Purchase From the Rooftops

Visit the "From the Rooftops by Myrlin Hepworth" link, or click the "Cart Icon" to buy the book online

From the Rooftops by Myrlin Hepworth | Make Your Own Book

Coming Soon

Coming Soon, Cover Art by Michael Faulkner, Photo by Pedro Perez.

This chapbook features poems written in 2010-11 during my time as a student, performance poet and professional teaching artist in Arizona.

Hickies

I think about the girl at the 7/11—

mostly about the hickies on her blue veined neck;

those greedy plumb leeches—

those wriggled beasts that have been smacked into her skin,

they are disturbingly pleasant things I think.

She hands me my change and I become

uncomfortable from my imagination.

Once a time ago upon my flesh two women drew

continents that sprawled like ink spills,

their lips and teeth scribed

messages of ownership back and forth.

Only the blood thirsty invent maps.

A world of gluttons maps its own illusions.

But you and I never used lust from tongue

and teeth to lip-mark our belonging

with bruised flesh dry of saliva

and purple to a public eye,

accidents once or twice, I recall.

We feasted every night though—

mapped each corner of who we were,

and are, and should be

until we knew we were no more

and should be no longer.

And now through the crowded faces

of women I meet,

I walk with skin naked from your absence

wanting to claim itself yours.

Ç Myrlin Hepworth

Ode to Refrigerator Boxes

You are much to dirty for Mikahil Baryshnikov's toes,

to beautiful be allowed in Carnegie Hall,

too poetic to be displayed at the Smithsonian.

You are the foundation of the B-boy stance—that wild style

paus-pop-flex-flavor crowds jeered for, that stance which defied

police batons and prison cells, Vietnam jungles and Contra cocaine,

same stance that shot erect from your surface and mimicked sky scrapers,

Still I Rise tattooed in the lining of your back,

the firs stage ever

to support the weight

of a man spinning on his head. Once

you lined the park surface,

crowds stirred below the backdrop of a Bronx sunset,

Adidas scuffed

broke

swung-spun-tucked. Kids

became mystics

to the thump

of break beats. Now

you wait to be collected. Lost

from the tremble of fat laces,

the squeeze of shoulder blades

in revolution

the scissors of legs steady swoop of ankles, lost

from the Steady Rock,

Cool Herc rotation of turntables—you wait.

Outside warehouses and in trash bins,

in alleys in New York City and Paris

behind appliance stores in Idaho, Belgium, Egypt, Japan, Kenya,

in a hundred different nations

in a thousand different cities

where B-boys and girls

reinvent your name

in phrases as infinite

as the ways in which the human body can create itself in motion,

turn itself inside-out-outside-in — you wait.

You wait for boys and girls

who starve to move like

litered newspapers drift, who ache to tumble

like trash cans, to bend like ricocheting bullets,

to land upon you like jets and leaves

to set themselves frozen like dry paint,

to sweat form hips and shoulders,

to find rhythm

from speakers

that rattle

like silver-wear drawers in busy kitchens.

You wait for them to collect you,

use you as you were meant

as a dinner table.

Ç Myrlin Hepworth, 2011

This Morning

The rain

tipped into our gaze, dashed sideways

and caused the street to shine a liquid black.

A sopping flicker scurried across the breeze.

That morning,

the orange shadows of rock and sand

grew deep into the blue downpour.

By your car we embraced for warmth—tried to say goodbye

for like—an hour,

laughing at the skies oscillated kisses.

The rain changed intensity

like a dieing street lamp sputtering light

across an adobe mural painted in blue sand.

How the rain fell into us.

How the scene of it all glows so sharply in my mind,

it couldn't possibly have been so beautiful

it could'n possibly have been that beautiful I think

but I believe it had to have been. Even now

I realize that the morning the desert, the rain,

these things have always been that beautiful.

It was you, your electric kiss

that shocked this epoch into my senses.

This morning

I know no other way to reach for you

but to assault the horizon with your memory,

but to create teal streaks as I glance into this expanding sunrise.

Ç Myrlin Hepworth, 2011