He Must Have Done Something

I want to write a poem about
The texts you send with the lights off.
I want to write a poem about
Keeping her close to my belly like
A pocket watch.
And watching her take big swings,
Asking me to cancel plans for her.
Snapping my fingers,
While she thinks of the name I can't grasp.
"John Steinbeck...?"

Yes,
That's the one.

Do you think John Steinbeck ever did
Something shameful?
D'you think he ever did
Something that felt yucky?
Something that resembled worms
When the memory slithered
Through his gut?
He must have done something.
Maybe a lie.
Or a low.

Yes,
That's the one.

Cortico Sport

Teeming with tunnel vision and little else,
The tot leaps off the slippery deck and
Flings herself into the depths below.
Five and a half feet of pool water is not terribly deep
But a toddler can drown in one, you know.

My mother moved with such swiftness
That any onlooker would have thought this
Was a coordinated succession.
First one
Then the other.

In fact it was born from a panic
So promordial it takes no input
From higher order cortical areas.

Just adrenaline and impulse.
It was a nudge from the brainstem
From my mother's brain's mother itself:
"Your child is in danger. Save your child."

The two plunged
One right after the other
And for the next nearly two decades
Neither would surface.
Not really.

The Covers

I'm in an Uber home,

Cruising into the sunrise.

I'm filled with something right now.
I don't know what it is but it sounds like Nora Jones.

In the bar... twelve hours ago.

The Cranberries we're playing.
But when we got in bed and she slid two fingers under my belt...

Others in my hair. The liquor made my lips numb but I can still feel...
It sounded more like Stairway to Heaven. Or Sonic Youth's Superstar.

Making tea in the kitchen at midnight
To Jack Johnson.
And then watching her splashing a shot of Jack Daniels into her elephant mug of black tea.
Sly smile through eyes that told me she wanted
To catch up to me.

Because she was still on Jack Johnson
And I felt more like Sex and Candy.

Now the driver's fingers brush over the volume dial;

Some 2009 karaoke number is flooding through the speakers.

I can't hear it.

The Chasm

I am not an announcement.

I am not one big achievement that carries me like a 

Wave to the next peak in my life.

I am a slow, mounting anthill 

Of tiny swells towards ideas about which nobody is more excited than me.

I'm not "down for whatever".

I am an edifice.

I come with multiple contingency plans.

There is nothing instant about my gratification,

And I've never taken a shower that wasn't hot as fuck,

And I feel as big as the ocean,

And as deep as a drum,

And as mammoth as a barrel full of wine.

You'd have me sleeping with one eye open 

But fuck that because I am a force,

And even when I am buried in the ground,

I will continue to form earthquakes until 

The house of your memory has fallen into the chasm of me.

Cricket

Lovesick again
Touch myself but with your hands
Moon rises higher
Attached to my heart with a rope
Like walking a dog
For ten hours straight

Cricket
It knows what I've been up to
Takes six eyes to catch it all
There's a lot you'll miss
With just your two

Didn't get high today
Makes the hours go by too fast
Everyone knows
That's no good when you're lovesick

Movies in Your Head

I still drive by some houses and struggle
Not to picture her curtains in the windows
And our babies at the breakfast table.

This house, however, is punctuated with a cop car,
Parked in the driveway like an exclamation mark.
Wait, I don't mean a police precinct squad vehicle.
I mean it looks like the type of muscled out,
Dark, tinted car that a cop drives off duty.
The one he takes home, fingers twitching for
An unreliably absent weapon.

When her fingers twitch, it's in her sleep,

The universe unexpectedly giving me space to owe it something later.

"Here," it coos, "Have her amber voice - sweet, and dark, and clear, like translucent maple syrup. Here, have her failures; even they are controlled demolitions. Here, have her keyboard clicks; they are bullets. Here, have her orgasms; they use the tongue muscle in its entirety. Here, have her words; they are spoken darts, sprung from a barrel at top speed."

The Real Tragedy

"What are you doing?" she gasps, one hand raised, with the urgent tone of someone stopping a child from jumping onto a live railway track. I freeze, with equal pressure, believing that there must be a spider on me or something. "You're using body lotion on your face," she tells me, relieved that she has saved me from what might have been my final, fatal mistake. Who cares I struggle to suppress, disappointed that this is happening yet again.

Unfortunately this is an interaction all too familiar. Apparently, some part of my first impression communicates a type of femininity on which I failed to deliver later. My skin care routine doesn't make any sense, or my bra needs to be resized, or my office supplies aren't from the same cute, gold-plated Target collection. Why does anyone need a gold-plated stapler? Are you assembling memos for the Prince of Bhutan? Whomever I'm dating cannot believe I've been getting along by myself, writing notes on scraps of deli paper and subsisting on a daily make-up routine of a little mascara. You know, like a caveman. So they'll sigh and take me by the hand to Victoria's Secret or Bare Minerals or some other awful cesspool of American beauty standards. I keep my nail beds so fucking nice for you, I'd protest in my own resentful head. My bras and panties would all match by the following month. And then from that point I've become another pet project of someone who was taught in high school that worth comes entirely from your ability to apply powders, colors, and fabrics to your loathsome form.

