Beauty Sleep

Days like this I want to stay asleep,

so I do.

I've become almost gruesome, microwaving single-serve

bags of frozen peas and letting entire 

crock pots of gumbo and pulled pork

turn to penicillin in the refrigerator.

But I'm running out of fridge space, so I've come up with a plan.

I will hire a construction team to build me a tower,

and a landscape architect to cover it in ivy.

Then I'll knock over a Walgreen's pharmacy

and steal a year's supply of Ambien.

Someone promised me, this is how 

you end up happy. Perch high in a campanile
and learn to be beautiful in it. Every so many hours,

take a pill and fall back asleep. Dream

of almost nothing but tintinnabulation. 

Stay drowsy until someone wants to kiss you,
and then up and marry
the first person to fight through your brambles.

It seems as good a strategy as online dating.

But what if it's some brute with a sword

who is the lucky winner? After all, the easiest
way to hack through defenses is with a sword.
I would have to prick my finger. I'd bleed for a hundred years.

But maybe instead it will be someone soft enough

to slip quietly through my protective ivies.

Someone who will not mind when I cry

about crises I should have gotten over in high school.

Maybe she will be drawn to me

not because I have more warning labels 

than the Ambien I stole, 

but because we like the same species of caladium,
broad and pink and reaching,

and she sees familiarity in my imperfections,

and I see in her a good reason to stay awake.

But I could be waiting for a really long time.
Who even knows what caladiums are?
I certainly won't find her sitting in this tower.

No,
I will flush the pills nobody ever prescribed me
and I will leave the tower via the stairs.
I will learn to ask for what I need
instead of hoping it climbs up to rescue me.
In fact, I will be outside after the show.
Come talk to me?
We can stay awake all night.

Thank You for the Offer, ADT, But No

I will bar the door tonight

Figuratively, I mean

Nobody uses doors with actual bars anymore when a deadbolt will suffice

and is more aesthetically pleasing

But sometimes the part of me that misses things I never experienced

(like soda jerks and speakeasies and hoop skirts with six-foot diameters,)

also misses having a stout blockade, a perpendicular palisade,

to bar harm from the house, an arm thrown across what is sacred

And somehow gazing with milky nostalgia
it's easy to wander backwards, disremembering
the past, through decades I never lived in,
and finally through ones I did;
how my father used to throw his arm across my chest

in the car, if he had to break suddenly;

how he stopped when I grew breasts

instead his hand hovering over the console

caught between propriety and protection;

how I never had occasion to learn

whether his arm would have made a difference

in the event of a three-car catastrophe

Maybe tonight I will not slide the deadbolt into place,

Because really, any earnest assailant with slender shoulders

could easily slip in through the doggie door,

and even if I were to outfit my house with everything
from medieval iron barricades to high-tech alarm systems

I still would not feel as safe as I did

in my father's car, with his arm outstretched