Hole

Here, you said, is the hole in me. It is called Loneliness. It is here, beneath my left ribs. And you moved my hand to probe it. I said, I would like to make my home there. Will Loneliness leave you if it is filled with my body? No, you said, the hole is not a bedroom. The hole is not a swimming pool. The hole is bigger than your body, even if it is sitting here, fist-sized, in mine. If you live in it, you will drown in it. If you try to fill it, you will be surrounded by it. Beloved, I said, but can it be filled with my love, wide as the sea, expanding like the clouds? No, you replied. Only with love of my own.

Collected Twitter Poems

Oh! Beloved,
you have made of me
a watering can,

And what can grow
out of this shielded Eden
But murky fruits,
too pivotal to handle?

— Emily Brown (@emilybrownmusic) October 21, 2016

2 matches, 3 matches, 4
hot plumes rise like 1, packed light,
lay down darkribbed

I unpack and unpack;
ravel a sock, unfold a map
sit, sigh

— Emily Brown (@emilybrownmusic) October 13, 2016

still I swing between god and not-god;
god admits he is pushing the swing

— Emily Brown (@emilybrownmusic) October 3, 2016

Time teaches me
to filter air
to swallow stones
to serve tears to guests

— Emily Brown (@emilybrownmusic) September 19, 2016

the cure: I open my fists,
press palms to thighs/elbows/cheeks,
and say:
"you are not in limbo!
you are alive all over!
you are right here!"

— Emily Brown (@emilybrownmusic) September 17, 2016

2
bleeds bleeds bleeds bleeds bleeds
whose is this body?!
does it love me or love you?
no, it reminds whining
i loved the baby you have lost

— Emily Brown (@emilybrownmusic) September 16, 2016

2. At some point I learned
Not to sing when I am crying
Not to cry when I am bleeding
Not to bleed when I am cut!
But yes, I cower when bent

— Emily Brown (@emilybrownmusic) September 15, 2016

Someday I'll say, wait,
that's me, I'm made of belief,
I'm a world washing over with love after grief,
Peacemaker/keeper forgiveness machine

— Emily Brown (@emilybrownmusic) August 29, 2016

Be not afraid of a sour heart.
When you come to me,
Be loved, beloved,
And say to your lemoned center:
Sweeten up, bitter fist—
This is mine

— Emily Brown (@emilybrownmusic) August 15, 2016

Amen, amen
Guitar on stomach, wheeze balloon whistles out of throat-
Darkpine branches, strain at window-
And press in, indigo summer,
amen.

— Emily Brown (@emilybrownmusic) June 21, 2016

Back at home,
I get to sigh the sigh made of
plasticskinned
dusteyed
waxtoothed
woolhaired
paperscalped
sandfaced
metalsternumbed
chest pain

— Emily Brown (@emilybrownmusic) June 9, 2016

Pinball brain:
wake up! where are you?
Of all beds we have slept in, all the white-morning windows,
And who is that coming through the door?

— Emily Brown (@emilybrownmusic) May 24, 2016

Some sad is inescapable!
Settle in, dissolving salteye,
But know this:
All my other faces pay rent.

— Emily Brown (@emilybrownmusic) May 23, 2016

It is hard to be:
Alive or yours
Or dead or alone
Or kind or good
Or mean or selfish
To be five or twenty
And all these multiply each other

— Emily Brown (@emilybrownmusic) May 22, 2016

In this house of skin even the furniture shines with heat
Like salamanders, burning bushes, like the phoenix,
I am consumed and regurgitated by the mouth of fire.

Wasp

Your convoluted paper house

made of fragile tunnels, a network of flowers,

hive of papery straw wrappers, sunbleached like dead coral,

and you built that house pressed into the top corner

of the outcropped roof, above the pool,

reappearing every May or June

just as I was racing my brother

to tag the drain first this summer

We filled with terror

when you came flying in,

spinning in the air and playing your violin,

neon yellow and black and raging in the sky,

my head sucked under the water with a mouthful of air--

And was this the moment my youngest brother realized

if he exhaled before sinking,

he felt inexplicably calm

about staying underwater for good?

Cake

1. Combine the dry ingredients first because something about how if this cement touches water too soon, it will become not a corrugated tower but a terse brick.
2. Combine the wet ingredients (but not the eggs) with the sugar because the sugar dissolves into the butter when you beat them together, it turns glossy yellow, divining down from the whisk, pale yellow silk.
3. Beat the egg whites separately because they expand slowly into aerated styrofoamish clouds, pearl sheen when they stiffen, the whisk twists and gathers them into soft towers, mountains and valleys topped with soft, slick fog.
4. Fold them into the batter because of the satisfying "thump" they breathe when you drop them on the buttery surface, because of the variegated stripes that form as the spatula gondolas in circles around the mixing bowl's edge.
5. Split this batter into three pans because a three-layer cake is a tower, a fortress of floors and floors made for kings.
6. Put them in the oven because these floors will construct themselves with invisible hands, balloon-blowing yeast inflating into a thousand tiny rooms.
7. Pour simple syrup over these layers because it perfumes these rooms with shining gloss, fills them with silk and morning.
8. Frost it because now it is only crumbling drywall, because a palace like this needs smooth white plaster, that soft sweet safe membrane from the heat, from the rain.

