Monthly Archives: May 2016

Working at a Cellphone Company

You tell me about everything—
why you’re here and
how your plan started
what was wrong with your phone and how
you dropped it in the lake
climbing out of the canoe
when you were on a fishing trip with your son
who flew in from school in Seattle
(where he’s studying to be an engineer)
to spend the summer at home before he graduates
plus his grandmother’s health is declining,
so you’re glad to have him home—
you’d go on if I let you,
but I don’t.
You’re life may be an open book,
but that doesn’t mean I want to read it.

Untitled – May 4, 2016

It was years ago, but I smell you sometimes
usually on another woman,
and everything stops for an instant.
It’s not when you introduced me to Jones Soda
the excited confusion when you told me you were bisexual
or the depression when you friend-zoned me—
I remember those things too, of course,
but not when I smell you.
When I smell you I’m passing a note in shop class
talking to you on the the phone for five hours,
switching out the cordless when the battery ran out
telling you I’d never been kissed
watching Ashlee Simpson try to lip sync on SNL
walking out afterwards in the rain to meet you
on the corner under the lamp-post
holding hands stepping over writhing worms
(out in the rain for the same reasons we were)
cuddling for warmth under a park pavilion
and the electric taste of my first kiss
to the tune of “Mr. Brightside” by the Killers.

If I Get Alzheimer’s

If I get Alzheimer’s,
I think I’d like to die
before it goes to far.

I think I’d like to leave my family
knowing who I am
and knowing who they are.

I think I’d like my mind to die with me
Instead of going bit by bit—
a memory here, a loved one there…

Either way, I guess, it’s me that’s dying;
for who am I without experience?
Still, I think I’d like all of me to go at once.

Then again,
I say “I think” because
I may not want to die.

I’d hate to write my life away and
then retain enough of myself
to want whatever time is left

only to have it taken from me
because of some paper I signed—
or a poem I wrote when I was 25.