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.

Autumn Leaves With Little Mrs.

Among rings of our dark, black woods,
I'm bound in apron strings.
Trapped in Formica.

Porch pumpkins rot,
cast pulpy shadows of home.
Every night in and out of soapy water,
I calibrate the oven.
The various temperatures of you.

I become a face buried in detergent,
in a wicker basket filled with your shirts.
My pipe dreams live in kitchen drawers
or under our paper mache bathroom sink.

Waiting for you in the icebox after work,
I channel my spider veined grandmother.

Flowered plates crack under mismatched shoes.
Tangled vines hide a window
where our ginger cats creep.
Perched, taut.
Prepared for an exit.

Verses From the Middle of the Bed

I think of her at night.

The feel of my head against her collarbone, on a train gunning through asparagus fields. They call it spargel in Germany. She laughs at the word, head tilted way back.

She moves in after a week. Come home one day and dry my face on yellow towels. I hate yellow. But I dream of her in yellow. Her on the Fourth of July gnawing cobbed corn like a typewriter.

We buy papers and she quits after the third try. “You’re better at it anyways,” she says. Empties a cigarette, pokes down with a mutilated bobby pin. “You give up too easy,” I say.

Seven nights in a rented room, two pass. A map gets us lost on a street I can’t pronounce and I yell at her. Want to put my fist through a wall so she dares me.

We fuck sideways. On the golf course, once. In the back of my car on a dirt road. Wake to the smell of eucalyptus, of stale wine. Her delicate fingers raking over my chest.

I decide to leave and ask her to come. Boxes line the apartment and we go. A house in deep woods, an A-frame with a sloping roof.

One October, I bring home a six-week-old kitten with paws the size of cotton balls. She names it.

She comes in drunk one night. Says her little sister died. Makeup stains my shirt leaving big black streaks. I pour some water, put her to sleep. Auburn hair on my pillow makes patterns like an etch a sketch.

I picture that dune. The beach is alive that day. Alive in blue, grey, steel. Mound of sand, faces pointed west, we talk. Her words darken the sky. Foam billows from deep parts of the sea. She leaves first; I stay.

Watch the tide roll away from us.