Unfortunately, Seri's not much of a poet. Hell, she had very little interest in poetry beyond a few old favorites that she'd happened upon over the years until she ended up being roped into a poetry class in college that absolutely blew her mind. Now, she dabbles with the occasional bit of the stuff and she'd love to hear what you think of it. Improvement, after all, comes in the shadow of critique.

Note: I like to play with spacing, and a lot of these are not properly spaced. For poems that Mene won't let me space properly, I will link to another version via a title link so that you can see how they ought to look.

Poem Index

✧The Moon is Down

✧This is you remembering the time when she used to sing,
back when you still thought that it was a good idea to date an actress.

✧This is the day when you realized that, maybe, just maybe,
dating an actress was actually a terrible idea…and decided to do it anyway.

✧This is the day when she fucked the director,
back when you still dreamt of dating an actress.

✧The two times she cheated on you with the director,
and the one time you followed suit.

✧This is the day when you got fed up with dating an actress and decided to end it.

✧“The headlines read: 5,000 birds fall from the sky in Arkansas,
no one is exactly sure why.”

✧I once asked a schizophrenic mathematician what love was.

✧There Is No Us In Silence

✧On Our Way from Phoenix to Denver: Six Hours Before We Break Up

✧Into the Ocean

The Moon is Down

Last night I captured the moon for you,
threw a rope around it and dragged it down to earth,
tied it to the radiator in your bedroom so that you’d always
be cast in the perfect light.

You took the moon and sent me away,
watched me trudge out the door and down the stairs
to the cramped hallway where we wanted to make love but hung framed photographs of couples making love instead.

Some of them look like you.

You come to the stairs to watch as I pass them.
I turn back to count your eyelashes as you fail to count regrets.

Instead, you count memories:

• Of discarded boots.
• Of surrenders.

You taste victory on your tongue and tell me that it tastes like
the Orange Julius I bought you two weeks ago when the summer heat made our clothes stick
to us, and our legs stick to the seats in your car.

Leather. You’ve always had a thing for leather, but I’ve never seen you in it.
The man in the photograph has.

The muddied carpet. The empty wrapper - blue and unassuming, hidden beneath the bed.
The boots in the hall that you said were mine, but I could never remember buying or wearing.
I’ve never seen them.

The man in the photograph has.

I leave my boots at the door.

This is you remembering the time when she used to sing,
back when you still thought that it was a good idea to date an actress.

She strings her songs together like pearls
each one just for you. Brilliant harmony in cant
chained around your neck like a noose
gleaming and you feel it in your bones
the distant thrum of familiarity buzzing
through your blood,
setting it alight.

You were at her mercy once before.

You know this with a certainty that you can’t explain,
no skin has been bruised or broken, no
tears have been shed, no secrets have been left
in the garden to rot beneath the earth,
yet there it lies beneath the pomegranate tree
in your backyard a stage cloaked in
summer haze and stained
red with promise:
the whisper of a
kiss
behind curtains.

Mine it says. Mine.

This is the day when you realized that, maybe, just maybe,
dating an actress was actually a terrible idea…and decided to do it anyway.

Each night after the show, she counts the stars from
her dressing room choosing a number
at random
(14,871. 1,264. 8 billion. 76)
giving an end to the endless masses
winking back at her. She sees fate in
the little lights and pricks at you
with golden shears binds your
heart with golden threads and cuts them
when they tarnish and turn first to silver
then to bronze.

She loves you. She loves you not.

Voice like glass, she cuts a piece out
of you
- the bronze you -
one night
and places it on the mantle above the fireplace:
Trophy it says.

(she loves you)

and something stirs inside of
you when you see it:
Again it whispers trophy.
You hear: something to keep. Yes, you are
a trophy, something to keep.
And as you slide under
the covers beside her, it whispers:
Heart. Heart.
and you sing out its notes and
know that you are
lost.

This is the day when she fucked the director,
back when you still dreamt of dating an actress.

In your dreams she has Miranda’s heart and Desdemona’s eyes
in her pocket. She sits on the edge of a fountain in the garden
at Center Stage waiting for you, always for you,
stringing pearls on a length of invisible wire.
But it’s you she stares through, your body shifting and fading
in the hazy afternoon light as you approach her.

In your nightmares, you aren’t featured at all, and she
sits in the grass by the fountain, her back pressed
against the heated stone. She sings out your name
as another man kneels down to devour her –

he looks familiar.

The two times she cheated on you with the director,
and the one time you followed suit.


The first time she slips into bed at 3am
and wakes you, she says:
“I had to stay late to rehearse my lines.”
It’s not the first time that she has done this.

She doesn’t like to share: her masks, her desperation, her lies;
but you can feel them all if you lie
still in his arms while he takes you from behind with sharp thrusts
that leave you laughing at their resemblance to the knife
that she used to cut out your heart and place
it on the mantle above the fireplace.

