Poetry is like the ever changing moon with me. Some days I don’t see it being an attractive way to spend my time, and others involve me sitting down for hours watching my emotions being transcribed across the blank white sky that is my computer screen.

Either way, the importance of poetry, at least, never escapes me. And so here are three poems I wrote, to answer various prompts set up by an old teacher of mine, that explore different parts of the world and how I feel about them. They are some of my first attempts at poetry meant for the page, as I usually write poems meant for the stage.

Diviértete. :)

Colors on Prospect Street

What is the street you live on like? Remember it, and let those memories spill on the page.

Quiet.

Quiet people walked

quiet dogs under

quiet trees.

The color of our skin was loud—

Our lawn mowers, our music, our misplaced farm animals.

The front of our house screamed tulips and morning glories and statues of goats in sombreros

To an audience of lawns

That stared back in green silence.

Coffee houses and vanilla families,

We seemed to have it backwards—

I still remember how aliens

slithered out of Mr. Shirley’s mouth

like the snake

in the pool across from us.

When the pool closed and fall fell,

The middle school kids walked home on our side of the

street, going swimming in October in our little lake of

leaves, putting on a show

for the congregation of ravens

huddled in cloaked wings with our neighbors’

eyes.

But,

When the sky dumped mountains of snow

And the air froze every door,

We were the same as everyone else—

Winter was the only time

That we are all white.

Autonomous Drift

Write something from a narrative perspective, but using someone else besides yourself. Someone very different from you.

My taste buds are still angry.

Words slug over them.

“I’m going to miss you.”

Hand, lips, muffled thunder of a tear

on the deserts of my cheekbones.

I love you.

As my eyelids dance,

I wonder if she

forgives me, too.

Last night,

I told her she could come

with me.

She had laughed, a forgotten sound when

“last” paints six months past

with ghost smiles,

but

our lips were where we stored our secrets,

and

her kiss said

she’d thought about it.

The pain is losing its grip—

I’ve become too heavy for it.

God— I think it’s God—

chastens my liver

and the throbbing ceases,

but Dr. Kilorn said two minutes

after swallowing.

I think I have one minute of pain

left.

The walls take turns

with the back of my eyelids:

Shauna, before I found her

floating at her bedside.

My mother’s hands,

the heat sprinting away at the whistle

of the flat-line.

Richard,

back from the war

in a little yellow envelope.

The bed has disappeared

I’m lying on black clouds

I’m everywhere balancing

on the edge of nowhere

but she hasn’t let go of my hand

I did this.

I clasp the pain and

scratch at the mud until a ray of

life shines through.

Vis-à-vis, thank you

for everything

you’ve

History Is Painted by the Victors

Take a painting, understand it, and let whatever consequential inspiration fuel you to write something about people.

Supernovas in

letters. Pores sing with

wind. I remember glacier eyes

atop a firefall grin

and

an expanding universe

for a chest.

Our clothes melted

like snow off evergreens—

the sand entered her

before I did

but

the sand didn’t become a bird

like I did.

Just once.

The diamond man and

the clothed future and

the setting sun and

the

Just once.

The beasts inside our

naked hearts

cried—

an arpeggio of openness

barred within our rib

cages,

locked.