the holy grail

my father is the keeper
of the holy grail. he does not know it
but it follows him like
a toppled tower. i have seen it buzzing
above his head & sometimes he will
be drinking from it on his fifth beer
on a weary summer night. i am assuming
this will mean i might inherit it.
i am not sure if biblical fury will recognize me
as a first-born son or not. the older i get
the more i worry about prophecies. 
about which unfulfilled ones will end up
on my head. i consider whose houses 
i will have to clean out & what ghosts
will watch me do it. the thing about
the holy grail is that there has never
just been one of them. early on, the little vessel 
started to bud & branch. i have, on occasion, 
seen another person with the same affliction.
one of my father's friends, the one with
the blue chicken coop, he had two grails
one in each hand. he didn't see either of them. 
none of us go to church anymore which has
improved our lives greatly. my father used to
sing in the choir. he had the voice of
a thumb on the rim of an ancient glass.
angels peered in the windows of the church
because they were nosy, not because
my father sang well. if i get the grail 
i hope i will be able to see it. that is the problem
with prophecies, they happen to us. 
i will fill my grail with dry cereal 
& i'll eat it in the dark. i will run my thumb
along the rim & hear my father singing
ave maria, a song i am not sure if he believes
or not. the cup filling with sound.
our teeth like bells in our skulls. once, 
as a child, i tried to tell him i could see it.
i said, "why do you keep that cup?" my father,
half-drunk in the lamp light, asked,
"what cup?" the grail was huge that night.

tree tapping 

i drink all the flowers out 
from a hole in your neck.
when you became a pilot
i had you fly me to the sun
day after day. i miss the street
where the census taker came
to ask our names. he was a short man
with an onion smell. he held
his pencil up to count the houses.
in the hours after you worried
that you shouldn't have told him
you were a girl. gender is a footprint
in the mouth of a wild timeline. 
i bought a kit to try & tap the trees.
i wanted syrup. i wanted to have
my teeth ringing with sugar.
nothing ever came out. i ran my finger
around the rim. it seemed sticky but
it might have just been the lingering
humidity of the kneeling year. you parked
the plane on the roof. i begged you
to stay & let me fill my mouth
with peonies & roses. a single knife
sleeping in the drawer. the trees holding on
to their blood. i guess i had not
earned it. did not listen to what 
the maple wanted & craved. instead, i thought
only of taking. of the relief it would be
to see amber pouring from a spigot. 
when i turned the radio on i heard you.
your voice was made of fiberglass 
& a baseball bat. i am sick of people
mulling over what is & isn't love. 
sometimes love is hungry & selfish. 
i woke up once with a tree tap
in my side. so much sugar came out. i closed
my eyes & let it happen. woke up feeling
like a lone cloud in a stone soup sky.
the plane was gone. the trails through
cut the morning blue. a rippled scar. 

ancestor soup

i mostly avoid my ancestors
when i run into them in the dark.
but sometimes, in a pot of broth
i'll see a walking stick & take it. 
my grandfather would braid his hair
& his beard. lean his legs against
the wall. we are shrinking people.
memory is not so much a state
but an act of invention. what were we?
the resewing of a gone blanket. 
i keep keys in my pockets so that
if they ask for a gift i have something
to keep them busy. i have never seen
a picture of any of my great grandfathers.
it is possible one does not exist. 
we are not sentimental people but we are
collectors which is just another word
for hoarders. if i were to try to summon them
i think i would go into my parents' attic
where there are pocket watches & 
rings & hair pins & beads & skulls & letters. 
gather a good bunch of them up 
& put them in a round-gutted pot. 
bring it to a boil. the smell of metal 
& mildew & leather. they would come
& try their keys in my mouth, each tooth
a door into a buried life. i have blood 
like syrup. i never heard my grandfather laugh
but i think it was sticky & wild. serve them
the bowls of soup. our mismatched spoons.
an emptied sky. all the stars down to visit. 
the mule deer & the elk & the spiders.
we feast & the ladle never comes up empty. 

