If today, you’re alone, working late,
if you’re too far away, drinking wine,
and you know all too well you won’t make
it back to celebrate the day in time,
if the future you dreamed of has died
in a past that left you behind,
if all you’ve dreamed of is waiting
offstage in the money you’ll never find,
if you know no one knows your full name,
or if all you’ve ever known is the worst,
remember, tonight, the miracle happens:
the news we’re all waiting for reaches you first.
By Heidi Turner
When we met, I didn’t say much;
I wanted you to think I was thoughtful,
that I was listening to you,
reading your body language,
attentive to the way the hairs
on your arms lie straight and long…
In fact, I was building little bridges
and finding little matchbooks
in the overcoat of my subconscious,
keeping fires alive, trying to trap the past
on its side of the river Styx.
By Heidi Turner
When I listen to the melody
you whistle, I hear Heaven
peeling back the clouds,
tissue paper galaxies tearing
through deep space, the sky
between your lips and mine,
but when I hummed along, filling
your song with rhythm,
its nature revealed itself:
the end of the world,
a requiem silenced in a kiss.
By Heidi Turner
There was a time when secrets
saved me, cloaking sins in silence
I donned daily, years I spent
entombed in masqueraded
holiness, sustained in vaudeville piety,
until the day you reached for my cloak—
“Who touched me?” I screamed,
praying you were mistaken, and you
insisted, reaching again:
I stumbled forward, genuflecting—
an unintentional sacrament,
and all because you believed
I, of all people, could bring you healing.
By Heidi Turner
I said, “I am alone,”
at the exact moment
you pulled me out of the sunset
and into the quiet world,
out of shades of red and gold
and into the pale pink nothing
that lives between my scars,
“I was alone,” I said to myself
while you held my hand
and sectioned off the darkness,
giving names to every star.
By Heidi TurnerI
The truth lies somewhere
between a cat caught
in an irresistible sunbeam
and the alarm sounding
in the back of my head
when I try to remember why
I bothered getting up today;
I’ll limp through a lifetime,
if only to feel lights catch
and hold me between shadows
they inevitably cast.
By Heidi Turner
You are you when you feel like not-you,
when you feel like someone new,
when your hands feel foreign, like
holding a stranger’s for the first time,
on a first date that might be going well
or might be going poorly; you are you
when you feel lonely by yourself,
or like you’re spending the night at a cousin’s,
unsure where the light switch is; you are you
hen you are certain you will never be again.
By Heidi Turner
Unlike me, you don’t like the space puppies,
the way they dance and squeak away
all the gravitas of galactic struggle
while making gods of no one’s favorite,
how they crush the troopers
with Boy Scout-like precision, and I do;
I wonder whether it is worth ending evil
that haunts the dreams of every creature
if there is nothing small and helpless,
no one who is only glad to be home safe,
holding hands with someone kind.
By Heidi Turner
The closest thing I did
to learning how to keep you safe was let you go,
and I learned, slowly, from a distance:
I watched you wander the woods I planted
and wonder at the sunlight;
I learned to blink back tears
when you reached your hand, too large,
toward me while I made sure I found the trail;
you were laughing at flashlights in the fog.
By Heidi Turner
We learned the world was more than hopeless
in the transforming pages forming cities,
watching Jack run into history headlong,
the spaces between the past and memory,
and we found ourselves, wandering
through forests made from woods
we cut down, making room for dreams,
listening to the rustling sound of miracles,
of universes forming in the palms of our hands.
By Heidi Turner
I once diffused a bomb in my house,
a stick of dynamite kept hidden
while I pried open arms around me
and lied about my job, and danced
through a minefield and replaced
my bra straps, while you left confused,
and when I locked the doors I knew
that I was a grown-up now, forever,
entitled to my secrets, particularly
ones where no crime was committed.
By Heidi Turner
The worst part of saying goodbye
was that I hurried through it,
and missed my chance to record
the closing of a chapter
in the time it took
to see my shoe had untied itself,
and decide I would risk the fall.
By Heidi Turner
I don’t know who told you
Time takes sides against us
or places bets on the rising tide,
or stops to be sure we leave;
Time himself insists:
he holds us in his arms
for what must be a moment
before we crawl into forever,
leaving him and sequoias behind.
By Heidi Turner
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
