Poems About L

My father's workshop smelled of pine and something electrical— the ozone ghost of a drill

O body, you magnificent disaster, you creak now getting out of chairs and take the stairs a half-beat slower

Saturday starts with silence, slow and soft, sheets still warm from sleeping in.

I used to draw the map with more on it— the house would be bigger, the job would have a window,

I've started keeping Saturdays the way some people keep a journal— every detail logged,

Another year. The candles on the cake outnumber the breath

We don't say I love you anymore. We say: your phone is at eleven percent. We say: I picked up the thing

She does this thing with bobby pins— holds three between her lips like small dark fish

The house at three a.m. becomes a throat that hums with all the things we didn't say, and I lie still as someone in a boat

There is a jacket on my chair that doesn't belong to me, and this is how you know

Flowers, I have learned, are not about beauty. They are about the argument

When I was young, the afternoons were countries with no border known, and summer hummed its lazy tunes