I will let this falling be a baptism

I will use my lungs for suitcases

The gasp of these days will be new as the morning outside your window.

2

I won’t move somewhere warm

I’ll stay right here and move like the earth, create seasons for my life with my rotations,

I’ll wear skirts more, so I’ll have some reason for my spinning.

You said you like skirts.

3

All I want to do is find four walls that stretch out far, far,

For a room so tall I forget about the ceiling.

I want windows,

I’ll put Magritte’s painting of a landscape painting in front of a window in front of my window.

I’ll call it the human condition, know that everything new is just a repetition of something that preceded

Learn how lovely the lenses of perception can be.

4

Maybe I will run out of sleep someday.

If I do, I’ll spend my nights tracing the stripes of your bed sheets,

Meditating on how the weight of your sleeping body lends a curve to those straight lines,

As I might walk a tightrope and dip the line with my footsteps.

Heaviness is coupled to balance, together they are breathtaking and terrifying.

5

We live in upstairs rooms.

We are suspended above the ground, held up by three stories of air.

I tell myself we are floating,

I think about the empty space around us and below us.

6

I string beads of silence into our conversations like pearls,

Placing more space between thoughts,

Then hide the conservations in the attic of my mind,

Maybe you will find them again on rainy days

When you open me like an oyster.

7

You will be wherever I am.

Or maybe I will be wherever you are.

Or maybe I will be wherever your hands are.

8

I will know the grid of this city like the crosshatch of my windowpanes.

I will be the architect to my life.

I will build something here.

There will be no windowpanes or city blocks between us.

9

I will only be as sad as I am when looking out a window.

With a cup of coffee cradled in my hands,

There is sweetness to make the bitterness pleasant.

10

I have ten fingers.

They travel across the terrain of your body.

I am not going anywhere.

I have everything at my fingertips.

“it’s not your fault. you didn’t do anything wrong,” i said.

sometimes, my mother was a diamond.
the hardest known mineral since antiquity,
diamonds can only be scratched by other diamonds.
goldsmiths like to call it “tough love”
but my brother and i knew it as childhood –
a time we wish lasted half the length it did,
living in a home whose walls we felt safer outside of.

he and i were pebbles,
who spent our years trampled beneath the
jeweled heels of galloping horses.
every step was another gem stomping on our necks,
another slap into the gravel: my mother tried to coax beauty
into ugly stones like us by powdering our faces to dust.
but we were just pebbles, worthless until treated otherwise,
made for tossing in the river,
to see how many times we could skip before we drowned.
to see how wide our ripples could spread,
each one a little more lifeless than the next.

she tied necklace chains around our wrists,
and studded belts across our backs,
another gem — “it’s good for your posture,” she said.
no wonder she only fed us organic foods,
insisting on natural but bitter ingredients,
we drank orange juice only if it had been beaten from pulp.
downed vinegar with every mouthful of discipline,
at least we were well-behaved children.

once in a while, i accidentally catch a glimpse of the scars.
the sight of them surprises me, because i rarely look
at those places on my brother’s body
anymore. but i’ve learned that pain doesn’t become invisible
if you avoid making eye contact with it.
hatred cannot become a better man,
unless you let it escape from the prison you built.

so i have stopped trying to understand what you were thinking
when you sewed his lips together with needle and string,
why he was forced to sleep in the garage for a month,
how i snuck leftovers to the basement
because his hunger was never a metaphor.
i have come to terms with the fact that i may not find
the answers to these questions,
but forgiveness requires of me that i stop asking them,
because i have always known why.

the answer
is that sometimes,
love is a diamond who we cannot blame for
being the sharpest and strongest jewel.
love is a beautiful knife, like the blade she once held at his throat.
and love may act like a murderer, but it will not take your life.

because love also saves you
from the people that love you
so much
that they hurt you.

mama, three months ago you hugged me for the first time.
my gut reaction was to raise my arms in self defense,
but i froze up instead, and locked them to my sides like an orphan
finally meeting the one who gave her away.

i didn’t know where to put my arms,
didn’t know how to reply because tender hands
have never been a part of your body language.
but your touch that day was round and quiet
and gentle enough to hold someone
as fragile as a pebble.

(No disrespect to Marcel Duchamp.)
I’m not a cynic. Just a realist overfed with contradictions like necco sweethearts;
Besides, the only difference between cynics and realists these days
is how frequently they check facebook.

I blame America;
we boast both the world’s highest quality of life and the highest incidence of depression:
this shouldn’t come as a surprise, when even our happy meals cause blood clots.

I had been trying for weeks to write any poem that wasn’t a love poem.
But love, like a whack-a-mole, kept popping up.

Dearest Love, you are in a state of identity crisis.
You are a dandelion wisp caught on the lipstick of kids raised against a paradoxical backdrop:
Porn glistening on the well-stocked walls of a convenience store,
movies rated R (not for gore) but for a two second shot of nipples,
and disney-sponsored fairytale endings –
kids learn how sex works before they know what love feels like.
I was no exception to this trend.

And speaking of mythology, when Prometheus brought fire to the mortals,
the Gods punished him by having an eagle eat out his liver once a day for all eternity.
This reminds me of Valentine’s Day. There is a reason everyone hates it.
People fear that which makes them look inadequate, and hate the things they do not understand.

