new zealand poems: glenfern

trapped like everything

but blue, holding fast to

curtains drawn in the dark

and looking where we know are

mountains.

Cook for those who cooked

For you, sometime, and tell me

About the disappointment

Of sunrise with no sun.

I am tired of days spent

Holding out for no rain, counting

Dollars spent like karma

Leading me to this life.

Welcome to now, slow

Flowing stone of ice, I feel

My sockets carved like a valley

By deep and groaning movements.

I am reading poems about my own heartbreak

Written by a bisexual woman halfway

across the world. I guess that also describes

the one I love. I guess I want them both

laying down a bed of apologies for us.

She should be sorry the way she treated

Mary Oliver—the way her brutal honesty

Caught my soul like jade in the river—

Now I am raw in a sleeping house wanting

To cry out, it is too much,

All of it, too beautiful this

Green that is life that takes over everything

like the lake that gives life, this grey

That is water that changes and pulls

and covers the world like night

And is kb’s eyes even as i

Struggle to be here and she is

There—too much, the world

Beginning anew, looking up at new stars unable

to find a pendant to prove it to myself—

Too much knowing these others in the dark

That look like me but who’s souls

Do not, knowing they are going through it too

Equal and strange like the

Glacier moving down the mountain

With new snowfall, its foot

Curling up as it melts.

Discussing north korea

And oblivion we say—

It never touches who it should—

Being here is hard

Because now is sad

So many are gone

So much of me is gone

Washed into the ocean of longing

I know I am on dry land but

Right now, not all of me

Can love the rain