limbo.

it craves oxygen
we fan our flames with fervor
words may burn it down

© february 15, 2012 heather brager

your word.

(click to listen)

she can hear a murmur, after a faint rasp

and you are talking in your sleep

just moments before the truck belts squealed

and for less than a second, she had forgotten you were

pressed firmly against her back,

your arm draped across her neck

for those miles through sunken states, the pilfered

softness through the nights

all stacked, shaking, end to end

but there has to be an end

then, your hands on her shoulders

gently tugging her hair

under the pulse of bass and content, warm

with too many plastic cups of gin

connected through strings to her deafening sight,

it is all tied to the baggage, the phone, the bed

she is cursed with knowing, trying desperately

not to meet your mind’s eye

and you try not to calculate the hours

before she flies out again

© february 12.2012 heather brager

6:55 departure.

I am alone
on this blue vinyl seat
in the center
of this murmuring flock.

I am shouting
against my closed lips while
I look them in the eyes
and count.

a running child with ketchup
on his three year old face

a silent man with low eyes and
twitching mustache

a screaming diamond on the
finger of the woman in red pants

they are all leaving here
while I sit on cold vinyl
and am left uncounted
because I am alone.

© january 23.2012 heather brager

vision is a septal defect.

you will envisage
a reaction to misplaced rhythm

buried within my soft torso
your forearm quarrying, into the cavern

covetous, your hand thrusting past
my unhinged jaw, my meted throat

you will not see, grasping
but it is hanging in my eyes

© january 4.2012 heather brager

The End of the Year.

the shape of things.

in the early part of the dawn

this year, or some year to come

as her eyes trace light crawling

across a bedroom ceiling,

she can almost recall being

someone else

she can see a shadow

from a lamp on a kitchen table

in a yellow house on a tree covered hill

drawing the shape of a bird on a paneled door

a splotch of paint on a whitewashed porch

in the form of a shadowy man

who will sneak in through the darkness

and stretch across a little boy’s face and arms

she can hear echoes of dreams

drawing timelines of moments

that will arrive some January, or June

she can feel the lonely ache

of a woman on a corner bench

as she drives past in traffic

in the early part of the dawn

she watches patterns

sneak across a bedroom ceiling

while they try to elude her

and she can almost recall being

someone else

© december 19.2011 heather brager

an omen.

we are a pendulum, forward and backward

belief and disbelief, knowing

the sun always rises

then sets in the west

my eyes are diverted to the sky

the silhouette of a large bird,

the pitch of his calls remind me

my heart thinks in symbolism

and my mind assumes

he is in search of carrion

I blink and the Big Sky

swallows me whole

a lost northern girl, consumed

by the firmament

quietly, I am smothered

in the belly of the tundra

and your tail lights compete

with the rising sun

© december 2011 heather brager