These Trees Were Illegally Cut

These Trees Were Illegally Cut


(A sign seen on I-94)



Stealing trees just sounds odd-

Imagine a gang of tree thieves

Arriving in big black Fords,

Hanging onto axes and saws

The way they would hold their wives.



They stole you.



This is the hour the ground exhales

Veils of fog,

Enveloping the remaining willows

(leftovers)

And unfurling its ragged edges to melt

The interstate into submission.



Then there’s me

And my clumsy car

Tapping out a tune with Vixen-colored fingernails

(the best damn steering wheel drummer to ever live).

So here I am again –

Me holding your hand without you knowing it –

And thinking about those grown men

(arbor whores)

Defiling themselves in the pre-dawn.



They were the ones who took you away from me.

Made you join them in their secret work.

Made you leave me in the middle of the night with

Something swirling and unborn inside of me.

Made you disappear.



Bags and suitcases rustling in the trunk

Made me

Realize –

It’s raining again –

Off and on for four days now –

Half-expect to meet Noah around the bend.



Almost opened my mouth to speak, but

Riding in my passenger seat is my

Brand new purse

(still clean)

Already heavy with burden.

The Green Robe

It took folds of forest green

terry cloth swallowing me

one limb at a time to make me

into a mouse – warm and weak

against my giant.



The shield is one shade lighter

than the forest at midnight and

one shade darker than the sky

before a storm, and as that peculiar

sky breaks apart

over our heads

with me,

unified as confetti,

looking at you the way raindrops

dripping off of lips look so delicious.



It can absorb

the droplets left over

on the small of my back

where I can never get the towel to reach.

It takes away

some little bits of sin every time and

morphs it into little pixels

like the potting soil in the living room –

ground into each fiber –

woven into the Berber like it belongs there.



Tossing it to the hamper as one

might toss a crutch after the cast comes off –

I can’t comprehend – because the day

you pulled your robe around me you

stirred the internal and it became

my emerald everything.