welcome to my miniature life

i dug this grave with a spoon. everything was a baby 
but especially the television & each breath i took.
my cherry tomato fist. palm standing 
& calling a boyfriend "zeus." talk to me
like you would a necklace of ants. i am
here to carry away each grain of sugar. doorknobs
the size of knuckles. even smaller still
is the passage i use to sneak into the walls. knock
three times on moon & wait for a seagull 
to open the door. i am not welcome in most 
dioramas. they say, "where is your mother & father?"
i say, "i am my mother & father."

guilt free

we sit in front of the factory drinking seltzer
& talking about hunger. when we were kids, 
we accidentally fed our goldfish to death. 
filled the surface with flakes & watched them 
swallow & swallow & swallow until their bodies 
were no longer their own. you ask me how to make enough money.
the seltzer is peach flavor. tastes like hallways.
i want to be a guilt free person. someone who 
doesn't replay each conversation we have for years after.
am i a good sibling? why don't i have any answers?
i pretend the seltzer is a can of real fruit & that i am feasting. 
i drink quickly. you crush your can under your shoe.

boiling meat from bone

you took off your coat three times before you entered.
winter smacked bells against every window.
for you, my hands became door stops. in the cupboard 
pickled song bird eyes unfurled to diamonds. the meat is
always in the way. i wept for days as walls
fell off each side of the house. soon it was 
just me & the vacuum cleaner. sucking in my stomach
i stood in front of a full-length demon. wrote you letters
& each lost its exoskeleton on the way. delivered
& delivering. watching my knees like watermelons.
there is always more to cut away. i banished your mouth 
only to find it whispering in every corner.

antlers for almost once dead boys 

with a pocketknife we planted seeds
in our skulls. blood throbbing all night long.
on the trail the day before, we watched a buck 
chasing a comet. he looked over his shoulder
to tell us "feed the sun." so we did. we baked all day 
& all night. offering loaf after loaf of bread. 
sun refused to eat until he saw deer had come too. 
an antler is a branch from one day into the next. 
one body to the dirt to the roots. an antler is a courier. 
it took weeks but the seeds did take. in the mirror, now,
an oak tree sprout grows from my skull. soon, i will have antlers. 
planets will nest here. i ask them to ward off my hunger.

narwhals kissing

we skewered the moon like a white grape.
every core was apple flesh. breaking the ice
& waiting for angels to come out. at the poles,
god comes with handfuls of thumb tacs.
you told me you wanted to become penguins 
in our next lives. i asked, "how are you so sure?"
you said you were not sure. not at all. 
i swam through blurred ancient worlds in search of
our oldest skeletons. graveyards beneath the water.
i looked up & saw you. your body like a book of commas.
everything i know about blood i learned from snow.
when they see horns crossed, will they know we are kissing?

smelter

last winter dad told me a man at his work
was burned alive in a vat of molten lead.
he works in a battery factory. today i am looking 
at a busy street & wondering how many of my father 
are curled inside bellies of passing vehicles. then, if maybe,
there are still cars moving with a flicker of that man 
eaten by flames. i look up pictures of car battery anatomies. 
staring into the folds of mechanical hearts. 
i am tracing assembly lines in my blood. knuckles
& respirators. i want softness for our bodies.
a graveyard where cars can go to become mammals.
where fathers sleep & wake up with pockets full of gold.  

mirror cakes

i watch tiktoks of bakers making my face.
in the basement i keep knives & serving pedestals. 
he is cutting the throat of the moon to stand beneath 
a waterfall. i wish someone would teach me how 
to coat the edges of my life like this. a blurr blanket. 
mixing sugar & sugar mirage. the baker is careful.
knows nothing about my nose & my cooked teeth.
instead he works from memory of the last time
he made a mirror cake. his own reflection peering up.
severing his face into eight slices. one night 
my bathroom mirror shattered without warning
i kneeled to collect fragments. my face in each.  

inedible 

my friend says to me "you know the food you see in commercials isn't real?" we talk about food stylists & wonder if our ancestors could have imagined a whole profession around making delicious phallacies. my grandmother used to grow herbs in her windowsill. i remember her thin fingers pinching boats of basil. she would talk about her mother's tomatoes: amorphous but sweet. almost none of what i consume is picture-worthy. then i think that eating is a kind of anti-knowing. tongue & gums. only senses. photographs always unfurling in my blood. blueberry fields & sighing corn stalks. fingers holding steady a zucchini to cut into cubes. on tv there we watch ice cream made of potatoes. water droplets that have been delicately placed on a skirt of lettuce. we are hungry tonight & we watch burger advertisements. the buns rotate on their pedestals. smiling mouths. white teeth. a nuclear family laughing & i laugh too at the absurd distance between of what we say we want & what we really want. 

feather duster

in my polkadot life, there is always more childhood. 
i fill my shoes with blueberries. wear the straw hat. 
i am eight-years-old again & it is a cleaning afternoon.
my mother is handing me the feather duster. i observe how
every corner of the kitchen gathers dust of all pigments:
grey & blue & amber & saw-dust beige.
congregations above the fridge & along the fire place. 
dust in the corners & dust on the ceiling fans.
i think of the church hymn line, "remember you are dust
& to dust you shall return." the words used hollow me
but seeing all the dust i feel plentiful. if i really were dust, 
i would be tended. gathered. taken. then, arrive again. 

visitors

when the night the visitors came, we covered our ears. 
our soil hummed & then screamed. 
we mistook their halos for airplanes. in their arms 
they cradled giant teeth. spoke a language full of nails. 
in the morning, i often cut a hole in the sky to let the sun out.
these beings had no use for light; it radiated from their eyes.
we welcomed them as we do all visitors. angels or gods or 
demons or interplanetary birds. we fed them
oatmeal & all laughed like rain. i wished i were them.
opening homes like sweet melons. begged them to stay,
but they departed by turning into grains of rice. to this day
we keep those grains in a little bowl by the door.