Barnaul #2

The bus is shaking, knocking its passengers around;

it stops- Vzlyotnaya, Svyetochnaya,

Pavlovskii Trakt,

and if you could see the original copy,

(I mean of this poem)

you could tell how distastrous it is,

writing a poem on a bus in Barnaul.

There are things you write about because someone has to write about them,

if I don't, people will forget Barnaul, or they,

heaven forbid,

might never learn what Barnaul is.

I'm moving soon; even I could forget Barnaul, I guess,

but what I'd like to remember is:

     1. The mess a bus makes of my handwriting.

     2. The fog on the windows in May (May 3rd).

     3. How the bus nearly tips over when it left-turns over the trolley tracks.

     4. Driving past the beginning of Spring in Siberia.

10 Poems, 4

What do you taste in this cake?

I didn’t cry into it.

I did dump the rest of a bottle of vanilla vodka.

I also burned (carefully) the edges of the meringue in the oven.

Does it taste like revenge?

Does it taste like angel bodies?

Does it taste like the pain of heaven?

At the Family Reunion at Zion Ponderosa

I am not afraid I will feel the metallic scrape-in-the-heart

of a coyote call at night here; I am afraid that the

untempered voices of teenagers 30 feet away will not stop

with the turning of the night; I am afraid that the sound of

a baby wailing through the canyon will hit the bell

of my heart, hard, ring out in my warbling throat.

Saltines

When I was in England I was so sick I didn’t eat for a month, and then what I craved was pretzels, soft pretzels, and the only soft pretzel place was so many stops and walks away from me, and I was too tired to leave the house. One morning I woke up craving salt, craving bread, and I went downstairs and poured salt on bread, shaking off the excess in a snowy hiss on the counter. Maybe I was losing salt in tears; I wanted to lose it in blood (from screaming arms) some nights. Today I ate a whole sleeve of saltines for their salt and I don’t miss you. I feel bad for not missing you; putting the salt back into my veins makes it easier to lose in the dark.

Cleaning Out the Fridge

First off, a can of chile peppers in adobo sauce has vomited all over the second floor, its dark and clotted blood trickling down to the lower apartments, in which a bunch of wilted cilantro protests its dismay and a bag of coagulating spinach hits the ceiling with one plastic fist. In smaller containers: pungent minced garlic begins to liquefy into piss mixed with tasteless pale grains, while basil sprouts the soft gray fur of a blankfaced koala. A lemon, skinned of its zest weeks ago, feels its skin blister and tighten, its pores dry with dehydration, and passes out on the ground, buried beneath a single brown-ended celery rib, and beside a still-crisp apple, and behind a yellow pepper in the midst of a midlife crisis.

Poems written with pens that need to be used up

I. The bakery two blocks from my house

It is made of brick the color of marzipan folded with flakes of iron,
those spiny needles that reach themselves into Soviet castles, sharp and feathered,
if you hold a magnet above them,
and tease.

Poem, right now, in 337.

Stone

When I think about stones, just one stone, one of them,
it's the singularity of it that holds out,
Something about it that feels impossible to invade,
solid, solid, not made to break or to cut into.
A stone, then, is safer than I am,
a woman lassoed by plane tickets,
pried open with words.

Poem on the train this time last year.

The trees are yellow, orange, candy-red fruit falling, in the morning frost dusts the grass.
On the train the sun shines through the trees, makes leaves look like hammered gold.
I realize that if I focus on waiting, I lose the sweetness of looking
I can't see anything before me-- the same if I think about pictures, 

documenting or whatever.
I sit my chin on the windowsill. Steam from my nose blurs the glass.
I'm looking at the sun, flashing between birches; a window to heaven.

Galette

Usually it takes longer than this to recognize failure.
Batches of cookies take a few hours; breads, a few more.
How could we know now how we’ll turn out—golden or brown or bloody and pink?

You’re never at risk with an apple.
I mean, almonds speak for themselves.
No one ever complained about a lone nectarine.

Still, you’ll find me slicing nectarine globes into thin half moons,
rolling buttery dough into a wide round,
arranging those slivers into concentric circles,
layered like the petals of a flower;
I’ll fold the crust over itself, the pleats of a dress,
and I’ll put it all in the oven.

This still-pale crust, folded over,
brushed with egg, dusted with sugar
spiral of yellow converging at its center,
brief hearts dipped with deep red,
each part touched with my hands--
See? sugar under my fingernails,
the stain of juice on my blouse,
I made all of this, pieced it
together all afternoon for you.

