and all of their heads engulfed in circles of gold

Dear Baby Jesus,

I remember when we were both children. My thumb fit nicely in the space between your ceramic fingers reaching and your ceramic legs kicking. You were the same shape every year when we lifted you from the crackling tissue paper. Unchanging and immovable God. 

Now I am an adult, taking these things in slowly. Poinsettias towering over the altar, and the paper doors of advent calendars - some days never able to fit neatly back in, hinges over-creased from years of expectant opening, the slow turning of surprise into reminder, The Christmas Story now mostly a collection of words that I know by heart forced together only at this time of year: hark, manger, census.

Yesterday I watched a small boy - one of those little boys with the skinny arms and the fly-away hair - he picked up his dad's coffee cup as soon as he was left alone at the table for a moment at Starbucks. With two hands, he lifted the cup to his eye, trying to see inside through the sipping hole. Debating whether or not to have a rebellious gulp.

Treasure. Ponder. The unique taste of cookies overexposed to other cookies under a tent of saran wrap on creased paper plates. Remember to tip the unlit candle into the lit candle. Peace, be still. Good news. Old news. Christ was born for this. My fingers reach and my feet kick when I wake from bad dreams, return from places worse than the world already is. May Christmas cut through the darkness, said the words printed in the liturgy. I picture a slicing joy, creating ragged edges. I picture you, still and ceramic. I watch. I wait.

half-circle smile

i remember learning about the horizon in kindergarten. when it became a critical element in my drawings. small girl in blonde, off-kilter hands dividing - sun, grass. Yellow and orange circles, green lines. Hundreds and hundreds of blades. Miniature god, miniature person, newly cognizant, in great need of lines.

self as red wine sponge

woke up too early this morning and the whole thing resulted in me heaving over my porcelain sink, my white and square shaped sink. And the smell of my soap which i usually like and strategically placed at each corner - made it a little worse. Poison! My legs and neck took a momentary fever, and I groaned loudly against my will. humiliating. but no one else heard, so it's fine. because why be up at five unless you're fighting evil with good? good, cool water from the small glass mason jar i keep in my medicine cabinet. my square shaped medicine cabinet with the fake gold trim and the magnets in the corners that pull a day neatly shut before bed. i'm writing this in a coffee shop and everyone's words are blending like alphabet soup with letters floating in so many rotations that you can't spell words, and then your only real option is to shovel, spoon to mouth. Your stomach gets the message. Is this how i'd explain it to a deaf person? Maybe someday a deaf person will ask me, what is it like, the sound of sitting in a coffee shop? Would they like to know that? Or maybe i'm completely wrong about that - the interest might not be there. maybe she or he will be content to listen to me talk with my eyes. My washing machine spin cycle eyes, turning thoughts with a powerful agitator at their core, shaking monotonously like something you'd watch only if you didn't have a television. The people around me will never stop having televisions, leaving only myself to stare longingly into these eyes in my mirror, rising from heaving over my porcelain sink, my white and square shaped sink, slowly diluting the toxic within.

? or !

the world is riotously unfair.

i both benefit and suffer from this reality.

the red box in the corner is called a sharps collector.

when she took my pulse her fingernails left

half moons in my wrist, and then when 

you're getting your blood pressure taken, the point

when it's tightest you don't even know anything's

squeezing, it's only when the blood starts gulping

through your arm that you think release 

and then you are dominated by your choking 

veins and the scrape of velcro coming undone.

Doppler effect

i can still hear honking shouts and loops of noise underneath my third floor bedroom window every few minutes. i picture a palm pressed hard against a steering wheel. i welcome this interruption of our city's silence, strangers sweeping other strangers up into celebrate! significance! reminder!

this night is a beginning. 

plastic spider rings

here are things i don't believe ever actually work space heaters umbrellas prayer flashlights and Tylenol. here are things i have a hard time getting right brownies in the oven finding someone to make out with doing mail merges at work and getting the key to turn all the way until it clicks when i leave the house. here is something i noticed today the smell of burning dust.

a place on earth

perfume and cigarettes cling

to cloth swayers to the margins crowds

to the next song spilled beer to the wooden

floorboards 

sticky sweaty smoky sweet:

loose gestures, 

tired thighs.

ceasing sleeping

the illuminations of a new day dust
and eyelashes in the crevices
of the letters as i type myself
awake watch steam
turn oatmeal somersaults, long
tumbling between dream and not-dream.

suggestion

dip a paperback book in bathwater dip 

a strawberry in chocolate let 

the dripping edible pages melt

in your mouth become soggy stain

your teeth red give your tongue mushy 

papercuts dissolve the fresh

fruit publishing industry for good.

to sustain a living thing with food

the cream i just poured
into my tomato soup:
still life hurricane.

because one of them held the door for me this morning

I am watching a flock of security guards
in training on the margins of the parking lot. all of their ties
pointing straight black and white down to the ground, taking on
punching mats with their clubs, swaying
quickly before an attack rippling
like the distance through heat waves, the thick glass
of my office windows shot through with their
synchronized cries.

We all lived here quietly together

I was late in an agitated middle of

cars diverted onto First, all of us

driving thinking shit

tapping breaks, gas,

steering wheel waiting for work,

craning. the answer

next morning in a headline: woman fatally stabbed

at bus stop. waiting for work for the morning to continue the day to begin, her life-

the writer said the sister said She loved going out

with her husband and going to the airport,

to watch planes land.

i drive to work picturing a plane's halting landing

Stop.

the writer said the sister said Someone assaulted her. They took everything, and ran.

Relentless teeth

i find ways to keep busy,
feeding the shredder. pretending with the way it looks after:

a paper-crane slaughter
sudden blizzard of murder in the office

opening the tray to stare-
thick interlocked ribbons of prey.