libby's profile

Holding my hand in the parking lot and I skip over gritty yellow lines. Promise me you'll buy me lunch and really that's all I need. Later I take your hand in mine and, bored, I study it. Polished slick nails, a shiny ring, lots of smooth, soft skin. Lines in your palm, you let me open and close your hand to watch them crumple and bloom. Walking to the store with a friend without you for the first time ever. Lines in the sidewalk - (don't step on a crack or you'll break your mother's back...)...

There is a poem here, I know it. Somewhere, locked behind the glass with the tortoises. We watched them make love. There was something human about them... did I leave that poem in his open mouth, her passive stance? Did it wriggle underneath the sand, the rock, so as not to intrude? We were intruders enough. I think it followed us home. It followed you and whispered in your ear, told you, while you were half asleep, dreaming, and still half drunk to pull at my panties. Too tired to move, we f...

Little music... featherspeckled, crested and rosy cheeked. Incessant twisting skull, incandescent black glass eyes. We won't touch you, little music, we promise, if you only sing for us the way you sing to birds outside. Twitter and laugh for fat brown sparrows, pretty finches. Caw the crows away and beckon in cardinals. So effulgent and evanescent, draw them in for us. Little lonely music, maybe you know... your sky's encased in window screens. Tree bark polished smooth, always seeds in your...

We trudged through the marsh and wet grass to dig up your grave. We found it empty, we sure didn't find you there. It ain't no big thing, hey. Never thought we'd see you again and I didn't really want you mud-crusted old and rotten. Your lady, she went and sold off your farm. No place to go for anyone no more, she bought a little blue house and keeps the goats in a shack with a floor made of shit. I just want to know: is that okay with you? If she goes a little crazy? I saw you once in a clou...

Hands 2/21/08 She has beautiful hands. Graceful and fluid, she traces them over my body and it makes me alive. I never see her attend to them - no nail files, scissors, lotions. Maybe that's something she does in private, but it almost seems more likely that it's just a natural radiance, God-given, that makes the skin so fine, nails so neat, palms so tender. Sometimes I take them up and study them, roll them over in front of my face, manipulate the digits, while she lies languid on the bed by...