After this many years,
I’m sure someone’s told
their story on the stock exchange,
carving little runes of history
into arrows and bullet points,
entire heartbreaks encoded
in PowerPoint transitions,
the one that got away sailing by
in the fees assessed from their ETF.
By Heidi Turner
I sometimes wish I was a cynic
and saw nothing in the sunsets,
that miracles hid themselves
underneath trash on the streets,
that in this world of illusion
I had fully misplaced my wonder
at my Father’s sleight of hand.
By Heidi Turner
I ask a question,
the last wondering
I can manage while
standing by my window,
the one with the view:
“Has awe ever struck
the same place twice?”
By Heidi Turner
My nemesis lives on
in the myriad spaces between
sarcastic kisses I offered
to hands I was loathe to touch
and the scar on my lower lip,
the one I am biting again
as you say I have bewitched
your body; I let my nemesis break
free as you speak of your soul.
By Heidi Turner
Words
march in rank
and file across
the plains above
my soul; drawing
swords, reflecting
light through cracks
onto the secret
story I will
never
tell.
By Heidi Turner
A stretch of road beside the sea
has followed me every time I’ve left it,
in moon tracks on the blackness
that re-appear behind faraway spires,
in the sound of rocks rolling into the foam
that sound so much like stilettos
striking cobblestone, a familiar drumline
that left me shaken just yesterday
as I remembered that mine is a life
of sea-borders, a world encased by
water that somehow tracks me down
even in the dreams where you are waiting
at the station, carrying a sheet of A4
paper with a stranger’s name—my own—
written in curling cursive, the color of ocean
when stars are rising behind the clouds.
By Heidi Turner
I missed you so intently
and for so long that,
though I no longer watch
for your shadow in my doorway
and forgot the sound of your step,
the past is coated in residue,
as if you really spent Christmas
here, lived days as the passenger
in my car for uncounted weekends,
as if you were here for more
than my birthday, when I smelled
the scent you always wore,
mixing with the candle smoke.
By Heidi Turner
Half the dreams in my hands
were still crawling across
the kitchen floor of my soul,
waiting to reach for me,
to hear the applause that comes
with first steps as I resisted
letting you go, they hunched,
waiting for space
within arms I had thought
would never hold a child again.
By Heidi Turner
There are entire oceans I’d not seen
until we met.
I know lovers
have said things like that since
wine-dark sea first
dragged a man
back home, but I still say
I’m a poet
with a secret:
the oceans I never dreamed of were
mine long before
I found them,
shades of blue hiding deep in me.
By Heidi Turner
The time it took to lay the bricks
to build a single wall
was more than we needed
to pull a fortress down
and leave the shadows of seven years
on a well-swept floor,
and the rubble revealed a moment
from the first time
I stepped onto the chessboard
and fell madly in love with the play.
By Heidi Turner
A ring embedded in candle wax,
a bouncing child made of broken glass,
the girl who holds back and her man
holding nothing, time passing
into timeless music, and silence.
Someone is feeling somebody’s eyes
across the room from nearly waist high,
watching a mother watching her child,
“It’s hope son, I’ve been feeling it too,”
and the flames begin to melt the ice.
By Heidi Turner
You’ve been watching me
from the couch in this house
you never lived in
just to see if I am someone
you can stand to become—
I, likewise, pretend I’m doing this
for someone else
and not the shadow that still
needs to hold my hand
when we are scared of the dark.
By Heidi Turner
I heard the whirl of sails unfurling,
the sound of a staff clattering
against the dock, the silent splendor
of the rising sun—All of this,
and I was weeping while the flames
flooded the sky above us;
I saw you leaning on the mast, read
your lips: a prayer I cannot yet repeat.
This is my inheritance:
legends I’ve already told my children,
the battlefield dawn of the seashore,
tones cracking under a warrior’s weight.
By Heidi Turner
Last night we watched a star
sinking into the ocean
to fall off the edge of the world.
I leaned closer just in time
for you to say you’d stopped
believing in miracles,
just in time for the galaxies
to fill the darkness and stare back
at us watching the tide roll away,
waves crashing in four-four time.
By Heidi Turner
There was salt on my skin,
my collar to the wind,
when you grew deep
and I frayed, so afraid
that all we have is picking
stitches; “This is all I can do.”
I cannot give you rest:
I’ve never had it myself.
By Heidi Turner
Red numbers above blue envelopes
I will not address, I say, and do;
scattered papers down the hall,
the smell of salt I am smelling again
and the look of bedsheets you’ve never seen
crumpled at the foot of the bed
as though, in the night,
I had started running, perhaps to get
an early start on today.
By Heidi Turner
If there were no clouds rolling
across the sky, no waves lapping
against the clay and sandy shores,
the T.V. wouldn’t tell me thrice,
“The sun is shining,”
and I would not remember
that I will be soaring
above the wrong ocean
with the kind of regret
that can be cast in marble and bronze:
the safest place is one
where no one misses work
when the shadows come.
By Heidi Turner
All around, waves are rippling on the mountains:
the long-lost whitecaps of a tsunami from below
that dug the lake I’m staring into
with the fingers now tangled
in growing green things,
spreading along the earth.
Somewhere, a lamb is crying,
aware the waves are ever breaking,
and stones fall into mirror-water.
By Heidi Turner
I watched the world unfold
into slate crags and endless cloud,
fields of dandelions left untouched;
wishes left for the wind to carry
over fallen trees, whistling
across the mountains.
I sit quiet beneath them, beside
blowing leaves, watching
water touch shore in two-inch waves.
The song stuck in my head,
forgotten in the desert:
bluebells, shadowed, in summer rain.
By Heidi Turner
You are the seagull I watch fly away
from my shoreline, the call I wait for
while the lark is singing, the tired
wings soaring when the turtledove’s
sleeping, and you are the eyes
watching me breathing,
breathing beside the sea,
and I believe that your circle of sky
belongs also to me, you carve space
in the clouds for the anchor,
that I may bring you home safely.
By Heidi Turner
