poems

echo.

i found my mother’s baby name list once

the name i ended up with

nowhere accounted for

instead

penciled in a leaning line

are names like

easter

blue

i guess that’s what you get

when you grow up in the bay area

wolf

tacey

echo

bigger names than i could ever account for

for a kid afraid of everything else

i didn’t grow up afraid of the dark

more afraid of the recognition

of myself in the dark

i knew

as soon as i heard the word

cavern

in one of those oppositeofblindness moments

what i was made of

                            of the cavern within me

            being bigger than any cavern i would ever find myself in

                            of the vastness of who i was

            always reaching terrifyingly beyond what i could see

it all came down to what one could bear

but i hadn’t recognized any breaking points yet

only more cavern

so i kept salting

kept boiling

kept swallowing

on the way to being

which was only ever really code for doing

since i only ever really did things

rather than became them

when there was too much of me to ever really become

i came back to square one every time

                        squarely stuck between

            born on a fault line

clinging to those edges

whiteknuckle afraid to fall moorless into that infinite middle

sisyphus and i rolled that rock up the hill but i never made it to the top

not once

always stopped at the mouth of my own cave

kept every boulder to keep anything from coming in

                                    or out of that darkness i knew could not be good

and we stayed like that for years

all my mouths and me

shut against secrets

(but

of course

that meant shut against

everything else too

but who’s counting when there’s a cave—that could not be good—to get lost in)

i sang myself canary every time

introduced myself at parties as

just some small thing

wrote my name on every page as

little bird

promised

i was only

feather and yellow

only singing the sweet notes

swore

there’s no coal here

no mine

only sweet

only soft

the canaries

go first

our lives

are up for grabs

i avoid any sound from within

for years

cringe at any whisper

any proof of that cave

swallow bolder

after bolder

after bolder

cram myself full of stone

and salt

and still

i know it’s there

waiting

indefinite and dark

echo

the name they meant to use

the thing i always was

the echo was me

and mine

the voice whispering back through the dark

was my own

and what i fed it

it fed me

my heart called itself canary

but i was more than my heart

i was the coal mine

all of me

i was all the space inside

talk about real

estate

all i had been afraid of

all this time

it was all only me

here i was

all these years

singing myself canary

when i’ve been coal mine all along

even when the ghost would not give me up,

i was mine

dark

and vast

with something small and yellow

singing inside