Love, you are not something I understand.
You are a language still foreign to my tongue,
But I’ve always had a propensity for falling head-first into pools of the things I try most to avoid,
And so, I must confess-
Lately – I’m a little bit in love.

I had all but waned to a crescent when I was suddenly lovestruck,
love struck and spun my sliver into a smile,
I’ve been grinning like the Cheshire Cat for five months now,
because for the first time since forever,
I’ve stopped measuring moments by how
if I were to disappear into the night, would it have been enough?

The answer is so often yes, and besides,
I’m too busy deciding whether her eyes are blue, green or grey
to consider such morbid hypotheticals.
I’m leaning towards green, though
I do not know the answer.

As a professional bullshit artist, I’ve learned to define the terms
I do not understand by stating what they are not, so:
Love, you are not a metaphor.
You are not a box of chocolates, nor a rose,
nor a sunrise, nor a battlefield.
You are not a stranger.
You do not make the world go round,
and you are certainly not all I need.

But I do need you.

Love. is like not knowing the answer.
Though not a metaphor, love, you are a little like a simile.
A little like a glass simultaneously half full and empty.
You’re like my mother walking in on us at 1 pm,
You’re like the way we kiss when there’s food in our mouths, because we are disgusting,
You’re like the dead flowers I keep in a glass on my desk, from the day I came back from Christmas vacation and you stood at the corner with a bouquet of green roses.
You’re like for the first time I feel beautiful wearing nothing but skin.
You’re like a bottle of wine with a twist-off cap.

You are not the heels of our hands.
But maybe, just maybe, you are the heels of our feet.
I am digging in my heels.
I suggest everyone do same,
because to all the realists checking facebook:
I don’t know when, exactly, but
I swear one day. It will come.

Friday, April 6th, at 8:00PM and Saturday, April 7th, at 8:00PM
The doors will open at 7:30PM both nights. The show will begin promptly at 8:15PM.

Tickets are $8 on the walk, $9 online, and $10 at the door.

A group rate of $7 per person will be available for groups of 6 or more. Please e-mail group rate requests to excelano.project@gmail.com.

Tickets are now available online: http://excelanoproject.ticketleap.com/the-miseducation/.

Ticket sales on Locust Walk will begin on Monday, April 2, from 11-3.

Metal making love to metal in a
distant but familiar place. The
calling of a feast I was not privy to.

Yet somehow, these echoes persist
in their fragile lives, filling the
empty spaces of this heart
as stuffing does a turkey.

This heart, the organ I think with.

The one that recalls every beating
it took in the name of survival.

The one that always strives to
forgive, but never forgets,
because it is also a muscle.

It remembers.

The last gift I clearly remember my
mother giving my father was a
set of silver handled kitchen knives.

And if I ever found courage to cut the
silence between us with my tongue,
I believe she would say the last
gift my father gave to her was my
youngest sister, who is like one of
a set of silver handled kitchen knives.

Teeth forever showing in my presence,
a serrated smile that slices into me
without causing me to crumble
at the sharpness of her mind, as I
do at the sharpness of intentions
behind the extension of knives as gifts.

Since the day my parents cut
the nostalgia loose from my
childhood like burnt crust, I have
dropped crumbs of myself
everywhere I made travel.

In the ears of women. A bowl of chili
cooked in a nearby soup kitchen. The
palms of a God begging the world for
recognition or a dime of every dollar.

Anywhere except the basket
where I was bred and baked.

Because my left foot always wants to leave,
and my right foot correct turns wrong,
they could never agree to walk in
straight lines, so I lost my way home.

Found myself sitting at a table
full of surrogates who carried
me in closeness for the holiday
like a son of shared blood.

They were unawares to my hemophilia.
Had no knowledge my family was fine
china not to be removed from the curio,
did not recognize my meekness as shock
at seeing meals shared between people.

Supper was a solitary endeavor where
I came from. It was separating the
foods on your plate like parents into
different rooms to protect the taste of each.

It was discussing politics with a television
resting idly on cable news. It was
swallowing your pride because you
had not yet learned to cook.

But time has passed through me like heat.
The yeast within my voice has risen,
and friends have been fed by my words.

I have grown, only to see much
of what was with me, still is.

I still dine with a television. I still avoid
cooking whenever possible since some
pots are better left unstirred. I still
separate my foods with restraining orders.

The shame of it all is that a meal will
never satisfy when one fears becoming
what they eat, and so I am left with this.

A stomach full of holes fit to sheath the
knives my father forgot to take with him.

By habit, I sleep atop my belly at night
and drive them deeper into myself.
My silence, an accessory to the crime.

Not to say there was ever a crime,
just that there were victims.

Not to say I am one of them, just that
I would like to avoid making more.

And so, whenever I find myself in that place,
I take that youngest sister, who is like
one of a set of silver-handled kitchen knives,
and bring her head gently into my gut
where I have fashioned a groove for her.

Tell her to be still in what she is, since
she is a blade, and life cannot always
be trusted with a gift such as hers.

Just look to me as proof.
We came from the same set.
Four forged with the mettle to love.

The spring semester auditions for The Excelano Project will be Sunday, January 22 from 8-10pm at the Kelly Writers House. Please bring 3-4 minutes of original material to read for us. It doesn’t have to be memorized.

Please bring copies of your poetry to leave with us (even if it’s memorized).