disorganized

i am not a very organized person. there are many obvious penalties attached to my disarray. discomfort and irritation, of course, but also an over-looked, potentially hard to accept pleasure: an increased rate of romantic coincidence. of stumbling across something you weren't at all looking for but certainly need. that jolt of happiness, the rush of recognition when, out of the blue, you find your brother's birth certificate or your parents' marriage license or the haiku you wrote in 3rd grade that won a district-wide poetry prize. items you have no reasonable need for now as an adult. or do you? these little beauties. these treasures. these histories. the hook that drags you back to moments of the past and set your heart beating in a flurry of remembrance. that surge of emotion that comes from being confronted with true memento mori- the artifacts of ones childhood, of ones parent's childhood, back and back, a lineage of belonging. or of rupture. the red thread of how ones life, as it stands in this very moment of Finding, had been built.

allowances

today i spent

$14 on poetry and 

$17 on stones which

may or may not help me

with anything.

when i was 8, i would

sometimes swim

with ankles twined

pretending to be a mermaid

in the cool blue obsidian 

bucket of our

apartment complex pool.

i hoped that if i stayed long enough

if no one was looking

if my mother forgot her watch

forgot herself to wine-coolers and adult conversation

if the sun was going down and

the pink shafts of sunset firelight

sliced through the water 

at just the right angle

and the wish in my small heart was honest and true

that the change would take place 

and i would be transformed 

and i would go home to the ocean

beautiful, immortal and mythical

safe, dispite the coral

safe inside the whale of the world.

a new

blue obsidian sits

to my left on my crowded nightstand.

i'm coming home 

with a new stone each week

and praying again

for the first time in years.

i read a poem called "Zero" 

by Maggie Nelson 

and hinge myself to old hopes

for my own

"gem future."

only that isn't what she wrote

it's what i remember

or maybe just what i need-

something to reach for that isn't

"fiction."