unkept pronouns

let's never talk about the government again.
build a house with chicken legs to escape in.
i want to eat honeysuckles & learn
the language of the mosquitos so that i can bribe them
to drink my enemy's blood & tell me
what it tasted like. i have been
letting my pronouns get unruly lately. 
call me what you think i am. it's a game of
visibility. i am your magic 8 ball. shake me
& i'll give you a fortune or a warning.
aren't all fortunes warnings though?
if i lost my sense of taste i don't think i would
eat less. instead, i crave sugar like a butterfly. 
i have a bad habit of throwing things out
in preparation for a sudden & urgent runaway.
i get rid of the hedge trimmers & the scythe. 
the pronouns get weedy & unkept. the government 
punches a hole in my ear & tags me
like the dairy cows who roam the pasture looking
for a way out. i promised i would not
talk about the government but i am really sick
of considering what i should hide. i am too tired
to be anything but a menace. i let me pronouns
attract bugs. i get the hoa called on my pronouns.
they cultivate wild raspberries & i eat them
all myself. red-fingered & sweet. dandelions come
& sing their yellow hearts all night. a family member
buys me a push mower for christmas.
i bury it. i will not be tending this mess. 
i want to see how wild i can get. 

deep-fried communion wafers 

this is my get-holy quick scheme. 
we become miracles. maybe i'll wear 
stigmata & you can cry milk. we'll attract
all kinds of people. the believers & the curious
& the atheists. we'll make a carnival out of it.
neon halo. a lemonade stand. 
somewhere on the side of the highway that
makes a belt across the state. 
maybe we can take over that old building
that used to house the model train showcase. 
glow beneath a jesus billboard that asks,
"are you ready for him?" 
i'll dress in white & you can dress in black. 
we'll make big beautiful promises 
that never go anywhere. then, in the dark,
we can kiss each other like only trans people can.
we'll sell deep-fried communion wafers 
& offer them with powdered sugar.
tell everyone to lick their fingers clean. 
once, when i was an altar girl 
i dropped a consecrated host. i felt so bad about it.
i still believed that little piece of bread
was god. i actually still think it is but 
in a different way now. in the sense that there
is no god so we have to be him. 
we can get a few good years out of being
roadside holy. maybe make enough money
to buy a farm. i tell you all the time
about how badly i want a cow. we'll settle down
but still travelers will come to us.
they'll say, "i saw you years ago. you prayed
over us & we ate deep fried communion wafers." 
we'll make them again in a stove pot. 
i'll bring out my stigmata. you, a glass
of milk wept fresh for our visitors. 

re/growth

i was convinced my hair wouldn't grow back.
it is autumn now & still there are flowers 
who find reasons to open their eyes. i have been
warming up to the color yellow. 
when i shaved it all off, i remember collecting
the strands from the red tile bathroom floor.
i thought, "what have i done?" people like to say
"it will grow back" but what if there is not time?
the staircases & the windows. touch & evaporation. 
hair is not a limb but a place. when it is gone
that is like severing a house. i am great at leaving
& horrible at letting go. i prefer to still talk
to exes even though i hardly do. when it first started
to grow back i wanted every day to shave again.
to press the clippers to my scalp & say,
"i do not want to remember all the world
we can hold." to be bald meant to be untethered.
unmarked & unowned. my hair craves a place
to wash. a well to worship. my lover to learn 
exactly how i curl. so, i let it. i can almost pull my hair
into a ponytail. i tell myself that this time
next year the house might have
new windows. we might have a car that works.
my hair might almost be where it was
down my back. eager to be braided & pulled. 
on the hillside there are wayward crocuses. purple 
& meant for spring. i go to tell them the terrible news.
that soon winter will be here & that they 
are lost. they laugh at me. they say, "there is 
not point in arriving if we are never gone." 
i love my hair most when it is wet. when i sit
in the shower like i used to as child. pretend i am in
a lush rainforest. the bugs whine & gossip. 
the birds eat neat holes in the night sky. 
my hair grows slow but steady by
the moon's yellow light. 

twist tie 

we save the twist ties from
the bread to make a ladder to the moon.
they say the moon is made of cheese
but i know it to be a melon. honeydew. 
there's sweet flesh inside that, when you decompose,
a horse comes to feed you. i do not know
how to process the world falling apart. 
i have begun to question though if it was
ever together in the first place. there are
holes dug in the earth where children have dug
for weddings. as a child once i was a ring bearer 
or was i a flower girl? history is hard to make sense of
because what persists is not the facts but 
the emotions. i think when i was a child
that someone put me on a butcher table
& marked my body like a cow. the dotted lines 
like skipped stones in a valley of teeth. 
i saw a meme today that said,
"when i hear people say fall, i don't think
of autumn anymore." there used to be a fountain
where i played as a child. we went barefoot
& once a high school boyfriend spelled
"i love you" with the rocks. there are not
enough opportunities to be sickly sweet.
there are too many runaway trains. 
i catch one. i have nothing but a bag full of
twist ties. i have a dream of making
a house from them. weaving the plastic & metal
into something breathing & holy. 
a monster maybe. a creature with a hunger
as sharp as mine. i would sleep inside the beast.
let its lungs press against me. 
until then. i collect the ties in a little drawer.
measure our days in loaves of bread. 
the bread knife with teeth like an alligator gar,
takes me home. tells me to stop coveting the moon. 
we are not gone yet. 

