This poem is trying to be too many things...

Tori's Reef -OR- Diving

What drew me to [Los Angeles] is that I'm not completely at ease there...

-Sara Bareilles-

Without this photograph, the motionless blown-glass

blue of the Caribbean would ripple off the matte

finish of my fogged up 4x6 framed reminder (depth:

40 feet below, give or take) of the way it felt to hold

my breath, your hand, my fear under

weightless water.  What I didn't know:

that the unpredictable stares you baldly 

in the face, like the sudden movement

of crabs distinguished from the freckled

smoothness of rock and sand and sea when

you realize quiet, bubbles, breath, now only feel

real in deep waters.  

this. poem. sucks.

She kept a Campbell’s soup can filled
with stones on the shelf behind
the picture frame. Her junior
high smile, post-braces, thick
eyebrows. The stones held up
the weight of the frame, white
and wooden. Three women
with the same eyes, same
smile, same hairline, heads tilted
in the same left
direction. Sometimes she thinks
without this photo
she would forget the woman
on the right ever existed.

Untitled No. 2 (I've been having trouble with titles lately...)

Sometimes, startled by dusk, she would
creep slowly down the splintered stairs,
to the clammy, dusty floor of the basement.

Reaching beneath the workbench,
her hand would emerge with a flathead, thin enough
to pry the paneling loose from the far wall.

The space was dark and cold, smelling
like a dried out riverbed. Large enough for her hand
to fit in and place, replace, and remove.

She kept her memories there, tended them when
the rest of the house slept: a photograph
of the dead family dog, Rosey; blueprints

of a tree house; a Campbell’s soup can, filled
with stones; a lock of her best friends hair; the receipt
from breakfast with her father, the day before he died.



(Unsure about the ending... unsure about this in general... oh well.)

Awake Before Dawn

Just breaking the surface tension, sensing

history waiting to spill over the edges

of morning, she paused, spoon in hand,

as a globe of rouge peeked just over

the rough ridges of the May garden, untended

since September.  Leaving her earthen brown

bowl half full on the counter, she tiptoed 

through the kitchen, as if someone in the empty

house could hear her, and out the windowed

back door.  Strangely surprised by the dew 

normally gone by the time she rose on the average

day, she stood still while the toes of her bare feet

grew cold in the stiff grass.  It wasn't that

she hated to see the stars go, but that daylight

sometimes startled her after the smooth dusk

of evening, after the subtle notes played by the 

waves as she drifted to sleep.