Quilt

As a high school graduation gift my Auntie Donna sewed a quilt
of cut up t-shirts: all of my school and sport and sweat stained shirts
neatly dissected into small squares and stiched into one.
I've never used the blanket once. It sits on the shelf in my childhood bedroom,

where I haven't lived in six years, sixteen years, sixty years. 

When I lived there I held my own hand so I didn't get lost but did 

every time I stepped out. I tried a leash, a seat belt, velcro, and all types of tape. 

I cut myself open to slip in a chip so I'd know where I was. 

Every time I put a pen to paper, I was making a map of where I'd been. 

I met myself at every party but never remembered my name until I left the room. 

I only remembered the scraps of things, cut from old days and useless,

my memory of self a quilt less warm than the cloth that it was cut from.

Gloom

My brother said that the fire looked fake and the log

was too lit with orange and I thought about that and my

mind rolled into my stomach like a marble big and heavy

and I already said that I wanted you babe but I want a lot

more than that too I want to pour the pink of sky

at sunset down my throat like Peptol Bismol

chalky cool coating my guts. I want guts. I want guts.

I want glasses that sharpen the fine lines of time so that

I can stop counting down days like I’m waiting to die.

I read that in Turkey there’s a family that walks on all fours,

hunched at the hips with knees of the ground in a bear

crawl imagine that not knowing that the way you walked

was wrong to everyone else in the world have you ever

caught a glimpse of what it would be like to be wrong

about everything each time I have actually the one single

time that I have I thought I would die on the spot and I’ve spent

the rest of my life forgetting what that felt like; no one

has ever lived more than  once at Brunch Michael talked

about decreasing margins of life extensions and

I didn’t fully understand but pretended I did and he said that

the first immortal person might be only 10 years younger

than the first person to live to 150; my dad said that 9 out of 10

of the people who live to be 114 die when they’re 114. There are

limits, it seems, he said. I tried hard to be convivial or congenial
I’m not sure which but death really looms, when you think about it.

Things I Never Called You (revised)

Chicken, duckie, cutie. Sweetheart or a real good fuck.

I never said I love you but it lived in my eyes when I looked at you,

looking away, love. My squash. My squishy. My seven-year-itch

with a cape of dark hair that sometimes was greasy. I never said

you were a freak in a good way, or in a bad way, or in bed. Some days

I was just too tired to not come see you, babe, baby girl, baby doll, pork chop.

You unwove my clothes, m'ija, and sewed the threads into the ground.

When I woke up, sown in your city, darling, I saw that your hands

were just covering mine all along. I saw that the city was beautiful,
beautiful. I'm sure that I called you beautiful, once, when the city was ours.