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. 

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.