I told you I was ready.
I waited in the garage
with the kitten in a towel.

You never came.

I saw an ax on a peg on the wall but couldn’t use it.
The kitten shivered, and it opened one eye.

It crawled out of the towel,
up to my neck, under my chin.
I decided I wasn’t ready.

It’s a good thing you never came.

Dear Frank,

Gosh it seems ages since you left me
at the bus station, saying, Good luck with
everything you want to do in life.

Frank I was a fool
for you and am a fool
without you

but I’ve learned something:
There’s no need for all this thunder
in our heads, between us

if you don’t want me to write,
I won’t, or else I will, sometimes
but only scribbles, not for pay

not for anything as important as
money for our little house, our nest
the little baby birdies we talked about

having. Frank, now I know and I will try
if you will meet me next Saturday at 2:15
at the station, I will give you my briefcase

of scripts, poems, stories
you can lock it, Frank, and bury

the key

I had a sobering experience this evening. I had heard about a contest for previously published poems and thought it was right up my alley because it didn’t involve creating anything new and submitting it for judgment, but instead entering things that had already been given the stamp of approval. No problem! I have plenty of previous publications, right there on the Shelf of Myself, which is the silly, vainglorious name I gave to the shelf where I keep print publications with my poems in them.

Except.

There has been some serious attrition in the Shelf of Myself, with several things missing and apparently elsewhere in my home, which is really not a comforting thought, given how deeply lost things can be in this “elsewhere.” Instead, the Shelf of Myself is now mostly occupied by:

1) other people’s chapbooks (no offense, other people)
2) books I received in exchange for not winning prizes (sad trombone)
3) just straight-up, random crap

I managed to get together a contest entry based on what I could find, but it just made me sad. At least one of the publications has folded, and probably others, too, so they aren’t entirely replaceable. Besides, it represents disregard for my own work.

Other than just life moving forward and stuff accreting like coral, I think what happened is that in the years when I just kept losing one chapbook and book contest after another, and when I told myself that the first one was obvs a fluke that would never be repeated, I started to give less value to the individually published poems than I should have — because they weren’t what I wanted next, so what, etc., etc.

The ones that I did manage to find on the Shelf of Myself were good, honestly, and that’s sad, too — because in recent years, I quit putting myself out there. Here, in my own online “house,” sure — but not submitting anything so I could either not measure up (losing all those contests), or have a poem published and not feel good about it, and then feel bad about not feeling good.

I don’t know all the remedies to all of this sadness, but I think part of it is to submit a lot of things this year and then, if any of them get somewhere (whether online or print), enjoy them for what they are, enjoy the other poets I’m published alongside, and then not let these things just disappear.

And part of that is to allow myself to think any of this matters, despite everything else that’s going on currently — which feels as indulgent as naming something the Shelf of Myself.

Ginger, what I knew the other morning,
as if it were written on my closet door,
was that you were the next one after me.

One afternoon, sitting on a little hill
outside the church, I seethed as he
paid attention to you. I didn’t know

I had grievances other than
being passed over, discarded—
I couldn’t save either of us,

from what had ended,
world without end, amen
from what was beginning

I’m going to call you Ginger, he said

on the hill

I’m sorry it took me a few years to tell—
a few years after you needed me to,

Virginia.

The man on the curb
with his socks pulled up high,
a Swisher Sweet parked in his mouth,

(no mask)

tells his friend in the car
that he wants to see this dog,
my dog, asks me what kind she is

then tells me

I don’t mean you no harm
I don’t mean you no harm

at least those two times, as if
I am making a silent calculation of risk
and whether I need to ruin his day

or end his life

by calling to say that I’m scared,
there’s just something off about him
my cellphone as weapon, deadlier

than anything he has
unless he has COVID
(but I only think of that

later)

this morning I step forward,
say I know you don’t, twice,
at least (through my mask),

so he can pet my dog
and we can move along,
that much closer to 2021

and all it might bring us.

Why do I have to tell you this,
the surprising ways I failed myself,
failed all of us at 10 or 11 years old?

It’s like a picture of tiny waterfalls
where you can’t see the river system
just a twee little jigsaw puzzle of water
but you don’t know how it was crashing,
why I couldn’t save myself in time

I remember that green tile wall,
the prickly velvet of the bus seat
but not how old I was, or
where the bus was going (first
choir trip or second—?)

and when I tell the whole truth,
that’s when no one says

anything

silence again
because a girl who was
unacceptable

wanted attention,
and when it found her,
when she was found
kept it for a while

pondered these things in her heart

Do I make you feel dirty, too?

He’s dead
I’m here

I’m the only one left to tell it

So.

I still lived in Little World then
Garfield books and the cabbage patch
a room painted peach, a box of seashells
a shoebox in my closet with a robin’s egg in it
a small world of other small worlds of boxes

so when he trapped me in the church kitchen
against the green tile wall, facing the double ovens
as my mother arranged egg-shaped candles
all down the long table in the other room,
when he smeared my glasses with the grease
from his cheeks, and then thanked me
for a kiss I never gave

I was as shocked as you are now, reading it

I didn’t tell because I didn’t know what to tell
or if it was a thing for telling. Instead, I went outside
to the church playground, to the top of the jungle gym

Little World

and I thought, Now I have a secret.
Everything has changed.

At last.

The game is to be tossed into leaves at the Halloween party.
a Coca-Cola bottling plant jumpsuit, a wolfman mask
You see? He is a funny monster now. It only feels like

boyfriend-girlfriend stuff.

The game is to ride on shoulders in summer,
around and around in a kidney-shaped pool,
your legs around his neck. Because you are

favored.

It feels like maybe you are a woman
in your mom’s magazine, in an ad for Tab
or diet ice cream bars,
maybe,
skinny in a bathing suit.
You are in the sun, at last. Icarus.

Months go by, and something happens.

The game is that if you don’t want to be just in the chorus
in the Christmas pageant—if you want a part, like always—
you talk to him and he talks to his wife, and you are a camel.

By then, you are out of favor
but you can still ask for things
and get them

Follow the leader
and we all get poisoned

we don’t know why
or there is no why

Can I tell it to you?
the monsters in basements

rattle against asbestos tile,
break all the eggs on all the tables

again

Happy trails to you,

monsters