Carving out your body from Birthday cards.

We all cut our hair and scattered
it like a decade's worth of birthday cards.
We had felt too guilty to throw them away--
flapping to escape like lost geese behind
the garage where the pumpkins broke
and cried their seeds-- bleeding on the damp
oak leaves and smell of roasting autumn 
in the rain-- how old are you now
how old are you now that no one
sends you birthday cards? They mistake
you for your father in your short hair
and ink-stained wrists-- 
You've written too many get-well cards
to yourself-- post marked two years
until maybe we can piece together
a creature from decades of birthdays
that have found their way sleeping
in the garage-- they lay in pumpkin guts--
There's people who only know us 
by our birthdays-- card signatures
cousins and glitter balloons-- twenty dollar
bills that say 
I should love you or 
someone says I should love you
I don't want to be a birthday card 
mixed in with my cut strands of hair.
I decided that there was
only one person who could own this body--
Only one hand to roast pumpkin seeds
--carve out a girl-body with me--
I want to be a pumpkin.
Let's keep everything. My innards.
The seeds for salt and nutmeg.
The stem to remind me that I had brown
hair and that I had birthdays
that were worthy of dancing
dinosaurs on cards from aunts
I've met maybe twice. They don't
know how queer I am and how short
my hair is but they know
they're supposed to love me
and isn't that enough for anyone?
I want you to think you should love me
because I have love you for
all the hair you have cut in these
last years and how many piles
of oak leaves you've imagined jumping
into to hide your own ink stains.
I'll send you a get well card today
so you don't have to. We can eat pumpkin
seeds on the porch. The pumpkin gore pie is
in the oven and we don't have
to eat it if you just want to decorate
it with candles and frosting--
we can make it a birthday card 
or just an omen-- we can be fourteen
and cutting our hair in front of 
a sink if you want? You could touch my
neck with oak fingers?
I want you to know you have been
a gift every time the calendar turned for
you like the carving of geese wings 
in the rain or broken pumpkin stems screaming
to be noticed from behind the garage--
I noticed you before your birthday
and I wrote you a card every time 
you wanted to smile. Roast pumpkin seeds
with me over burnt birthday cards 
while in cut hair
and pumpkins
we carve out our bodies.