live stream jesus 

i don't tell anyone but i watch him
each night. my palm, a theater.
live stream jesus has a face
just like my father. sometimes he walks
on water for galaxies & coins. other nights
he rests his head in his hands & talks
about carpentry. the way wood splinters 
& nails join the walls of a future confessional.
some of the comments are mean. they call him
a wannabe & lots of words i don't want
to repeat. others are fair. they tell him 
he should do more if he is the son
of god. one night he is distraught. 
he turns his wine into water. he begs 
us on the other side, "tell me where
we are?" and "i do not even remember
what i said." i once listened to the bible.
it was strange. not a religious experience
but a funhouse one. the book reads to me
as a thrust toward an end. the last pages
like the unhemmed edges of a great skirt.
live stream jesus isn't even a top streamer.
his followers are mostly transient. some of them
haven't been to church in years 
& just want to remember why they stopped.
there are of course the worshippers 
who spam the comments with praying hands
& cross emojis. i picture them weeping 
in their sliver of the dark. i am sometimes
envious. what would it be like to trust a god?
others, like me, watch him like a mirror.
in church i was told that we were made
in god's image but i know 
from watching live stream jesus
that the reverse is true. instead he was made from
our image. a hunger for a less cosmic husbandry.
my father on his knees joining 
planks of wood. the wood of crosses & trees.
i one of only a few who almost always
lingers until the stream ends
in the purple dark where one day twists
towards the next. 

bodyguard

i don't need a bodyguard but one
arrives anyway. he was a tree in a previous life.
he stands outside the door whittling branches 
into vampire stakes. i don't know what
is wrong with me but the worse things get
the less i am afraid. my life used to be a watercolor
& now it's a pastel. easily smudged. the oil
on my fingers. sometimes i feed my bodyguard
a steak. i used to think only rich people
had bodyguards but sometimes one will choose you.
mine is not armed & i'm not sure
how much of a difference that makes. 
i read obama's memoir because it was free 
from the library & sometimes i want to know
what powerful people are thinking. we all write
myths about ourselves, some of them just grow bigger
than others. he talked about the secret service & how
they follow the president with quarts of his blood type
in case he were to need it. i think of how many people
die needing blood. how my bodyguard never speaks 
to me, instead, he mumbles into a cellphone.
it's a flip phone. he's calling his mother.
she lives in another dimension. one without war.
i do not know what brought him here. i do not
even know if he likes me. i guess that is like
asking a gun if it likes the bullets in its throat. 
there is a gun shop up the street from my house.
on their billboards they show sexy ladies 
toting ar-15s. i tell the bodyguard this & he shrugs 
as if to say, "isn't there always a gun shop 
up the street?" i like to imagine the inside. 
maybe there really is a sexy lady there, cradling
a gun like a little god. i ask my bodyguard 
if he would like to come in for the night. it is 
getting cold & autumn will be here soon. 
he refuses. stares the moon in its eyes. remains
as still as a stone. his faint shadow on the porch steps. 

street sweeper

i park my car in a cloud & it still manages
to get a ticket. i'm afraid of how 
they tell stories without us. the phrase
"voiceless" is a speech act. it does not admit
that the voice was taken & put through
a paper shredder. the shreds used as bedding. 
i have been a pig in another life.
i wrote poetry & shared it with the others.
we plotted ways to take over the government
but then we died. they sensor death
on the internet these days. people say,
"unalive" as if death were an erasing instead
of a return. i was sitting & eating lucky charms 
last night & thinking about how one day
all the buzzing in my head will be nothing.
i don't know how to make sense of death other than
to watch the street sweeper go by & panic,
wondering if i remembered to move my car.
if this life were a quilt, it would be complete
with crisscrossing squares & a big tear 
through the middle. i tell my partner for
the third time this year that i am going to
dig out the sewing machine & get started.
i'm going to make a dress & sleep inside it.
everyone is always "just doing their job"
as if we don't all wake up & sleep longer 
than we're supposed to & steal moments 
in bathroom stalls craving rest. the street sweeper
puts on a dirty ball cap & sunglasses.
decides to clean the asphalt. the leaves are falling.
the road is clean. my car has a boot on it.
a parking meter blooms where there didn't
used to be one. i don't ever want to just do
me job. i want to wake up & scream with
the cicadas until we are both speaking
the same language. when i die i will only
be gone for seventeen years, just like them. 

