several kinds of downpour

the first kind is obvious. the rain comes
like spilled teeth. we go outside 
& soak ourselves until our water is blood
& blood is water. the next is less common
but has still followed me. the ceiling
like a mouth of moths. all the wings
beating against our faces. i am not someone
who can do anything halfway. it is always
a deluge. the flooding alleyway 
we swam through to be lovers again.
i call you & it is midnight. we are both
underwater. we are in the city again 
& no one else is alive. we walk the phantom streets.
sirens spill across the clouds, another form
of downpour. there are not enough 
wheels to carry the kind of grief 
of leaving too soon. i never reach precipices,
instead the downpour is the place where
the bodies can no longer carry all the peaches.
i learned everything i know from the first kind.
from clouds telling everyone, "soon"
& everyone rushing as if they might
outrun the arrival. i once walked around
with a shower cap on during the day.
i was preparing for the finger snow.
the great eyelashes of angels. you sometimes  
come to my backdoor & tap on the screen.
i do not want to turn you away
but i have a secret room full of buckets.
they fill with water & i empty them.
i am always just a breath away. i wonder 
what it is like to live as an easier person.
head filled with turtles instead of cicadas. 
i take my exoskeleton to the car wash.
put the quarters in the machine 
& watch it pour. when i see you next
should i pretend not to know you 
or should i tell everyone stories of what
we used to tell each other when the moon
was ready to gush? when the streets filled 
with ivory & birds? 

how to breathe

there were years where
i hid having only gills.
i didn't want anyone
to see me gasping
in a jar of water.
i think it started in middle school.
the water there tasted
like aluminum foil
& the color green. i never have been
a great swimmer. my gills though,
i loved them so much.
frills pleated into 
my face. i took pictures
of them that only i would
ever see. sometimes our bodies
know exactly what we need.
a dress without the world
attached. wind & leaves tripping
like eyelashes. i do not think
anyone every caught me.
though once, i was in the bathroom
& someone came in
to do the same. she plunged her head
beneath the faucet. gasped loud
& urgently. the kind of hunger
of someone who has not breathed
all day. i wanted to tell her,
"i feel that too." instead. i pulled away.
held my breath a little longer
& waited for her to be done.
she was so hungry
she didn't notice me.
eventually, i became an amphibian
like all people 
with a semi-functioning gender.
still, my lungs have always felt
like mismatched socks. 
i walk around & see a world
underwater. i wonder who
i would be there. clouds of fish.
eel ribbons. my mouth, a tear between
the sun & the deep. 

hypochondria 

come & let's catalog all our soft parts.
i put a needle 
through my ear drum & hear
gulls. 
the word "hypochondria"
comes from an ancient greek word
meaning "between the ribs 
& navel." here is where all my worms go.
they believed this was where
sadness lived. there is so much wisdom
in all the old science. 
i have felt my sorrow there
like a water wheel.
this is all to say
sometimes i make lists
of all the ways i am dying.
it doesn't help that
i am sick it so many 
bright & gleaming ways.
pills, like little eyes in their bottles.
the doctor measuring my skull
& saying, "there is a spider
big enough to crawl
in your mouth when you sleep."
i go to webmd when i want
to feel the full panic. 
cancer & lung collapse 
& sepsis. i imagine somewhere
there is a little angel man who
has to write all these entries.
sometimes he pauses
at the completion 
of an article.
he considers adding
a short poem before 
reminding himself
that science is not supposed
to sing. i trace my melancholy. 
count my ribs. i am missing one
& it is off being something else.
maybe a spoon or maybe
a bookmark. i look
in every encylopedia for an ailment
to explain this
but there is none.

