How to Unhammer

Is it sexist to think a man should be able to build something
At least a relationship
At least a life

But you couldn’t build lasting trust
And you couldn’t assemble furniture
That came with instructions
An entire 8x10 booklet
With numbered steps and illustrations

And you always said I was the one who needed to listen
You would scream in my face
Unaware of the jet black irony

Besides knowledge of literary devices, here’s
The ultimate difference between us:

When I say “listen” I mean, hear me
When you say “listen” you mean, obey

Lake Superior Redhead (from fall)

Sweetest Sagittarius, ever mysterious
Physically insatiable, emotionally unavailable
All I ever wanted was to keep you
Or keep you up all night talking

You said you wanna talk highs and lows
Well lo and behold, even without to have and to hold
We’ve still had some of our own
And my drama might not up to snuff
With some of your other skinny starlets
But I did always give it the old college theater class try

Let’s whisper about the night I stood on my bed screaming
In the most whiskeyed, tearful tantrum
A manic twenty-two year old had ever thrown
I think a threw a pity party every Friday night
Remember when I cried “don’t you wanna be with me!”
At you, aloof, turned off
In the battered doorway

I’m sorry to this man

Let’s pass notes about the sunlit mornings
I spent lying on my back in your white sheets screaming
For the hottest carnal joy
Because of you, so present
And closer than a ghost
Inside me deeper than a daydream
That I would never want to share

I’m not sorry, to this day

Passion was never the problem
The devil’s in the details and I swear that it was some form
Of magnetic black magic that held us together
Or rather
Kept pulling us back into that
Abysmal utter mess
Of tangled legs, twisted sheets
Smeared lipstick at 3 am
Mascara tears running away
Stealing your jeans, losing my rings
And the way we loved
My messy morning hair, and the way you used to make me
Glow like the most wicked, breathless, wretched angel

You Scare me like my Favorite Holiday (from fall)

When the final act of the summer
Bleeds into a fair weather fall
That was always our time to shine
In between twilight and midnight
In between rock-hard doorways
And loose-leaf autumnal, burning
Red poetry

My untrusting hips caught like a calf
Between the protective barbed wire
Of your calloused hard-working hands
The faint beating of my heart as silent
As every held-breath in a horror movie
Intermingling of fear and butter and salt

A Halloween murder mystery
Two victims two villains
Too many times to count
How intensely you ravished me
We never carved our names into an oak tree
That I know of, but God damn
I can leave notches in your bedpost like nobody’s business

I wanted to be the queen of your damned
Handmade headboard

I wanted your Giants jacket draped over
My pale shoulders, instead of
The weight of the world
I wanted to have everything
To know everything
But I didn’t have a clue

I’m sorry, it was me who killed this
Miss Always Right
With a body like a revolver and an attitude like a lead pipe
In the living room in your work boots
That careless killer smirk
And wearing nothing else

Black and White (from August)

I thought I was done writing about you, maybe

A sonnet here or there or a love poem for our wedding

But never for this ice you injected into the something

Borrowed, something blue, of my veins

But I was the one who held up insides over head

Guts gold sparkling like a championship belt

But delicate as a tennis bracelet

I presented the slender palor of my inner arm 

I said hey slim, pick your poison and plunge whatever 

Fatality into me you please 

And maybe I’ll die pretty 

We’ll always have downtown Austin, we’ll always 

Have the modem art museum in Denver 

We’ll always have this home we built, even

If it wasn’t always 50/50, even if sometimes it was 1950 

And I was so tired of trying to do all the housework by myself

While simultaneously inventing feminism

I should’ve made you carry me over the threshold

The way you made me carry the team 

To think, out of all the doormats in all the world

You walked into me 

Wolf vs a Lie (from August)

So this is how it feels
To feel everything, to feel nothing
To feel something with no name
Something that we rename

To turn our backs on our shared decision
To bleed a red ink incision
Down the heart of a vow that was supposed to feel
Everything, that was supposed to fill everything

Your cup runneth over while mine was always
At least half full, I had so much to offer you
But you would rather shout it from the top
Of the processed food chain, you wannabe
Fucking alpha, that you have so much to offer the world

I will stay stationary, white knuckling
The whites lines of this stationery
With white lies you make a folly of our fidelity
And my loyal consistence, my empty mirror existence
You make me a fool and an immaterial witness
My fangs are no longer the sharpest tool in the shed
I can’t fix this, you take and you take
But isn’t there something I can take to heal
This ad nauseam still sickness

The sweet little girl who never dared breathe “no”
With pale pink lips and a big black bow
Let the phone slip, let’s pin a split black ribbon
To our overcoats