Poems
David Cassidy Writes Me a Fan Letter from the Great Painted Bus Beyond
From the pages of all those Tiger Beat magazines
you purchased with your allowance, I became more
like sugar with each poster you pulled
from the centerfold’s staples. I never liked
that my crotch was always pinned to the crease,
that girls tugged at my sleeves, ripped off my clothes
and shredded what was left of me at my concerts.
I was hoping to be a firefly that feasted
on night flowers, leaving my scent behind
with my original songs, the ones no one heard
over the din of those pop hits that ABC’s money
moguls shoveled into my mouth. During boxed lunches
on the set, I had to sign thousands of postcards
to girls I’d never met. I was drowning, Sandy,
in the fountain of teen idol fame, and I didn’t know
how to swim. Who does in that kind
of water? So I vanished into those cheap
newsprint pages of 16 magazine. I became
a paper ghost and only the drugs and sex
told me that I was alive. What can I say?
Why am I risking this from the great painted bus beyond
to share with you? I think you know better
than the lyrics to “I Think I Love You.”
Every poem is a spotlight that shines the light
back into your eyes. You need to keep them open
to honest desires. Don’t get caught beneath
the undertow of the trap door’s weight. Come on,
you know how to escape, to get happy. You
almost do it every day, except you act like it’s your shadow
side. You never let yourself fully embrace the miracle of you.
I sang all those songs on those albums that I know
you still sing, when you are alone or driving
with your sister in her van. I know you gave
a private concert to Tara Hardy
in your living room, that you have two microphones
at the ready to practice when you feel inspired
by songs you wore down the needles
in your pre-teen bedroom to hear over and over.
I wasn’t ready for everything that came next
after the gold records and the show’s opening credits
dressed in mod. I should have shaken off that Partridge
Family tree sooner, but this isn’t my ending, Sandy,
this is your beginning. So come on, stay happy,
swallow my songs, my prayers for that girl long ago
who loved me as no one could. Retire all those faded
fan magazines. You know you are happier
when you are unlocked, unleashed
from inside the glass house where you’ve been
breaking your whole ludicrous life to sing.
~ from The Glass Studio, Salmon Poetry (2024); first published in SWWIM Every Day
Boats for Women
Yes, the boat sank. Yes, it broke in two like a stereotypical heart before it
plummeted to depths no one could measure until seventy years later
technology caught up and looked its ancestor in the face. Yes is the way
the years oxidize the steel, and yes wipes the name Titanic off the bow.
Yes is the lifeboats, the davits, the call for women and children first. Yes
are the men who cry from the decks. Sometimes when I kiss her, I am
leaving a yes on her lips to remind her that I will go down with the ship.
Sometimes when she whispers yes, she is staying on board. But there is
always room in the lifeboats for two more women. Yes is the fact that if we
were alive on that night, we would have lived.
~ from Boats for Women, Salmon Poetry (2019)
The Glass Studio
In the Copper Room in Limerick, on what should be called Copper
Road, the low copper ceiling is held up by copper walls. They sing me
their copper songs whenever I can be within them under copper
ground. Last visit, Edward and I drank pint after coppery pint
of Treaty Ale, so many coppery pints that we began to see
our reflections in our makeshift hall of copper mirrors; another night,
another friend told me about her cancer but didn’t use that word,
choosing instead to call it something more shimmery or burnished
like copper, while the candles amplified their messages
against the copper walls. The Copper Room always feels familiar
like the press of copper foil between my fingers
that I used to wrap pieces of hand-cut glass in my father’s stained
glass studio as a girl. Every now and then the copper foil
would slice through my unsuspecting skin; my blood would ooze
like a copper river until someone would bandage me,
the blood drying to an even deeper, copper hew. Every lamp
in the studio was made this way: copper foil, silver solder,
a toxic elixir of patina that muted the shine. People
would buy their lamps to hang in their copper kitchens
near their copper pans, but few knew the process to make
each lamp as I did. Few know that copper lay buried
beneath the skin of the solder’s seams or of all that blood
turned copper that went into the making of their coppery light.
~ from The Glass Studio, Salmon Poetry (2024)
— for those departed and surviving in Orlando and everywhere
I am struggling now to comprehend my pulse, how I still have one,
after all the opportunities I've had to die with my hands
at the wheel after too many drinks in bars as I waited
to become my uncloseted self. And now I have nothing to do but pulse
with crackling rage as I raise an empty glass,
mourning the fact that you, Orlando, lost so many hearts
and hips and hands, all wanting to give themselves over to the other hearts
beating like hell on the dance floor before the clock strikes one.
You. Alive. You. Raising your luminous drinks to the glassy
air. You. Raising your brown Orlando hands
to the heavens in the heat of your last dance at Pulse.
And, of course, you don’t know this. Don’t know that death waits
around the corner like a drunk in a car. You are just waiting
for last call, for your early morning heart
to drum faster, to keep perfect time with its perfect pulse
as it moves closer to each slick body on the electric floor, to the one
you will leave this world with tonight, with your hands
locked tight, pressing each other's calloused palms, your glassy
eyes looking forward to the next time you raise them like a glass
clutched in the grace of everything that the body waits
to release when it releases itself from the tenuous grip of hands
in the act. And doesn't your Orlando always resemble the heart —
resilient, restless, eager to demonstrate how it is one
with the divine, how it yearns to live from within its own pulse?
And now I am pondering the woman who sat next to me, our pulses
quickening on my porch steps before we kissed then shuffled our crazy hearts
back into the deck to hide in the shadows of the one
true thing that I know I have been waiting
to discover with another. And now all the pulverized bar glasses
resemble diamonds on the dance floor, and a pair of smeared sunglasses
sleeps in the massacre's aftermath, inside and outside of Pulse.
Orlando, the world will wake Sunday morning with news of your hearts
murdered, and in the fifth stanza I've dropped a line in shock. My hands
go cold with grief. I don't know if I can spare the time to wait
for the one who could be the one while everyone in Orlando is one
heart beat away from shattering like blown glass
floats that hands once held precious, waiting
for love to pulse. Yes, pulse. And still, I have one.
~ First published in a special edition of Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Pulsamos: LGBTQ Poets Respond to the Pulse Nightclub Shooting