garage 

my father jokes about running a power line
out to the garage so he can live there.
i remember once
during a thunderstorm
we sat on overturned paint buckets
& watched it pour
from an open bay.
washing the driveway clean.
i have walked inside there
& found shrines to invented gods. 
the walls are covered with
old paintings & wooden idols.
my father is a maker. a maker of 
holes & a maker of hinges &
a maker of sawdust. 
i used to want to be just like him.
he fills bags of wood shavings 
to give to us to line the chicken coop. 
maybe i still do want
to be like him. in the yard i build
a garage from leaves 
& feathers. every time
the wind comes strong it
blows the doors away. 
i find i have less & less places
to hide. i envy my father
& all his garages. pulling the door shut.
the callouses on his fingers. 
what is it like to live
inside your own fist?
my father is rarely delighted.
i guess so am i. sometimes when it rains
i wonder if he is there
still sitting & watching it. i don't
watch the rain. not anymore.
my garages fill with bones.
burst. rebel. i throw a tarp over
the firewood in the yard. 
use a shovel to turn the chicken's bedding.
look out in the yard at all
the places my garages 
could bloom. run a power line
out to each of them. watch them glow.

gift shop

when it rained in chincoteague 
we would always walk in town
& decide how we wanted to remember
escaping our pennsylvania ourselves. 
on vacation, we were opalescent. 
rainbows of our flesh glinting
from the light of the peach ring sun
even as it shone behind grey clouds.
when i was younger,
i lied & told everyone in school
that we had a house in chincoteague.
i think a part of that was true.
i had built a little house
by the water 
between my ribs. lowered
a crab box into the channel. 
i was a girl or i was almost a girl
or i was not a girl at all.
saltwater taffy. toy horses.
a wrack of polka dot headbands.
my favorite shops
were the dust-veiled ones
where a man behind the counter
talked to birds that were not there.
in one we found a sting ray necklace. in
another we played mancala
& held up kites
as if we knew how to fly them.
we only ever got one or two trinkets.
they never felt like enough.
how do you take a whole 
imagined life back with you to the house
of grapes & dirt?
there is nothing hungrier than a gift shop. 
desperate. a forced smile
inside a disposable camera. 
we roamed the aisles. shook snow globes.
saw our reflections in the wide windows.
all the ways you can say,
"do not take me home." 
we waited for the sun to emerge
dazzling & wearing everything i wanted
but could not keep. 


 

b theory of time

get me out of the dirt
i want to shake 
a tree for chestnuts. 
all my boyfriends 
are beautiful & on fire. 
we run without bones
back into the soup.
come & feast my wings.
boil the first frog with me
& walk our fathers
back into the frost
so they can eat.
sometimes i go present-ing myself
too much & i forget
that we are sitting
in a preschool without windows.
that you are not my god
but my tongue. my river
into the ancient crack in the earth.
i always thought i would
one day arrive without
any texture, instead
here i am as smooth
as velvet & kicking the knees
of a chronological wedding.
instead, the future of
our sighs is thick & earnest.
a shawl around us. 
we are resting. we sleeping.
we are wrestling an angel
until it sings. dear god
we are worms &
kidney beans & pleasure.
a pile of shoes. a shoe of hair.
you watch me buy
a boat & we sail it into
the orange after before life.
not a room of quilts 
but the threads, shoulder
to shoulder & sometimes 
whispering into
each other's ears. in the darkness,
we get to speak without unison.
i choose to say, "keep me." 

@ once 

i start with the smallest knife we have.
a knick between my big toe &
the rest. Like peeling a butterfly.
i need to be in a radio. i need to be
grocery shopping for teeth.
i need to be sitting with you
with a mouthful of bubblegum. 
pink as the sun funeral wishes it was.
dear god it is coming apart. 
then the crowbar. then the ice pick.
i am saying there is 
never enough of me. so make more.
as if that were part of the laws
of blood & air. i ring a bell
to summon every pill i know.
give me the silhouette treatment.
put me in a cautionary tale. call me
fox or call me grapes. the river
comes through the yard 
full of trash. we shift in it 
looking for a video game. if only 
you have a room for the soft me.
the only good part about fracturing is
someone gets to be the nothing girl.
head full of tinsel. maybe we can all
crawl back to her where she's laying 
on the couch with her mouth open.
i don't want to be
hollow chocolate. i want to be
the park bench. electric sinew.
i don't know what the others
are urgent for but i am
in need of a locked door.
of a pillow case full of birds.
"let me out!" by which i mean
hold me together. the needle
& thread in the medicine cabinet.
it's harder
each time. don't tell me
i should try. i am done trying.
now, i just wait & see what happens.
someone will remember
how to breathe. someone will remember
that we have to open
the telephone. the rest, well,
who knows about the rest.