elephant keeper

i have the sense that terrible news
happened last night but if i don't look at it
then i can just tend my elephant in peace.
no one knows i am an elephant keeper.
i assume i am not alone. someone of us 
are born with something gigantic 
that follows us asking to be fed. i named
the elephant when i was little but the name
no longer suites him so i just call him,
"elephant." sometimes, when i am feeling
particularly lonely, i will call him,
"sister." i have a suspicion that my brothers
have elephant too. i am getting to the age where
i am worrying about what will happen
when my parents die & the house is still there
full of all their skin. i saw my father's elephant once.
he keeps it in the garage. he sings to it. 
he used to sing to me. i was convinced he was 
john lennon when i was very small. thank goodness
he is not that would be upsetting. i have not
had the courage to ask my father, "will you sing
nowhere man to me?" but i crave it every night.
the news breaks a window. there is a lost elephant
weeping on the roof. maybe it is my partners.
in the end i am selfish about my creature. 
during college when i kept almost jumping
off the top of the building, i promised the elephant
i would deliver him to a zoo nearby. the lie stretched
until we talked about it but neither of us believed it. 
sometimes a fantasy is just a tool to keep going.
we could just never open the internet again. i could
for the first time ride the elephant. flaunt him 
& his massiveness. tell him to scream at the september sun. 
i hide him behind the oldest sycamore tree in our yard. i bring
him a loaf of banana bread & we eat together. 
do secrets keep us human or keep us from it?
i wish i could trade places with him. be the hidden
monster instead of the singing one. 

tick feast

let's get carried away. i drive into
the pennsylvania sticks & there are
five billboards begging for blood. 
i do not have much blood & so i keep going
until a sixth sign gets me. it says,
"without you we will have to 
become pizza shops." i too have had
to open my face up for drunk midnight boys. 
i give the blood. the ticks come in their
traffic uniforms. the forest is full
of ways to be eaten & ways to eat. 
mouths inside mouths. my tongue is
a jump rope in a song about leaving.
once i came home to find myself & my dogs
covered with ticks. i spent the next hour
on my knees, harvest them from our bodies.
some had feasted, were round like 
horror blackberries. the bite marks made
constellations on our bodies. big dipper 
little dipper. big bear. little bear. there is
a tick version of myself who only has to worried
about finding someone to eat. the moon
has a bite mark. i worry about lyme disease 
& that new illness that makes it so 
you cannot eat red meat. i have only 
seen headlines & there is too much information.
i do not want to know more. give me
all the hearsay. i am so tired that i barely
want the truth anymore. i want speculation. 
i heard there's another rapture date
coming up this week. of course it will pass
with so rapture but the last time
i remember people waiting i was in high school
& my friends & i were sitting in a park
pavilion eating peach rings & covered
with ticks. i used to try to live with 
as little blood as possible back then. in some ways
i still do. we do not grow up. we grow in. 
we hold our little bucket of river. 
the last tick i removed that day i lingered on.
watched him for a few moments while
he drank before removing him. a creek of blood
trickling down my calf. the deer came to drink.  

hot water

in the big-window apartment
we held seances for hot water.
once, in the middle of the plum
we bit down on the pit. you were bare.
i was reaching. i spoke into the faucet
like a telephone receiver. the landline 
in my parents' house was a portal.
i cradled the phone book & tried to find
my friends from school. sometimes though
i would just read names & houses.
numbers spilling from a hole in the wall. 
the apartment was awful but also home. 
our upstairs neighbors wept & fought often.
always worse when the hot water wasn't working.
sometimes i'd run the shower for thirty minutes
hoping that breath would come only to
give in to the cold shower. my bones 
wind-chiming in the rain. the ceiling 
in the bathroom leaked wildly. the building
clamored & shook. my childhood home 
rattled too only for different reasons. like,
it wanted another dog or there was no one
on the phone even though my grandmother
was talking. i have housed & been a house. 
we were not a family who took our shoes off
at the door. i thought it was strange to do so.
i loved to be an outdoor human. windows
& doors open. the hot water had to be summoned
there too. hands placed on the walls. 
a soft prayer. offerings of sunflower seeds 
& orphaned socks. the last week in that apartment
i dreamed of living in the shower. becoming
a fish. my roommates would have to buy a bowl
& cradle me into the bruise. i told them this
& they forbid me of it. i should not have told them
of my lush & selfish plans. i could be a beautiful
beta fish man right now. once during 
a cold shower i heard the neighbor above me
humming. or was it a ghost? i had been furious
at her for her late-night music & thunder feet. 
in that moment though we stood rain bound 
together. i found myself hoping her water
was hot & glorious. 

