Category: poetry

Every time I pass that room

I expect to see you lying there.

Already staring at me with those eyes

That everyone thought were scary.

I always thought they were sweet.

If only they stared a little longer

And saw past the sagging red lids

To your amber eyes.

They would know how sweet and gentle you really were,

And how you hated thunder.

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I want to paint you into my horizon

But I’m scared that’s where you’ll stay

Fixed into the landscape of “what could’ve been”

Suspended in the brushstrokes of “who knows”

A beautiful, ever-distant sunset

I try to capture every detail, no amount of pigment is enough

Yet your brightness shines through my mere impression

The painting hangs in an unmarked corridor that I selfishly hope remains unexplored

But light like this is hard to keep hidden

I just count myself lucky to have experienced the real thing

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His Collar is Always Up

His collar is always up, but not on purpose, like a detective who is posing as post-middle-aged Asian man who whipped his coat off the hanger on the way out of the house after making sure the all the lights are off and the doors are locked, and he plays the role well. He’s extremely practical, if not impractically so. He’ll literally go the extra mile to park in the one spot where he can plug in his baby blue Prius and walk that mile to where he is going; we still had seven miles on the battery.

He begins flushing the toilet before he finishes peeing in our small floral-wallpapered bathroom to save time because he knows you have to hold down the lever for at least five seconds for a full flush.

He taught me that if you can build it, don’t buy it, and if you have one, but don’t need it…you will (though often by that time you need to buy a new one anyway).

His mom called him lazy; my mom calls him crazy; but I call him Dad, and he dresses exactly as you would expect him to.

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