And inevitably, somewhere between the 3rd and 4th date, the imminent question. It's appears without fail. It doesn't matter that we're going out to a dive-bar with queers that are far more, shall we say rustic, than the one I'm forcing her to deal with. "Could I...," she starts tentatively, her eyes lighting up with possibility, "...please do your make-up tonight?" I feel like a little brother in a cartoon family, being made to play dress up with my older sister and her high school friends. A make-over dummy on a teenage sleepover, my ruddy, Irish face smeared with lipstick and embarrassment. There is no bigger turn-off. Trust me, I've explored many.

It's here that I get... rebellious. We're going to meet your parents? Excellent, I just bought new Nike high-tops. A lunch date in the park? The old trucker snapback I found on the street last night will do perfectly. I'm proposing marriage? I'm not shaving my legs for that. It's petty, I know, but nothing makes a girlfriend less comfortable than insisting on being the master of my own appearance. That and having a "formal-wear t-shirt". Don't worry, the relationship only gets healthier from there.

Of course with all of this comes the sneaking suspicion on my part that I was never attractive to these girls in the first place - that my minimalism and simple appearance was not, as they thought, a conscious choice to dismantle the patriarchy, but just a cry for help from a girl trying to be a woman. That from the beginning, I was an ugly house in a nice neighborhood, and with a new coat of paint and some landscaping, I would become datable. And thank God they found me when they did. They might as well date a man - it would be more of a delicious challenge to change him into something acceptable - if not for the undeniable upgrade that lesbian sex affords them. Ah, my only redeeming quality.

Don't get me wrong - I approach relationships with the same "let me get my hands on this train-wreck" sentiment. I'm no more innocent than these well-meaning straight-passing women, although, my adjustments are more geared towards the topic of professionalism or grammar. No one will send a subpar email as long as I'm dating them. I'm as fun at parties as I sound. I believe everyone has a streak of fixer-upper special projects coordinator, but this urge is compounded exponentially when the relationship consists of two women. Each of us is desperately trying to pin the other down into the person we'd both like to be and date simultaneously.

I imagine a fantasy conversation that they have in their own minds, mistaking them for memories of actual reality. "Huh," I'd say in their delusion, "If only I had someone to teach me in which contexts to use a bronzer, and in which contexts to use a peach blush!" The nine elapsed minutes it took me to do enough research to even write that line should be indicative of how little I know about these things. They'd swoop in, rescuing me from my ignorance, whipping out various-sized brushes from their elastic tool-belt, the cosmetic equivalent of every Avengers hero combined.

When I was in the second grade, our class was taught what was referred to as a "game" but was really a way to force the memorization of multiplication tables. The tottering students would make their way through the 5's and the 6's and the 7's, memorizing math facts of one table each week until winning an ice cream party following the 12's.

"Are we allowed to do two tables in one week?" I sniffled, already planning my strategy, forever the social calculator. I wasn't particularly attached to multiplication, or ice cream for that matter. Come on, Breyer's Mint Chocolate Chip? Whatever. But the rush of sucking up to an authority figure was the real reward.

"Well," my plump teacher said, cooing at my adorable naivety, "Of course you're allowed, it's just against the rules." I stood for a moment, dumbfounded that another person could interpret words differently than me. Didn't those mean the same thing...? How can something be allowed in a game and against the rules at the same time? What did she mean? Was she envisioning me engaging in this activity without respect for any rule? I pictured myself screaming in high-pitched impish delight as I careened through the room, filling out multiplication worksheets in a state of rogue chaos, shoving the other children out of the way to claim my sweet prize. "Well," my weary teacher would remark, "It's against the rules but it's still allowed." Never had my theory of mind been challenged in such a consequential way.

Since that day, I've been paranoid about my communication with others - walking on proverbial eggshells through every conversation, making absolutely sure that I'm being understood correctly. So if some accidental part of me betrayed the pleading need for a make-over from the woman I'm sleeping with, I'd be grudgingly unsurprised. Figures. I'll take completely responsibility for the misunderstanding.

As a lesbian, I already spend most of my time feeling disconnected to the skills and knowledge that straight women somehow came by naturally. But the kicker is that I couldn't care less about this shit. As a lesbian who just refuses to fall in love with anyone who isn't quintessentially, culturally, traditionally female, I'm aware I'm almost setting myself up for the self-conscious discomfort. I come for sex with almost frustrating equity and stay for the outfit tips. As unsolicited as they are, I appreciate them. By the way, I missed the ice cream party. I only made it to the 9's. That's the real tragedy.