focus

sometimes I still fall back in love with you 

on Thursday, during class

and I wonder about your voice & 

your laugh and I click my pen 

and take notes between thoughts.

a few days

for the past 5 days you've been behind every thought
behind every study guide
every face
every blink of my eyes.

for the past 5 days my body has said I need you
the way I need food
sleep
light.

and the only times this lets up
is when I'm with you.

when I'm with you I wonder
because
I don't know you
well
don't know your
family
don't know your
eyes

the way I want to.

the conundrum
of trying to learn another person:

another
23 years of life
another
set of lungs and heart
another
library of feelings

well I want yours to be mine
to understand

so I can know
if I want them to be mine to keep

so i can know
if I trust you with mine,

so I can know
what I never have.

e.m.

field notes

the first part:

when words fail me I will climb a tree
and speak with the other people who have no words.
we'll forget about
the angry words &
the tired words,
backs to bark,
sitting with Orion.

between stars our fingers dangle, sticky from the
peaches we'll eat before bed
and thats when you and I
--if you've lost your words too--
will just listen to each other for hours until we wake up.

next part:

Laughter is rain
and you wash me away in its flood

swept down to the coast and the Oregon pines
to the taste of sap and sand calling me
out to your ocean
I am on the cliffs above an orange crescent moon, watching its reflection on your waves
and all of that while I am still studying for geology.

I'd like to find you among the rocks and wonders of this book but
writing helps my heart see you better
(perhaps its daily dose of minerals?)
so that I can keep studying, here in this chair in the Eyring center.

are you a lost cause? Find out here:

there was a thunderstorm today.
and I cut my hair.

This is how I tell you I'm letting go.

I've broken past the emotions and the trying-to-impress and now
there are just facts (Wet ones) lightening-struck facts like the storm today and
my heart is giving up.

I'm standing on the curb and I think if I step left toward the bus I'll be climbing back into 5 months ago
we'll be back to having potential.
A few steps farther and we'll be 8 months ago
you'll be picking me up tonight and the asphalt road will turn to clouds
there was nothing beneath my feet and each step made me whimsical
Tomorrow we would walk by the pond.

my feet won't budge.
(not enough to get to either of these places.)
is this my heart or a sponge? the water is welling up
80% of me is tears that won't leak out, but I've been thinking about you.

I'm standing at a crossroads and one sign says Lost Cause the other points North

I just want to follow the stars but I forget my constellations

and the compass I can't read broke in junior high. Were we ever going the right way?

You love(d) me.
Even if its true we're three years away and thats longer than an attention span.
Its longer than
the 17 hour car ride between you and me and its longer than
church and
someone could have three children in that time
years.

oh.

oh it's been so
long. too
long. time to
move on.

I need something different.
Different looks like
we are a time bomb and I don't want it to explode
so I'll just walk away
and hear what ifs
and not listen

e.m.

we're basically just pen pals

Here,
there is music in the tapping of my fingers on this keyboard, in the way they push and pull and patter like raindrops clacking into the web.
there is music in my bed frame creaking, she groans and croaks and was a frog in another life.
there is music in the way my brothers have grown.

Meet Jane:
a princess; with long brown hair that swooshes over her forehead in the biggest, smoothest stylish bangs you've ever seen. If you're going to lose your pen, do it around Jane, she’ll have two tucked into her shirt pocket. We like to talk about the calluses on our hands because other people think we're being climbing snobs, maybe we are a little bit, but for now we haven't tired of running fingertips over changing skin.

---

Em is an enchantress. The boys love her. All of them. Love her. And she can't help it.  She loves them too, but never in the same way, and never in the way they want her to. A brilliant girl with stunningly clear blue eyes that draw everyone in like a stained glass window, like little kids looking up at a rollercoaster. She doesn't like breaking hearts. She just can't help it.

                              ---

Bekah is mom and a perfect one. We might not have been friends normally, but now I love how she looks ecstatic in every picture because she makes herself laugh. Bekah brings us together; Thursday is family dinner, and her apron is on and she cooks and scurries around the house doing everything and doing it wonderfully.

I live in the basement. With two other girls. But lately I've lived more upstairs, up top where the windows are bigger and open and I hear street sounds and birds as I do my homework on Bekah's chair, wrapped in Jane's blanket. where theres a breeze and we make a megabed. I like it there.

and im getting comfortable so I must be moving out in two days, moving states, changing roommates, changing jobs, going.
There is music in this, in the rotation that comes so often and in the cycle of acquaintance to friend to gone.
You’re part of that rhythm, of leaving soon and you've joined the others who came and went and now we've arrived at pen pals. Another new place.

this one is from Everett Mills

this is a college campus and I should be studying

but I'm watching. 

people who aren't trying to be beautiful.

we cut our hair
Smile
hug our legs adjust our glasses
cough and breathe
logic.
He is tapping his foot anxiously at the table, calculator in both hands.

She looked up and laughs, 
cross-uncross jeaned-legs,
Stretch shrug yawn 

eyes brighten on the phone,
bite nails or listen, still, smiling.

She is still twisting hazel hair around her finger.

I am still twitching my big toe to a beat only I hear.

we analyze synthesize wipe our eyes laugh and

this is not a zoo. I am not a fly and I am sitting in a chair, not on a wall

but observation is a strange feeling. It feels gentle and curious, the way clouds feel as they drift through the blue. It feels like peace. Like pieces of art sprinkled onto so many independent, moving beings and I, i get to watch them

we are all of the extended metaphors and we snatch them from the universal word bank of oxygen,
(it surrounds us and cushions our bodies against empty space)
inhaling
exhaling
existence.

we don't know what it means but
what is meaning but deep breaths of creativity,
taken human shape and crawling until they walk on two legs
all trying to grow and be

and succeeding wildly in the most subtle of
unexpected
ways?

[thursday in the library]