why aren’t my hands pot holes

to hold rain water
after it falls?
so that boys in rain boots
can splash murky waters
at the girls who pretend they
don’t love it.
so i could look into my hands
& hold everything
in a missing bite of earth--
god built the atlantic 
slowly by chewing away
at the dirt until his
mouth was full of fish
when I needed to pour
into new places
i’d spread apart my fingertips
to let the clouds drop
hail like glass eye balls--
but my hands are dry from space heaters
that cough me into raisin dried-sleep
& I feel like bent branches
that once held a girl who
was going to climb 
to the top of the tree
snow takes deep breathes
but somehow always drops
through the hardwood floor

*

i've been googling the galaxy

sometimes i think it's all so small--
all the clouds of star & comets
who always slither themselves
away like the decrescendo of a snail--
yes i guess it's all far away but
in a picture a being as small
as me can stand back at it all--
a pot hole in the road-- 
a stagnant pool of tadpoles who are
actually meteors chasing the bones
of allosauruses who burrowed
beneath the craters that would 
become lakes-- that would again become
oceans-- a scar above 
god's left eyebrow when the
moon stone-skipped on the
surface of his face
i've been googling the galaxy 
in an attempt to feel larger
but we are so small--
i reach out to extend to the walls 
of my room-- a fist of saturn--
my hair in the eternal fires of 
mars-- wrists wrapped in 
andromeda 

*

the rock store in search of planets

my father keeps a wooden chest
where all the planets have come from--
some of them sleep in beds of cotton 
coffins-- pockets of galaxies
where the suns are quiet for now--
sleep & uninterested in burning--
fern fossils that were once 
the scales of my neon tetra
fish-- the ones who ate themselves 
to death because my brother
& i didn't know to stop
feeding them pieces of saturn ring--
we went to the rock shop when we
wanted more planets-- you can
never have enough planets
just like planets can never have enough
moons-- enough children
to keep in their own dark
cotton galaxies-- the wooden chest
that waits in the attic 
for us to take our planets to--
the ones from the shelves of the rock shop--
the tyrannosaurs teeth from us who
would be king-- the bite of a memory 
of we carnivores