Each time you laugh he slams you against the wall
painted like a setting sun until you’re delirious with
the joy of it and there nothing but sunset
the oranges reds golds whites -

Again. Again. Again.

He’s your Iago he’s your Lucifer he’s your Loki,
silver-tongue feeling for your pulse as he lies to you loves you,
and you hope that he’ll tear you in two so you don’t have to face
her in the morning. A brush of lips against your neck your ear,
a litany of curses that sound like a prayer, and you sag
against him sated.

The second time he takes her you pretend share her,
your sweet Ophelia lost to a madness called lust
as the director lifts her onto his desk takes her from behind.
You snap a picture from the far window.

It feels familiar: the angle, her cries his
the position of their hips;
and you sigh imagine fingertips ghosting up your arms,
kneading your shoulders, imagine the dough the two of you made
when she was still content to play at being domestic
and the both of you ended up on the kitchen floor covered in flour
and smelling of bread and sex and joy.

He is remaking her now with each thrust, he is remaking you.
He is standing behind her in nothing
but a pair of threadbare socks,
redefining joy and you love him for it.

This is the day when you got fed up with dating an actress and decided to end it.

Last night you turned over to reach for her in your sleep and found a chrysalis instead, delicate
and worrisome. You thought it was another role, another ruse – thought: she loves her theatrics.
It isn’t the first time that she’s brought them into your bed. Two nights ago she was an assassin –
pinning you up against the wall, driving a prop knife into your body again and again as you
drove yourself into her. Last week she was Cleopatra, bent double against the headboard, her
eyes lined with kohl darker than lust. Last night, she was a cat, sleek and soft in black silk and
furred leggings, content to curl up in the crook of your arm. You could have sworn she was purring.

In the morning, the chrysalis is still there, but there’s a hole in the side, and the wispy edges fall away
at your touch. She is nowhere to be found. You think, maybe she’s finally flown south for the winter.

You catch a glimpse of her out the window, standing beside the director’s brand new Cadillac,
and know that she is flying south, and you are winter. You pick up the knife on top of her desk
and sing out a melody, calling to your Madame Butterfly.

“The headlines read: 5,000 birds fall from the sky in Arkansas,
no one is exactly sure why.”

They drop like flies
(the birds)
all around us,
blackbirds and starlings
falling
like
rain
until they become commonplace;
the splatters of gut and grizzle,
the explosion of feathers as
crack
they meet their fate on the road
or the windshield
or the upper edge of a well placed signpost.

Soon they’ll be stranded on rooftops
and littering backyards.
Soon children will wake up
and parents will be left to explain the little piles
of feathers in the yard. “They’re sleeping,”
they’ll say, and then workers with thick rubber gloves
will come and help them
fly away.

But now they’re falling, and I sink back
into my seat, unable to look at them
(at you)
and pretend that I’m asleep.

You dodge around them as they hit
the pavement
and I can tell that you pity them -
(not birds)
the people running them over.

I once asked a schizophrenic mathematician what love was.

He told me that it was squaring the circle,
that nothing was perfect, and
blossoms only grow under the covers in the darkness.

(So many layers)

It wasn’t an answer, but I took his hand anyway
and walked with him, our shoes dragging
against the pavement.
-Reluctant.
Each scrape in the silence an answer
that he would not or could not
give.

He took me on thick blue sheets that night,
washed himself afterward and spooned with
the wall, whispering quietly to
no one in particular when he thought
I’d drifted off:
“Love is when you take
the square root of pi and divide it by zero.”

There Is No Us In Silence

You,
You were mid-day banter,
Clear and dry like the summer skies.

And we,
We were sun-kissed berries,
Always a bit too ripe.

But now,
Now we’re stereophonic silence.
Not noise,
Not static,
Not a whisper.

Silence,
The act of sound
executing
fury.

On Our Way from Phoenix to Denver: Six Hours Before We Break Up

Your face is lit by the blue glow of the dash,
and I miss the static of the radio
with only two stations:
both country.

I hate country.

You don’t say a word,
haven’t for a while now.
For all I know I left you
at the rest stop in Arizona.

The dust in Arizona suits you.

Dust
and
Silence…

You belong there.

Here beside me,
hands white knuckled at ten and two,
you’re like a bird in a cage.

I wish I could open the driver side door
and set you free.

'Into the Ocean'

All is drifting,
lain still upon the shattered wood
remains of his maiden;
Fingers grappling with shards of the sea,
losing.

Betrayal, a spark, the powder, then nothing.
Though duty laid him down,
fate preserved him.

Now the sea, as before, as always;
ever present.
Unforgiving.
Sweet.
Suffocating.
Home.