heartache looked on the floor of my bedroom.

My Uncle was so eager to be a bad man. He knew what it meant to fail. He had shoes filled with pebbles and he resented being saved so we gave up trying on a Wednesday in Mobile, Alabama when the wind knocked him down with as much love as a big brother. He lay defeated at the wall where his mother marked his height until age fourteen and told him that with just a few more inches he could play pro-ball. He was 4’11. Momma knows best.

He thought with elbows and fists.

He loved with bullets spiraling out of the mouth like horror stories.

He was one of the drunks stumbling around town too frightening for company. Or perhaps, too frightened. Most nights I watched him pick dinner out of his teeth and wrote poems about how the moonlight worshipped the veins in his arms but he had lost the music at fourteen. There was too much winter inside his life. He let you down if you looked too close.

The big book of life told me he was no good. I didn’t believe it for a second until he ended it all himself, in the same way he entered the world.

Alone.

He quit. The evil, elbow man with pebbles in his shoes quit everything I stay alive for.

He had been kidnapped by bottles of scotch. He was a soldier in his own backyard.
He left an awful silence.

I drank Caribbean suns on a boat in San Juan with a gap toothed smile I never loved.

I thought for half a moment.
I still couldn’t remember how I got there.

I tried to cover the scratches painted on my hips from growing too fast.
The cats put them there.
The smile man kissed them.

Play me.
Play me, Springtime.
It's been done before.

I knew my innocence was left at second base
When history’s ghosts came to remind me that I’ve only known addiction to people
And to quit when the alcohol starts to taste like water and bad decisions.

I could only taste his lips,
Which breathed for more.

He was the beautiful Caribbean man they all whispered about.

He was kind
And I was tipsy.

That night was as intoxicating
As the liquor coursing through our veins and
Whatever it was that made me forget his name thirty minutes before he kissed me.

He must have been born to please.
I wonder who makes people that way.

I took the early morning walk of shame.
He held my hand the whole way.

But the bed sheets wouldn't let me sleep.
Not even for the last hour.
They remembered the spiders I'd swallowed in all my lives.
I wish they'd forget.
I'm good at forgetting.
I've mastered denial.
I shouldn't be so proud.

It was one of those nights only escaping could cure.

Momma

“You have the same face,” we heard for the fourth time that day.
“Nah,” we replied, still confused by the widespread idea that the apple fell so close to the tree.
We stared in a mirror. Shoulders touching, eyes moving back and forth as if watching a ping pong game rather than our own skin.
“I don’t get it.”
“Ditto.”