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
We are all only ever stories
passing through the pages
of our own manifestos;
“May we be brave,” she said
to her one-in-five sisters,
“Do not forgive me,” he said
to his one-in-twelve chances,
“Remember my number”
to the millions of millions.
We flit through the lines and call
it all fate until we tales,
chased by the wild night,
pass silent into the flyleaf.
By Heidi Turner
“When were there ever any answers?”
You asked me that when we were in love
and I kissed your hand, our fingers interlaced,
a strong indication I didn’t know what to say,
and I told you I only looked for clever questions,
to which you replied: “you lie poorly,”
sweeping me into an alternate universe in which
all of this happened, in which we are still looking
at each other, still asking how to hold galaxies
in the canyons between our touching fingerprints.
By Heidi Turner
I wait in yellow lamppost light
for the guide who can show me
the way to the West, below the
Elvenlands, the place of the lions
roaring
long hidden in chivalrous shadow,
the secret kept in the time fulfilling,
the untamed truth in-bound in spring,
I wait in yellow lamppost light.
By Heidi Turner
“Careful, dear, be gentle
And gently place that in its box,
back where you found it.
I’m asking kindly; I will not ask again.”
Must I start counting?
“One. Two.”
I didn’t reach three.
“My goodness, how did it break?
Well, don’t cry, child,
it was only a sentimental thing.
Smile, dear, we’ll find another one.”
See, nothing to cry about.
By Heidi Turner
Sand between the folds of your shirt
falling
as you stood above me, held out your
hand
and helped me to my feet that day; you
already
knew I was reading the lines of your palm,
feeling
the heartbeat I wanted to believe in—believe
me
when I say that I don’t regret enough to
cry
until long after the waves are silenced,
before
you, I didn’t imagine I could make
contact.
By Heidi Turner
I rolled over onto the space you do not inhabit
and fell through the bedsheets to the floor
at the bottom of the cave in my chest,
the one I account for in my every interaction,
brushed myself off and wondered where the exit
is, what song will play when I escape the shadows.
And yet, perhaps it’s less complicated than it seems:
maybe I’m only practicing, learning what to expect
when I finally fall headfirst.
By Heidi Turner
The only forest I remember
was orange and red
in the autumn sunset,
fiery leaves blowing in the wind
and sailing across the road
where I was watching,
searching for the three evergreen
trees that stood silent
in the graveyard,
waiting for winter to come.
By Heidi Turner
