Rocky Creek Landslide

I taught myself to cook from a library book

the week we watched the cliff road slide into the ocean.

Deviled eggs, first. Their soft white insides perverted

with paprika, you laughed at my mayonnaise hands.



The week we watched the cliff road slide into the ocean,

March rain spit in your face at the generator.

It pooled around my fingers, muddy digging for potatoes

in a Big Sur garden planted soon enough before the storm.



Leaves hung heavy with sodden sky at

the grange hall where someone told us

convicts built our impossible road.



Hooked backs hanging in the salted air, their

granite muscles nailed to wooden cribbage.

“Foundations,” you said, for so many leavings.



Convicts together ironed under the majesty of this place

Laying asphalt across roads they never traveled.



We move this thought around on our tongues,

tines of forks pressing well-fed lips,

scraping left overs from our plates to

the onion earth of our compost pile.



We walk slowly through pools of fresh water,

searching down the road

for the silver lights of the construction zone.

And there, beyond the redwoods,

we hear the wind men

skipping rocks across the divide.

Talking About The Distance Between Here and New York

Slivers of who we once were
meet under fingernails of moon on
our first night's pillow.

Concrete signs claim we've arrived.
Perhaps it's easy to mistake our hometown
for some other city.

Long division of two bodies-
belly button suctioned to backbone,
that tiny amber fleck sleeping on your iris.

We count insecurities night to night
because our parents taught us it's best
to forget sheep.

We become vegetarian.
Anemic. Two words shook up in a bottle, tossed
for sea long miles.

Against a fog lined bay we emerge
in latticed day from some frothy half-slumber.

Pressing lips to ridges
on the back of your left wrist, I kiss
corked veins that lead to a switchbacked unknown.

You lace your pockets with glass.

Portola Plaza

I want to write with lilies
spilling out of my mouth.
Full of wind. Curled up under a well-traveled
sweater, dank ends and edges of a fingernail
flipping over each scrawled page.

Shivering in snow-lined pockets,
penning lyrics to him.

What kind of flowers does he like?

As summer springs forth to fall, I call to
winter days, all pumpkin and stew.

Holding each tender bone against my veins, his
imprint presses gently, all vintage vineyard, cold
breath.

Swilling through glass, I live in
seconds. Listen for cotton fluttering. A vericose flow.

I want to call his name into the night
and hear him sing back to me.

Swilling liquid, sure of what to look for,
finding nothing but muddled time.

I was destined for empty bottles.
For thickets of roses grown in wine.

untitled (for t.)

I still taste the night before.

Sentences draped where you
left them: across knees,
on the bedside table, covering
the valley of my breasts.

I want to cup you in
both hands and keep
you in a drawer with collected
fragments of paper. Like scrapbooked
petals, a vineyard rose or
a firefly in a bell jar.

This House

A doorhandle once pushed open
is no longer unbuttoned.

I look through where we lived.

Behind the keyhole, leftover
edges and ledges remain.

Crumbs of bread we ate
together are shoved in corners
by the new tenant's broom.

My hair is lodged between
pipes in the walls of this house,
or sleeping in the tub's mirrored drain.

Your fingerprint lingers on the
oven dial or the wall above
an empty room where our headboard
used to stand.

I'm looking for the things we left, here.
The words.

I'm breathing in the hallways.
In the oil stained garage.
Waiting for your headlights.

good housekeeping (a love poem)

what would it be like, one
hundred and eighteen weeks
later, to fold myself on the vinegar
rim of your upper lip?

to become the sensation curled inside your
abdomen, driving home over asphalt hills?

on this un-anniversary, i
sleep yellow with rubber
gloves.

i lie under dust pockets
swept across the floor
of rooms we bent inward

"Verses From the Middle of the Bed"

Lillian's poetry is an illumination of femininity. Channeling goddesses from her own life, Lillian pens a heartsong of female perspective, exploring loss and longing at each stage of life: as the Maiden, the Mother and the Crone. "Verses From the Middle of the Bed," her first chapbook, is filled with both blossoming prose and hushed brevity. Images of sparkling dresses, blowup dolls, Barbie, sisters, and young domestic life swirls across the page as Lillian embarks on the labyrinthine path of her life's work: uplifting women through sharing the unique bond that the appreciation of sisterhood creates.

***

This chapbook is dedicated to my two magical grandmothers, Beulah Marie and Grace Lois, to my mother, Janet Ann, and my three sisters Pauline Lenore, Abigail Leigh and Kathleen Morgan.