water mark

i realized i have a watermark 
on my face. in every picture i show up
as a gender instead of an organism.
today someone called me a "beautiful lady"
which felt like a shawl draped over
my shoulders in the middle of august. 
i am always too hot & always too cold.
i drive my partner mad when i switch
the car ac on & off as we drive to 
a red pin pushed into the dirt. if i could
i would sleep for a whole year. no no 
not a coma i mean like really sleep. 
get so deep in a dream that it becomes
a video game. when we first started  dating
we wanted to do everything together.
i bought a video game consol we never used
with money we didn't have. when i was younger
i would try to scrub the watermark off.
i bought bleach & steel wool. my partner admits 
he once used sandpaper on his skin. 
a tiktok i saw recently showed lizard owners
helping lizards get out of their dead skin.
i thought, "i hope that's what the lizard wants."
if i shed my skin like that i would
probably keep it & hang it up in the closet.
i do experiments to see how & when 
the face recognition ghosts can see or not see me
in my little phone. the watermark is not my fault
or is it? i guess it's possible it's not there at all.
no one talks about it. maybe it's just not polite. 

sorry i got distracted looking on my phone. i have
no attention span anymore. did you know
that the word "tragedy" comes from two words
meaning "goats" & "singing"? dear god
so much is lost in translation. what if i never
get to have a really good cry again? what if 
the technology gets so good that the watermark
is thought of as beautiful? & to think i was once
a water creature. i could have stayed damn it
& maybe floated along in the climate soup. 
instead i have all the mirror-staring & a bag
full of videos tapes i made of myself when i was
a child. pictures of the early 2000s are starting
to look sepia tone & old. back in the day we 
had our tragedies out in the cornfield 
instead of on our faces. the trees & balling up
their fists with the last fruits of the year.
i am never a woman but sometimes i am in 
someone else's mouth. i have come to love
the irony of being always in drag. the intention
lost in whatever hungry i wake up with.
i want to be beautiful. i want to be gaudy
& goth & somehow still knowable.  

confessions of a bad drummer

i start a rock band inside the telephone.
call a girl with half my name.
we sit in the graveyard without heads.
the man with the hook for a hand gazes
longingly at our teeth. i buy a mannequin 
& pretend she is my prom date. my real 
prom date smells like grease & shoes.
i am lying, he doesn't show up. he is 
where my head is. a close lamp. tongue pulled
for the brief light. we keep the drums in 
the attic. i go up there to pretend to be
cool. i don't know how to drum & every time
my dad tries to show me how, they demolish
another old house that's falling apart. 
i accept that the town cannot handle
more of my hands. i explain to a friend
that until last year i moved at least once
a year since i was eighteen. room after room.
each space like a rosary bead. holy thumb
over a smooth surface. i have been trying 
to name the decades of my life. the horrible
mysteries. the lustful mysteries. 
the wandering mysteries. i catch a drumstick
at a show i did not actually attend.
i carry it around like a spare rib. smash the stick
against the cymbal moon. build a blanket fort
from microphone stands & sheets.  sleep there
until i'm old enough to run away for more
than just a few hours. instead of practicing 
i put my energy into daydreams. i get on
a tour bus. i play sold-out shows without
any music. my neighbor above me has
a drumset made of children. mine is made now
of book & a tape recording of my father
singing to practice for a mass he will not attend.
i cannot be trusted to keep a beat. instead,
i am the butter house with a skylight. 
when given the chance, i always let the stars in. 

the eagle beak & other myths 

i am a connoisseur of misinformations. 
inside each is a truth. this week my favorite
is the eagle beak myth which is the idea
that in their old age eagles fly to the top
of the mountain & scrape their beaks & talons off
to grow new ones. don't we all want to know
that rebirth is just one wound away?
in facebook swamps, people post low-quality 
images of eagles with a caption about their 
false journeys & their beakless faces. the beak
is not a separate part though. it is, like a jaw
sewn into the eagle's face. this is a myth
about immortality. the comments are full
of believers. they praise the eagle. they say,
"nature knows all" & "god is great."
i saw an eagle only twice in my life.
once, i was a girl & he was lost. he was
truly beakless. his feathers were ragged & he sat
on a log in the middle of the forest near my house. 
i could tell he was old or maybe sick. i wondered where
eagles go to die. did they have burials or did they
plummet from the sky? i tried to bring people there 
to help him. was it my father? my uncle?
when we returned, the creature was gone.
i wonder why the believers invented this story about
the eagle when there is already so much to learn
from them. their eyes, like visiting suns. 
the second time was on a mountain. wind cut
across the ridges. the bird was far away,
gliding perfectly. proud beaked & huge.
you cannot skip death. rebirth is a cut seam 
in the teeth of the moon. all the water pouring out
like a pitcher mouth. the feathers, falling 
as postcards. what if we will never be new again? 
the second eagle told me,
"even if i could, i would not let go of my beak."