In one moment, it moves from my control;
when into the oven go those careful folds
and rows, that taste of summer,
glittering sugar and slick gold with red veins.

What I mean to say is, sure! You’re right!
My stupid oven could this whole beautiful thing
into a charred and hardened brick! And summer
could turn you and me, these nights swimming
in overturned heaven in the lake,
into choking anxiety or hot disdain--

but it’s just dough and fruit now,
and the oven turns nectarines into jewels,
that egg-slicked crust into hammered gold,
studded over with diamonds of sugar,
and you will never love the taste of rolled dough
between my fingers, and nothing good can come
of unbaked, unpolished fruit,
scattered in nervous pieces,

on my kitchen counter.

Poem 9/16

You're eyeing the air above your head, grasping
At fleeting small-talk questions, tiny hooks tossed into the lake of me
Some draw out raw statistics, impersonal details
(My hometown, places I've travelled, what book I'm reading);
Others are strung at their ends to great matters;
They pull from within me, like trembling silver fish,
Gasping for breath.

Poem from Novosibirsk to Krasnoyarsk

I was promised inspiration, here
cab car rocking in the middle of the night,
thin white birch trees flashing by in the darkness.
We rumble down the tracks, endlessly,
We stop in still towns, full of dachas, surrounded
by dark, forbidden woods.
Inspiration I've expected, since the first night I awoke,
peering like a child at the trees and stars reeling by.
Now I can't count how many times I've ridden the Trans-Siberian Railroad;
How many times I've felt the string of cars settle to a stop,
sitting outside brightly colored train station after the next;
How many times I've waited in the same stations,
laughed with sarcastic conductors and attendants;
Fumbled for my passport at the train platform;
Told stories in a two-person compartment-- to one, to four,
to ten people, huddled in;
How many times I've made my own bed, rolled out old mattresses,
thick, deep, dense pillows, wondering how to sleep;
How many times I've looked straight up into the night,
to see the stars, holding still, anchored, ordained to their stations,
stiller, stiller than the road or the train or I could ever be.

Scars

(October 2012)

I realize now that I am accumulating scars,

and that they mean things,

scattered into poems, knotted deeply into the weave

of my memory, veins in a stone.

This most recent, threaded with a blue stitch,

in my forehead, where everyone can see;

I watch people seeing it on the bus, and too,

they look at my nametag, at things that mark me,

and I watch them putting them together,

and I wonder how other people things that these things

happen, if they connect the details outside me,

fabricating events in my life, simple as an answer to

the question, “How did you get those stitches on your

head?”

Later it will be, how did you end up with those scars,

all of them, wherever they are.

Three thin lines by my right ankle, the slash on my left arm.

There will be some dark line here, on my forehead,

the white line in the little of my right palm,

and a cluster of scar tissue, like a tiny nebula,

situated over the arc of my hipbone,

and if I keep this up, this wild flailing and

misinterpretation and lack of awareness,

I will tumble haphazard through the world, dragging its nails

beneath me, trying to catch what it can catch.

I will leave skin behind; in return, here are scars,

deep memories in them, now like dreams,

now replayed so many times they are oral legend to me.

Where did you get those scars, says my mind to

my mind, as if a stranger asks me,

and this repetition begins:

Strange Sea

Implausible fish bloom in the depths,
mercurial flowers light up the coast;
I know red and yellow, the other colors,—

but the sea, det granna granna havet, that’s most dangerous
                                                              to look at.
What name is there for the color that arouses
this thirst, which says,
the saga can happen, even to you—

-Edith Södergran

Translated from Swedish by Averill Curdy

Nobody thinks like me and that's okay!

The miracle is meeting someone's mind

that matches this one, even a little

like the green sliver on a blue and yellow venn diagram.

Valentine's Day Resolution

I have come to terms with the fact

that after me-- and before-- you will always love girls

who can't write,

girls who dye their hardened hair,

girls who wear prints and colors collected from the mall,

girls with Tumblr accounts full of orphaned, untraceable JPGs and GIFs.

You will always love girls who can't write,

and I will only love boys who can't take pictures.

While I'm at it, I'll give up people with ears, too.

People with eyes, people with hair--

ceaselessly, these remind me of you.

I'll give up people with hands, people with bodies,

people who have parents and dogs,

people who walk on the street or breathe air.

From here on out I'll renounce people

with names, people with hometowns,

people with skin, or muscles, or organs;

I will only love people without thoughts,

people without language, without long-held opinions

or email accounts, or telephone numbers.

Starting today, I will only love people

who have never seen the sky,

who have never heard of love,

who have never watched the shutter of a camera flash

always capturing the awkward way my face moves

when I know I'm being photographed and

am terrified that you can tell I'm in love.