poetry and prose

Team Dunnero by Rebecca Tillett

In the years it takes to double our lifetimes from the onset of our days as silly teenagers, I'll watch you profess your love and devotion to a lucky gentleman with a handlebar mustache on the banks of the Rio Grande, ablaze and glowing with the heat of the Fall desert sun. Your beautiful and brilliantly white dress, shimmering and dancing with each affectionate word you utter in the direction of impending and hopeful days, your relentless tears waging cyclonic wars behind the barriers of your reinforced but dampened eyes. Every word, a promise, every syllable a solemn prayer.

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Redwood National Park by Rebecca Tillett

There is nothing I can say about the trees to describe them to you if you've never seen them or found yourself in their presence. I hope you trust in my sincerity when I announce my satisfaction at that realization. It's true. I'm so utterly contented knowing there are places in this world that lie outside the boundaries of articulated description, places you simply have to see and feel and experience to know.

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The Burden of Filling the Vacant Spaces by Rebecca Tillett

So many never wake with clenched jaws, with jagged teeth newly softened and smoothed and transformed to powder. So many have never hosted such a civil war in their mouths. They'll never mourn the fatalities, the wounded, the lost. You'll never crush things between your teeth the way you used to. You acknowledge this.

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Almost Like God by Rebecca Tillett

Every child wants to know that their parents not only love them but love each other. I have small fuzzy memories of what could have been love between my mother and father: laughter, tickling, pet names, but those small moments had all faded and died before I was out of elementary school. From that point on until my father shot himself, my parents were strangers to each other at their best and bitter enemies at their worst. 

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Naked in the Woods by Rebecca Tillett

What if this is Heaven? What if this our reward for being good in a life of bleakness and despair, darkness, and savagery? What if we, holy, starved while all the others ate each other before turning themselves inside out and rotting to waste in the pulsing sun? What if earth is paradise?

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You Were Born to Love by Rebecca Tillett

Love without apology, without reservation, without fear, without safety and security and that hard shell you swore no one would ever crack. Love without boundary, without apprehension and cynicism and timidity over exposing the soft part of your flesh. Love like it's the last time you'll ever love because this life is much too short to waste such a precious commodity. You were born to love. Anything else is wasted potential.

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How Deeply I Loved Him by Rebecca Tillett

We would meet in a chatroom in 1997 when were just teenagers. We’d grow close and in 1998 when my father killed himself, Mike would become one of the only people I could talk to about it. I would read his sweet words on the screen, grieving over the loss, sinking into my swelling isolation and wishing I could disappear into his strong arms. I quietly fell in love with him then but he lived in Philly and I lived in New Mexico, and 2,000 miles is enormous to two kids with no means to cross it.

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Like Paintings by Rebecca Tillett

Don't you love photographs that look like paintings? I can hear your heart beating in the trees, baby, they're all pulsing so steadily and in rhythmic unison. Let's crawl under the blanket of snow and hide until the warmth of Spring thaws our frozen grip on each other's necks.

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Lola Roja by Rebecca Tillett

She pranced and she skipped and she romped through the woods
On toward gramma's house as quick as she could
When out of the shadows a wolf did appear
But our dulce mijita sensed danger was near
She cried "Come mierda y muerte, cabrón!"
And smashed him over the head with a rather large stone
Killed that wolf dead, right where he stood
Then onward she strolled, our Lola Red Riding Hood

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Young Enough to be Humbled by Rebecca Tillett

It really is true what they say, isn't it? You think you'll never change from the person you are when you're 15, 18, 21, 25, 30... but you DO, friends. You really do. I think I've finally reached an age in which I understand the older generation's contempt for youth. Kids really don't know a damn thing.

Hopefully I'm still young enough to be humbled by that realization.

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Persevere by Rebecca Tillett

I will persevere, when your skin cracks open beneath my fingers, when your bones become too brittle to hold you up, when light and dark are indecipherable, when ribbons of your blood weep to the floor threatening to drown us both, I will laugh at the audacity, I will inflate my lungs in defiance and I will hold on, I will persevere.

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Her Hands Will Embrace Your Throbbing Throat by Rebecca Tillett

Her smile will level you
Quite like her big green eyes
Nestled unassumingly behind
Her fluttering lids
But her hands will embrace
Your throbbing throat and squeeze
Until your lips turn blue
And your memories of her
Dissolve into the blinding stench
f dreams unrealized.

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347//365 by Rebecca Tillett

My fingers follow the roads and highways of your back,
reading it like a map
Every mole and freckle, a rest stop
On my way to the scenic bridge of your neck,
An overpass with breathtaking views
Breaking there to get my bearings
To will the flashing of my life
Before my fingers’ eyes Jump, jump, fly
and I find them alive on the rugged trail of your jawline
tip-toeing through rough terrain
The land moves easily here
And my fingers sway in alliance
As they travel north and linger
On the rim of the hollow of your eye
The universe

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332//365 by Rebecca Tillett

What can you tell me now that you couldn’t one year ago? Could you tell me how your reflection in the mirror has changed with such fervent subtlety that you hardly recognize the person you once were? Could you describe to me the palpable feeling of the shattering of such long-held presumptions of yourself? Could you tell me how fucking beautiful the silencing of such familiar doubts in your head can be? Could you tell me how your smile is an accessory you rarely leave home without?

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321//365 by Rebecca Tillett

Blanket me with the soft shroud of the setting sun's fiery mantle of clouds before I get too lost in the cold dark of the universe, before the moon soothes me to sleep with its stories of brave explorers who long ago hovered sweetly above its lonely ground, before my fingers become raw with lucid memories of the earth's thorny skin.

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305//365 by Rebecca Tillett

Do you remember the first time I told you I loved you, sweetpea? I meant every word of that sentence. I meant it with every force within me that propels me forward. I meant it with the self same honesty and intention I feel when I hold your jaw in the palm of my hand, when I get my fingers tangled in yours and when I touch my lips to your earlobe.

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