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I am in a coffee shop where young Christians
tend to gather to talk about God
like wildebeests at a watering hole,
and even with their Bibles in hand,
they still sound so thirsty.

When I was a little girl in Sunday School,
the teacher gave me a white piece of paper, a four-pack of crayons,
and told me to draw how I imagined God.
I’ve been working on that picture for twenty years.

Today I imagine if God were here
at this table
he’d want to talk about coffee.
I imagine him sneezing and me left speechless
—what are you supposed to say, God bless you? That’s presumptuous
And laughing. I imagine God holds his chest as he laughs,
like Santa Claus.

I don’t mind imagining God a man
because I imagine he’d be fine
with the box of tampons under the sink
and my tears. Each drop the same salty consistency I’ve cried
since the tears of my birth.
Since I was twelve and everyone in my class hated me.
Since heartbreaks and deaths.
Since I started crying for no reason at all
except that it would feel good to stop.

I imagine he’d understand how
we can have so much to be sorry for
without being able to say I’m sorry.
He’d know that saying it never changes anything.
and it only comes as an afterthought.

And he’d have mercy on the dirty dishes
stacked up in my sink.

I imagine God on a motorcycle
riding down the freeway in the HOV lane.
As he rides past I can see
on the back of his leather jacket is a patch that says
“You’ll die too.” True.
Especially the way the white lines weight my eyelids
behind the wheel a four-wheel drive and a false sense of security.
“What is it you’re really afraid of?”
He’d ask me when I caught up to him
at the next rest stop, drinking the free coffee from a Styrofoam cup.
I imagine God would go bungee jumping with me.
I imagine his favorite food is funnel cakes.

I imagine God sitting here with me.
I ask him: “How many people in the world are crying right now?
This very second?”
“Such a predictable question,” he says, smiling.
“Here, let’s do this one instead,” he says. “Ask me
how many people all around the world are
at this second
picking their noses.”
And he laughs.

The unlimited family plan

There is poetry for people like me
who hate talking on phones
because on occasion
it will happen that
I find myself having to call someone
long distance to bitch because

I’m in a cute dress that unzips in the back
and now I’m fucking stuck
because
I don’t have a boyfriend to unzip me
and I didn’t think of that
when I put it on

just to hear my sister
on the other end of the line say
“I know how you feel” and that
the dress isn’t worth it
so rip the goddam thing off
you can go buy another

Hometown

You go out to the bar with one of your best friends, whom you haven't seen in a year. "Two vodka crans please."

"What kind of vodka? We have Monarch or Absolute. I'd recommend the Absolute Red. It's like...low cal." Really? Did she really just say that? Because I wasn't making a point to keep track, and I KNOW I don't need to.

"Yeah, that sounds fine."

"Here you are."

"How much?"

"Um...(counts silently, moving her lips) seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven. Eleven dollars."

God I love this town.

Excerpt

"What in the end does even the most fervent kiss mean, in which body and soul seem to mingle? What in the end does it mean that we traveled for months through strange countries together? What does it mean that I had a child with you? What does it mean that you cried in my lap over your affair? What does all that mean, since you still have left me alone...alone even in the moment when my body drank in the seed of life, which I carried in me for nine months, and which was destined, as our child, to live with strangers, and did not wish to remain in this world."

-from A Road into the Open by Alfred Schnitzler.

(beautiful passage...beautiful book)

*teehee*

I've adopted a new life philosophy:

Be nice to me and I won't eff you up. We'll see how it goes. I'm feeling optimistic about my new approach.

A toast: because you deserve the best *clink*

There are the men I've loved
and there are the men who have loved me.
I wish I could introduce them to one another
I wish they'd meet somewhere in the middle.
and maybe bring me flowers--but maybe that's getting too greedy.
I guess I can pick the flowers myself.

To have your cake and eat it too--
sometimes you must bake it from a box yourself.
If you forget to add the eggs
don't be too hard on yourself.
getting right 2 out of the 3
ingredients required
are good odds

The CIA should hire poets for spies.

we're much more keen and stealth. After all, who ever recognizes a poet walking down the street?

Also, it'd be much less of a mess to clean up. People would have read the memos more closely so as to dissect all those complicated metaphors. Then we wouldn't have this whole water boarding scandal to deal with.

<3 <3 <3

The couple behind me has split up the newspaper into two parts. That way they can both skim for the important stuff. When one of them comes across something of interest, they read it out loud to the other. People in love must be more in touch with the world around them, and all its goings-ons. They don't know I'm listening in, too, so that I can keep writing my paper and get the latest news at the same time.

You don't need someone to hold your hand all of the time...just some of the time

I saw an old couple holding hands pull apart when they came upon some stairs. They parted to separate sides of a stairwell so that they could each hold onto a rail as they stepped down. At the bottom, they met back up, rejoined hands, and continued on their way.

Maybe since I'm young, love still seems so surreal. But once life runs its course, love seems really quite practical.

Listen to: Zee Avi
http://www.youtube.com/user/KokoKaina

A poem for a string of ex-Mexican lovers on Cinco de Mayo

First
let me clarify—
those few ex-Mexican lovers of mine—
they’re still Mexican,
just no longer my lovers.

This is a story of probability.
If you grow up in Eastern Washington,
odds are,
you will, and should,
at some point date a Mexican.

Today is Cinco de Mayo.
So if I go out tonight,
the odds of me running into
at least one of my ex-Mexican lovers:
great.
The odds of me being drunk when it happens:
great.
And it’ll probably be off tequila:
not so great.

When I run into one of them drunk off tequila,
the odds of me being spiteful to his face:
mediocre.
The odds of me being spiteful in a drunken text:
it’s a sure thing.

…to be continued on Chinese New Year.

Conversational Cleptomania

How I know I'm ready to graduate:

"I could write poetic shit all day, it just wouldn't mean anything's the problem"
Then it's not really poetic, now is it, Dumb Fuck?

Stars blaze. Yeah, we all get it by now. I think I've even read it in a poem or two myself. But moving on...

"I want to trace your skin with my fingers." SLUT! Oh wait, not you, I was talking about that line. It gets around. A LOT

I guess we can all still be friends though. Just don't try to talk to me about anything literary. I'll cut you. Literarily. Literally.

Variation V from "Theme and Variations Over a Cup of Coffee"

No, I'm sorry.

Here, why don't you take the moon? It's quite within reach and the lovers can do without it for one night. The way she's starting to droop, they'd have put her out with their musty sweaters and erroneous kitchen wares in a cardboard free box by the sidewalk to get soggy in the rain.

She's not for the lovers tonight. She's a jaundiced yellow like the half-circles under your eyes. Pick her up as you stumble away from the Horseshoe Cafe on the corner of Holly and Railroad.

Take her with you tonight and hang her above your head, right where the waves of the bay slap against the concrete rubble of Junk Beach, right over the warehouses abandoned for meth dens. Leave her on with the light in your bathroom just in case you have to rise in the middle of the night. Rock her to sleep to the freight train wheels sharp across the tracks. Kiss her on the cheek when you hear the hollow train whistle sing her off to dream. She can be yours for tonight, that's really all I've got.

But no, I'm sorry. No change to spare.