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Upon this altar I place the sweet honeysuckle of those ponytail days, truth or dare behind the neighbor’s shed, the color of your hair that lies somewhere between sweet honey and the blazing butter of fall leaves burning through that railroad and graffiti town. I give you this freight train of hysterical despair carrying us to pregnant too young and married to hard-fisted men. I place my closed heart next to your silent misery. Take my blindness and guilt and all those cold days kissing boys who tasted like cigarettes. Let’s waft the scent of lavender and fresh linens, listen for the sounds of our babies laughing on the rusty swing set, the dirty lake lapping at their tiny toes. Pay homage to the way you could whip up dinner with crumbs from empty cabinets, the food stamps long gone for the month. Popsicles and sprinklers, the sound of storms creeping in like cloaked men in the night. The taste of lemon drops and whiskey tongues, sound of quarters dropping down deep, pool balls clinking like bullets loading into the chamber of a 9mm. Heap together the damp carpet and the quicksilver bugs, the mice shuffling through the silverware drawer, that tiny, useless, crooked air conditioner, and the back porch that nobody ever used. I place my heart pounding with so much fear. I place the home that raised my sister to learn not to want to live. Take these mud pies on Plexiglas as an offering. Let’s pray together to the gods of old folding chairs and appreciate how they scrape the concrete floor of the church basement and the way they leave permanent marks on my heart. 
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after Archibald MacLeish's poem of the same name A poem should be smooth, worn slick as supper plates waiting in warm water going cold as the night wears itself out. Damp as a basement with graffiti-rough walls, no college degree in sight. A poem should shoulder the burden. A poem can't do the dishes because it’s too busy doing nothing. A poem is the time between when I realize I don't love you and the day I say it out loud in an empty room. A poem takes its time. Running, as the mountain pulls me close, boulder by boulder, my legs gasp poetry under their breath. Leaving, as the elk bounded from the meadow the night of blazing vodka stars. A poem should be equal to: open windows. The way the curtains catch the sunlight, paint a perfect slant across the linen. For love the crooked house and two hands in the dishwater - A poem should not mean but be.  And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom from In Memory of W. B. Yeats by W. H. Auden Wander the towns of America, and ask are you free? I asked this of a woman in the Dollar Tree parking lot which had been wilting under the sticky Cleveland heat for weeks. My head was a donut just out of the fryer. She barely looked my direction as she gathered small children set them right in the cart, tied a shoe, patted her purse. Her hair needed a wash. With a heave, she drove the cart, rusty and listing to the right, up the ramp. The door opened out and I watched as she maneuvered through with a hard twist of her shoulder and a quick two-wristed shove. I followed. But what I want to know, ma’am, is are you free? She turned on me then. Her eyes were broken bottles against a backdrop of painted bridges, blackened three times and counting, and held enough hope to kill a man. free The sound she made wasn’t a laugh or a cry, it was the sound of supper time forks clattering but not enough vegetables or meat. It echoed with the resolve to save beloved children from war and the knowing that you will fail. It was blood and spit, looking your enemy right in the eye. It rang with the hammer beat of labor camps and the slow seep of gas oven deaths. Without one word, she spoke of children who aren’t safe even in their own homes, held all the too-early deaths of the falsely accused and unjustly persecuted. It sang from a hymnal clutched in rosary hands passing baskets of money. It held up choir boys forever changed, and looked down upon televangelists just in it for private jets and swimming pools, amen. It broke her heart. It shouted poor is bad and I will kill you for that, one way or another. Her voice was heavy smoke, rising right there in Aisle Four between the Pringles and five dollar frying pans, and it threatened to burn the place down. And then it was gone and in its place, a soft breeze. She patted a startled child on the head, smoothed his porcupine hair. We have never been free, she said, sliding a box of Strawberry Frosted Pop-Tarts in the thin space between a son and a daughter, you just like to think we are. 
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Who am I?I’m a systems engineer and creative coach living in ABQ, NM. I believe that we can intentionally design our lives to align with our deepest dreams and desires. 
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