i bought you a church

the church comes with angels. 
all of them pour their blood
into the fountain. jesus is like a flag. 
he's not supposed to touch the ground but there he is 
lying face up on tile floor like a dead spider.
walls moves with jupiter beetles. this is where
we will baptism all through the night. 
do you like it? i wanted a place where we 
could be sacraments. devour & confess. 
stained glass shows a scene of dissection. 
no one returns to sky. every day i watch the world empty
this is where we can be full. angels coo like doves. 

swimming lessons

the day slips into the water as a salamander
& i walk barefoot. i learned to swim from watching minnows.
they move now between my fingers like ghost lungs.
i am learning how to breathe stone. i shape shift 
only when no one else can see me. a heron. a headless deer.
listening to the water's ancient tongue. on my back
i let the river take me. become the water strider.
my legs like pylons. i hear the cell phone conversations
of dead lanternflies. they say, "this is a dying place."
to live in the world now is to feel the world pulling back.
gums & grit. i find a river monster to talk to.
he comforts me. tells me, "it is right to be afraid." 

worm eaters

my father was a ten-year-old prophet.
he would go out to his grandmother's yard 
& eat worms until they spoke through him.
i'm scared i am the same way so i avoid 
grandmothers & yards & talking to worms. this morning 
i saw a worm being consumed by a wave of ants. 
they looked like water. in a past life, i drown in a green lake.
i can still hear the muffled birds above saying, "gone."
then, last year, we went canoing on your parent's lake 
& everything was worms; even you & even the clouds. 
i closed my eyes hoping it would pass. still, my father stands 
in my every backyard. he eats worms. offers some to me.

custom order

i'm 3-D printing you a language 
with no present tense. tomorrow tomorrow tomorrow.
i put on my rain boots & walk out into 
a bowl of orange juice. we used to kiss 
like a knot of snakes. now, 
i go out into a field of salt pillars looking for a life.
when i shaved off my hair, doves poured from my skull. 
i tried to catch them but they left &
carried with them my plates & silverware.
i'm asking god for an afternoon of nothing but syrup.
light coming in your window & you telling me,
"i will love you tomorrow."    

flight school for not-boys

one day, i was pushed from the roof. no, i didn't grow wings. 
i fell into a pit of cherries. all blood begins with hunger. 
stains under my fingernails. i just wanted to taste 
a piece of cloud. the sun said, "boys are always trying 
to grab something." i said,"i'm not quite a boy." the sun laughed.
after that, i spent ever afternoon gathering feathers.
stood beneath the pine tree picking up even the smallest ones. 
the birds said, "not enough" until one day it was. 
i didn't learn to fly from them though. i tossed vases 
& picture frames out the window. saw how quick they became 
catastrophies. to fly is often to plummet. i let myself tumble
& all the feathers disperse. i'll tell them i flew.  
 

stealing saturn's rings for you

in another life, i was a humming bird & you were a bee.
we drank from the same soda can. maybe i'm wrong.
maybe we were mosquitos with legs like eyelashes.
all i know is we were hungry. climbing a ragged rope, 
i finally reach the planet. breathe her atmosphere's 
pale yellow crystals. she is guarding a core.  
she says, "this one piece is mine." i recall how i must climb 
into my body each night. my celestial machine. i perch 
& look out at the rings. how far my rings stray. i pry off 
just one ring of saturn. teach it to orbit you as you sleep. 
i say, "you can open your eyes." we are surrounded 
by golden snakes. you say, "it's everything i wanted." 

gold dusting

the flood waters come with lightning in their stomachs. 
they ask "do you have enough to get by?" "yes," i lie.
i put clouds in jars. look for gold dust on the sidewalk.
a museum of magnifying glasses arrives on two chicken legs.
i am looking for angels. then, today, the sofa gains
a heart beat & we become too sheepish to sit anymore.
i stand in hallways & corners. brush shoulders with demons. 
some say that gold once was the bones of gods. 
i find a grinder dangling above. my gods go willingly to dust. 
close their eyes the same way rabbits die: 
quick & full of relief. to be prey in your own parable 
is to always look up as if it might rain gold.

i lie to you & pretend i have a daughter

this is the ziploc bag i usually keep her in.
toys strewn across the lava pit. she is the one
who tore the hole in the wall. the one that leads
right into bee hive burning. i bake a cake because
it is her birthday or mine. we live on a dwindling. 
i tell her stories about how when i was small 
daughters were everywhere. i had a closet of daughters. 
then, they all went to war or turned into glaciers 
just to melt a year later. a monster is gathering sticks 
at the soy bean fields' edge. i sent my daughter there 
with a pocket knife & she didn't come back.
i call out like crow to her. the mountain's echo back. 

rust

on the railroad tracks that latticed town, 
there grew rust from lack of use. 
the ghost trains carrying left shoes & wedding veils
did nothing to mark the tracks. a train in use
shines the rails silver from motion. sometimes
a train rushes my spine & i rattle like an urgency.
there is not enough time. there are midnights coming. 
i try so hard to balance between despair & craving;
walking with my arms airplane as i went. 
my friends & i would take each other's pictures there
on the old tracks. teasing, we told one another 
"move there's a train coming!" 

the birds &/or people outside my window.

they say, "tomorrow we'll bicycle
until the world is flat." then, they turn into birds
& those birds fall like basketballs.
i picture every wall in the city petaling open.
here is the tulip i sleep inside. pink sound.
red sound. our sneakers with desires of their own.
the outside people jump rope & then i am chaining myself
to the bed to listen. i wonder if i am 
part of their conversation even if they don't know  
i'm only feet away. the sidewalk is always a temple.
children litter the street with their old feathers.
referring to me, they say, "goodbye miniature man."