Genre: Poetry

Ah   night

night falls so impatiently

do not sing a mournful song

do not capture me with melancholy

do not interrogate me with questioning eyes

I only sigh

1.  Go ahead and fill your life with love

Let it be hot cocoa in February

Make it water from a cold outdoor spigot

When mama Gaia turns up the burning heat

Now the blackberries in the yard 

have finished their work of fattening with juice. 

They wanted to flower, wrote Rilke, but we 

wanted to ripen. That meant being dark

and taking pains.

is what they call  

a torn-up track  

whose living rails I jump  

to bed down in the wells 

and feel the thud  

hit every trestle 

steam at dawn 

like horses at  

the track I trained 

Do the best you can with your burden.

—Radclyffe Hall

I am reading The Well of Loneliness,

wounds dressed in language, 

on loan from the library.

Outside, June blooms in Pride

As if I created this

pyramid of obey and exist. 

Between the breathturn stares

of others, also exiled, and those

who called me all but my name, 

I nearly forgot that I could,

unlike Lot’s

All the waves arrive bereft of their refugees,

the trees abolish even their ruins,

amassed in the chamber of zeroes.

There is nothing there to be filled:

you could grow learned in noughts,

study the accumulation of chalk.

That too