dear department store

my girlhood comes plastic & sweet.
the mirrors get taller the longer
i eat them. outside my mother is
feeding me pants 
in larger & larger sizes. 
i show her & she says,
"almost. almost."
we are disciples of "almost." 
almost enough time. almost enough
money to buy a gender. 
over the loudspeaker everyone is god.
everyone is a pile of trying.
we never used to try to be beautiful
& i hated it. my eyes experiencing mitosis.
more & more places to try & look.
my skin, a carnival of fear.
in the dressing room i become
less & less sure of what a body
is supposed to be. i imagine
wearing trash bags. 
i picture myself in nothing
but a pillowcase. feathers 
in my mouth. feathers
in the trashcan. we are shopping
for a little self to put me in 
to go to school this year. 
i do not want to be older
& at the same time i want to be
the oldest person alive.
let me drive an ice cream truck. let me
choose a new name. 
a new body. it doesn't work like that.
there are items to purchase.
tags to clip off. a mirror to finish eating.
the taste of sugar & iron. 
my mom's gentle knock
on the door as she would ask
"are you done?"
i always appreciated
the knowing in her voice.
the way sometimes we tell 
one another we are sorry
with just a soft voice. 

elvis lamp 

i don't remember much from 
the house on frankline street.
the taste of spearmint
in the yard. a mouthful 
of birds. packing up 
all the teeth. a lock of my hair
in my mom's sock drawer.
walking through the emptied house
& thinking, "of all the ghosts
who would wonder 
where we went."
in the attic we left the elvis lamp. 
just his bust. face turned
to the side. i loved elvis 
in the uncomplicated way
that children love sound.
he sang one last time 
just to me. i don't know
if this is a memory
or a haunting or a tall tale.
his porcelain mouth. 
i didn't want to leave the house
or the yard where i planted
my first teeth. i worried about
memories & what they would do there
without me. would they grow wild
as the spearmint bush?
deadly as the crack in the bricks
snaking up the side
of the house? i don't remember
a moving truck or even
a packed box. i woke up one day
& the elvis lamp was not singing.
i was laying on the speckled carpet
of a new house in a new town.
at night, squirrels asked me questions
through the wallpaper.
they said, "where did you leave?
where will you go?"
i fed them sunflower seeds.
i sang "suspicious minds" without any idea
what it meant. sometimes we drove past
the house. a light on
in the attic. the spearmint, still growing,
reaching on to the sidewalk.
i was terrified that maybe
the new family had peeled
the wallpaper from its bones.
that maybe they did not know
how to talk to the space beneath the stairs
like i did. i learned to 
collect homes like songs. this was
just the first departure. 

countdown

count me to zero o rocketship.
take my portrait in a burst of skin.
the first year of the pandemic
i took so many images of myself.
i would carve rooms into the walls of the apartment
with my lonely paring knife.
a dying room & a television room
& a room for all the "what-ifs." what if 
you & i were still the versions of ourselves
before all of this? what if we never reached zero
& instead held our breath & turned into 
cue balls? i have been smacked 
with the broom. i have been led out
like a meat cow into a quick machine. 
there is never enough time to pose.
the timer on the phone says,
"i am your lover now." i played
with light. the lamps crowding to get
a piece of my face. the apartment had
only three windows & all of them gorged themselves 
on the shadows of the mountain. 
still once in a while the rooms could glow.
paint my skin alive. i didn't like
to smile. a mouth wound. 
i would wake sometimes to find it
scabbed over. the week i spent
without speaking aloud to another human.
i told the dogs, "when this is over
i am going to be a drag queen." 
they did not crush my dreams. i painted
my face only late at night.
walked around in clown skin. the ceiling
full of altars. there is never enough time
to make your face what you want it to be
in the seconds before capture
but that did not stop me from trying. 
"please," i would beg.
"give me something to look at 
when i don't think i am real." 
if anything, this was a gathering 
of evidence to the contrary.