Warpaint

You will not see me cry.
Charcoal lines and sapphire lashes do not weep.
You will not see me color.
Powdered and blushed to perfection,
Invisible; both pale of fear,
And flush of shame.
Where untinged lips invite,
Today their red will shake you
And you will wonder
How recently I have tasted blood.

-J

The general feeling on makeup seems to be that it's about wanting to enhance and attract, to draw people in. I often wonder, though if it isn't sometimes about wanting create a mask with which to keep the world out.

I Remember

I remember the moment you made my heart beat.
I remember the stutter,
the pins-and-needles, graceless thump that filled my throat.
Breath halted and caught, a sudden warmth;
The wary elation of the drowned who, peace made with god,
wakes upon beautiful, but foreign sands.

I remember your amber-green sparkling, smiling,
lit from within by a scrawled heart
and seven impulsive purple numbers.

There in that near-empty bar,
I faced you because I was afraid to turn away.
Pressed to the brick, turned in my chair.
Riveted to the way your hand rested lazily around the drink we shared.
I knew that if you touched me so,
Only to let go when I, too, was empty,
I would break like glass.

Spring drew it's deepest breath that year,
And blew us tumbling into summer,
into each other's arms.
Since then, a year, and more.
Some days a lifetime, others, a split second.
You hold me as you held your drink, that night.
Effortless elegance, smiling eyes, and gentle hands.

I face you now because fear has left me.
Safe at your side, rich beyond measure,
Riveted still to the way your hands move.
You touched me when I was empty,
And filled me to the brim with love.

-J

So, I think the subject matter here is pretty obvious. The funny part to me is that the first line is true. It was an exact moment that something shifted for me after two months of being perfectly content with 'just friends'. Eye-opening and scary, but ultimately worth the risk.

The First Fracture

Maybe this is where it starts.

Maybe this is the first fracture, the first sign
That you,
That you will break from me and fall away,
 like ice into an ever-warming sea.
Maybe tomorrow the silence between us will be a moment longer,
 stubborn and unbending as “You first” takes our gentleness away.
Maybe tomorrow the warm amber-green of your eyes will have cooled
 into the stiff oak of a winter leaf.
A day after that, perhaps a month, a year;
When my unwillingness to bend has coated you with frost,
You will leave me.

You will take the summer with you when you go.

It will be too late, then, to press my heart into your hand and hope.
It would slip through your fingers, an exercise in futility.

The sound of my heart breaking would not be like glass,
 It would be silent, lost inside the echo of your footsteps, walking away.

So tonight I will swallow my pride over this imagined slight.
I will climb the stairs and go to you.
I will press my face, wet with tears, against your neck and tell you I love you.
I will learn my lesson before it is too late.
I promise.

-J

A poem in which I acknowledge that sometimes, I am absolute crap at relationships, and then try to fix it.

Folding Laundry

There is something about folding laundry.
A quiet, penetrating melancholy about the way my hands move
 that reaches into my core and pulls up the past.
Draws up like water in a bucket the way my mother's hands
 performed this simple task;
 before her, my grandmother's--before that, her grandmother's.
Through ages, this piece of infinite simplicity has persisted.
It has never been a matter of life or death,
 no, it is just a way, a woman's way, of keeping what she loves
 bundled safe, nestled carefully.
Every piece of fabric, cotton light or woolen heavy,
 comes laden with memory.
'Remember then', 'I'll wear this when'..
Today, as I crease, smooth, and stack, I remember:
 the tie-dyed, contented happiness of a drive with my grandmother,
 the clean-cut denim and buttoned cotton of a lecture well-received,
 the green wool that hugged me when I realized I loved my husband,
 the purple wool I wept into when I realized he didn't love me.
Tattered navy that cradled me through my dark days,
 and black lace that tried to prove to me that I was not broken.
The flowing white and grey of finally remembering
 how to dance with wild abandon.
Here in this pile,
 Here is my life. These are my masks and my skins.
Not only do they pull me back, but they push me forward, forward.
Someday, I will do this thing in joy.
Smiling, I will fold the tiny socks and shirts of my first child,
 positively bloomed with love.
Someday, I will do this in sorrow, folding and blessing with salt water
 the effects of those beloved who have gone before I was ready,
 not that I will ever be ready.
Hope and regret, laughter and tears, bright summer and deep winter.
All of them live inside me but today I pour them
 in careful memorized sweeps and folds
 into closets and drawers.

There is just something
 about folding laundry.

-J

Spring

With all the lightness of spring, inhale.
With sun-streamed skin, remember warmth.
Stretch and glow. Unfold. Reach.
Put away those winter things, child.
Put away covered and curled,
Send wool and weather with melting ice.
Exhale, and fade gale to zephyr.
Put away simply survive; instead, flourish.
Follow the way of root and crown.
Dance, bend, and blossom.

-J

So, here's a rough little thing on the first real days of spring. It's in the high 60s here today, and lovely. I was laying in bed this morning thinking that there's something just infinitely light about spring air, so I figured I'd run with it. In other news, I'm fantastically behind on this, but pretty okay with that. It'll come when it wants.

A Study in Uncertainty

A dance.

Fumbling, my own two--

feet.

Impossibly, irrevocably so far down my throat when I'm around

I can't say what I mean so I say what I--

  don't. 

The last thing I--

  want.

A breath, a pause, I wait too long before I--

Leave.

Do you sigh when I go?

Is the room empty or just less--

  crowded?

-J 

This is for someone I liked far too much, and couldn't read at all. I used the scattered and likely hellish massacre of all things punctuationally proper to hopefully convey exactly the kind of halting uncertainty I felt in this particular somebody's presence. Hopefully it works and doesn't just come across as hipster-pretentious.  

Two Loves

Eyes closed and listening,
The rustle of hay, boards against my back, 
I listen to him breathe.
The weight of words cradled in my lap
As much a comfort as his solid weight
Standing above me.
For these two loves, my world turned.
Both were heavy, but he pulled harder.
Pen and page slipped through my fingers
Like sand in a child's grip.
Now in the chill of his absence I am pulled back
To the word and the wonder of the world
Which I can no longer watch
From between his ears.


-J 


So, this poem for me talks about two of my greatest loves, words and horses. I remember sitting often in my horse's hay pile while he munched around me, book in hand. Reading has always been a priority to me, but for many years, I put aside my inner writer. Why? Simply because while both horses and writing are in my blood, I'm not inherently gifted enough with either that they don't require a hell of a time commitment to excel. I made my choice in my younger years, and I have no regrets, but the strangling of my writing side continued even after my beloved Topaz was gone. I fell immediately from college and onto a horse-related career path, and somewhere along the line, I forgot I was a writer at all. Only last year, during the last rocky days of my marriage when I was trying to be away from home as much as possible, did I begin to rediscover that part of myself; With the rediscovery also came with the vow to reclaim what I'd lost. That transition will likely be part of more poems to come.