love a pocket universe 

i will never fear smallness. instead,
i will put on my oldest shoes & try to walk
to the seam. i think if there wasn't
a big capitalism that scientists would be poets
& so would school bus drivers &
cake decorators & people whose hands
grow callouses where they hold the machine. 
i am in favor of all theories that involve cloth.
the pocket universe is a belief that we are,
with all our pinballs & all our sunspots,
just a vessel for lint & coins in the great 
pants of the everything. autumn is coming
& soon my skin will turn pale from the dark.
in the cold, i become a moon. astronauts crowd
my face with their worries. often when
i am doing laundry, i will find seeds that i 
collected from the ground. i am, for all intents
& purposes, just a crow without feathers.
i think the animals know more about
the other universes than us. a bear tells a story
by the light of the stars that once his great-grandfather
walked all the way out of the pocket. was swallowed
by a comet & never came home. the point
of his departure, marked by the constellation.
ursa major. his youngest son 
followed not long after. ursa minor.
do you think dreams are contained in one pocket
or do they bleed? is our strangeness the other worlds
trying to meet us? them, in a nightmare, 
of a convenience store with the neon 
sky whining. i repeat i am not scared of smallness.
in fact, on most days it is my only comfort.
that my mouth can fit inside yours. that
when the great hand decides to reach 
& sift for us, that we will be smooth & round.
easily missed in the field. the bears crawl into 
their caves. a pocket in a pocket in a pocket. 
the first frost on the tip of the year's tongue. 

can you eat crocuses? 

cany you eat crocuses? 
by which i mean can you be 
too early to the party? i come days
early. before there is even a door
to be opened. i joke with a stump
that i'm sitting on that i am either
way way late or way way early
no in between. such is the way
of bodies unstuck in time. in more 
ways than one i am the between agent.
the poison gender. when i'm feeling 
destructive i like to imagine the taste
of poisons. the crocus i think
would taste like rain when unripe
& when ripe, just like glass syrup.
once i took my family to a garden
in my head. i showed them a slideshow
of all the times i had almost crashed 
a car. then we were on a hill picking crocuses.
my beard, lush for the first time.
i put flowers in it & my family took
a rocket ship to an appliance store.
they craved a fresh refrigerator box
to pretend to live in. i did not see
any crocuses this year. the older i get
the more often i am late. not just 
by a few minutes but years late.
seasons late. it is autumn & i am still 
looking for signs of spring. my face 
eat every mirror it lands in like
a hungry goose. i put a crocus 
on my tongue. savor it. hold it
like a sword swallower holds a blade.
i do not spit i out. i do not swallow. 
instead, it takes root. turns a deep 
velvet purple. if you come close
i will show it to you but you have
to promise not to tell anyone.  

for who the flowers bifurcate 

i can grow as many heads as i need.
some of them are ugly & others
are as beautiful as they need to be.
a man walking down the street
takes my picture & eats it. he is 
the owner of a newsletter that goes out
to the stones. i crouch in the late-season flowers:
the mums & the golden rod who are
experts at farewells. they show me their necks.
each, a choice of where & how to breathe
despite the cold nights & despite the smell
of grass screaming. we got new neighbors 
this summer. i hide from them. i pretend 
i do not live here which is mostly accurate.
i buy a rose bush with long long legs. i pull
the curtains shut when i have to
sprout a face. i buy grass seed & eat it.
it tastes like fatherhood. 
you can get so good at it. there is nothing left 
beneath the fork. the string cheesing
of the road where it divides & becomes
not one but two ways to get lost.
i sent a letter to the neighbors. inside is
a morsel of seeds. i am wondering if they do
the same. wrap themselves in the curtains.
keep a drawer full of all the faces the highway
asks of them. in a small town, i am 
a snow globe. in a big city, i am a lava lamp. 
at home i am a "no vacancy" sign on top
of a vacant motel. i pick the golden rod
& make a tea. it helps soothe my crossroads spirit.
in the dark, all the lights look like eyes. 
my house & my neighbor's house get into
a staring contest until one of us gives in.
it is always me. in the dark 
the flowers all look like tires. i rode home
from a purple door on the back of a motorcycle.
he didn't know my body but he know
my neck. where i split. the leather was fresh.
the moon did not show her face at all. 

what is left

i almost named myself "remnant"
because i know myself best as the leftovers
of several kinds of fire. 
here is the gender footprints. the musk
of the huckleberries a week after all the birds
have feasted. a fossil of a complete human.
one with all the tongues & all the flesh. 
ladders unfurled from windows. 
the buildings we have escaped after
they turned bright & blazing. our shadows 
painted forever on the sidewalk.
in the apocalypse, i want to be a collector.
the one who says, "let's hang on 
to this pamphlet from the museum 
where we were in love for just a few 
more years." i save train tickets. freedom routes
that have long gone belly-up. i don't know anymore
if there is such a thing as whole. instead, maybe,
a chain of remnants. a zoom out to 
our little glass of water. i want to float on my back.
give the comets a place to land. i hope 
they bring snacks. i hope they bring
flowers that i've never seen. i do not always
want to be a bridge but someone has
to be crossed on the way. once the great snow,
now my spit. i have changed before
& i will still change again.