low calorie cook book

i dog eared pages of the little death bible 
& said, "here is all my mouth will answer."
each rib like the lazy teeth of a xylophone. 
i played & played until everything 
was made of glass. trying to turn into a bird
for me meant hollowing every bone
i could find. my own & others. the spoon i used
to cry with. windows open, i feasted on breath.
why do we decide to become wells? here is where
the town goes to wish. a boy asking,
"let it rain toads tonight."
my mother worked with me. we used measuring spoons.
we stood on two separate burners of the oven.
i said, "do i look barbeque to you?" she was on the phone
with a doctor. the doctor was saying, "you have
to eat chicken." my boyfriend camped out
on the roof. said, "i have a wife somewhere." 
i learned that each flavor has the potential
to turn you into a hermit. i licked the ceiling.
taught the moths how to die. locked my door
& savored the sound of corn. she would
put a lid on my bowls of food. i waited
until they were cold. until the night had crab legs.
lit candles to balance on all of our heads.
this was the only way i could eat.
sitting on the floor of my bedroom, telephone
talking about fire & being the best child you can be. 

eyes in the back of my head

i traded a crow for their visions.
one bird eye without any shoes.
behind me is a jump rope garden
where all my little failures go
to have scones. do you ever feel like
even the sky is talking about you?
the clouds make trading cards
of my faces. they say, "look how
angry it was." i don't feel a lot anymore.
sometimes this concerns me. 
i go to a sand box & try digging for
a reaction. some kind of howl.
instead, i find the plastic dinosaur
i buried & lost years ago. he is just
a skeleton. i debate whether or not
to rebury him & i decide to let the hawks
have their way with his confessions.
truly, everyone's tongue is just
a temporary salamander. in the night
mine goes looking for rocks to tell
the truth to. i don't need
a shoe box for my lungs. i need 
a sail boat. i need a man made lake
where all the shorelines are 
rolled-up sleeves. in the back yard 
the neighbors have a meeting about
my paranoia. i show up & they raise
their hands like "i come in peace."
i raise mine too & then we're praising
the pizza box god. there is no where
to runaway in which there won't be
a whole world playing bluegrass 
behind your head. i turn around
& the music stops. using towels 
as curtains. the daylight bleeds
through a lifted skirt. they are saying
if i don't eat soon they are 
going to call in the elephants.
i sew my mouth shut. at first it was
a protest but now i don't remember
what exactly i was protesting. there is
always something worth a hunger strike.
i find a delivery man & he has
a bag of crickets. he says,
"did you order this?" i blink the eye
in the back of my head. 
see the bruise clouds coming & so 
i take the small bounty from him & run. 

sneaking into god's bedroom

we want to try in his clothes.
swallow his jewelry just like we did
with our parents'. there is a mirror here
where all you can see
are your sins. they come in the form
of insects. centipedes & weevils. 
put a blanket over the mirror.
in a drawer we find a gun with a bullet
ready inside. the gun says,
"happy birthday" & we run away from it.
a bedroom is so much like a grave.
here is where you go to be blood nothing. 
where you keep your stories
about the end. how & when you plan 
to take all the wallpaper with you.
i have never seen god. only his bedroom.
only his bottle of pills & his stale glass
of water. when my brother & i
snuck into our parents' room i always
left with something. a lipstick.
a bottlecap. i don't know what 
i was harvesting. their fragments.
proof we were kin. dust beneath
the bed. god has a painting of us
on his wall. the faces look all wrong.
like smudges. like they have been smudged 
from rubbing a thumb across the pigment. 
i have long wondered how many bedrooms
i am carrying. comforters & tissues
blooming like flowers across the ground.
god has a television without a plug. god has
a bible only when you open it
there are no words inside. 
the windows are open but no air
comes in, just the sound of construction.
the street outside is being gutted.
they're probably searching
for plastic babies again. my favorite thing
i ever took from god was
a little eye of the bird yet to be born. 
i found it on the windowsill.
maybe curing. maybe sun-bleaching. 
ran my fingers across the surface 
& promised the never creature,
"i will not take you back here." 

weeds 

i have at least a hundred siblings
if we're counting all the weeds
in my parent's yard. sometimes my father will
go through a phase of trying
to pull us all up. he'll work 
with his bare hands. dandelion boys
& crab grass girls. we spit our eyelashes 
into the dirt. more & more of us.
sometimes i feel sympathetic to him.
we'll go on a car ride & i'll forget 
everything about my body & we will
just be twin rootless cedars.
i want to ask him if he remembers 
the weed killer. if he remembers 
all the times my eyes came as potato bugs.
he thinks he's trying to save us.
the graveyards we have. the times
i have tried to tell him, "this is not
how i want to be loved." what did he think
he was doing in the shower with the curtain
made of butter? who did he think
i was? there was one night 
in a mcdonalds parking lot
where he left us there & we became 
the asphalt breakers. the churches of crows.
now, when i visit i go first to the yard
to talk to the others. i ask, "how many
are we now?" they answer with all
different numbers. i make the promises 
to leave as many of my teeth as i can.
how lonely do you get from you blood?
he sends me a blank letter.
all that is in the envelop is dandelion tufts.
my old hair or else another siblings.
i cannot tell us apart. 

eye of a needle

i do not generally like bible verses 
but i enjoy the ones that 
talk shit about rich people. 
the camels come with gossip
about celebrities. a private jet
they watched turn into a heron. 
gold toilets & gold windows 
& gold tongues. sometimes 
at night i bead by lamp glow.
the eye of the needle seems
like a gone basement door. a place
we could never go. lose your shoulders.
lose your skin. go through with only
your hair. i haven't believed in heaven
for at least a decade but i am sure
there is no gold there. maybe 
flowers. maybe justice. maybe 
a fountain where you can go
& see the versions of yourself 
you have loved most. i feel like
a lunch tray. here are my chicken fingers
& here are my guts. here is the camel
standing & knowing he is a parable.
i feed him a peanut butter 
& jelly sandwich anyway. 
the thread always finds a way through.
selves i drag along like thread.
i think in the fountain i would see
a little boy-girl in a big t-shirt 
talking to a snake. i want to live
with the toads. i want to see 
their coins turn into jupiter beetles 
in their hands. the shadows my fingers
make as i work turn become crows.
they pluck gems from cracks
in the floorboards. fly back 
& forth through every eye they please. 
the camels say,
"you know we all have the potential 
to get that hungry?" 

warehouse

we went to the warehouse to worship 
the keeping. the plastic breaths 
& the aisles of halos waiting to be delivered
to future martyrs. we find there is 
enough for everyone as long as 
you are not wild or hungry. the warehouse
is a dream of capture. of a harvest without harvest.
come & see how to ship out visions
of saints. packing peanuts & clear tape. 
repetition turned into a prayer.
come & let's pretend that there is
no outside. that we are here to live 
in fish bowls with iridescent pebbles.
sometimes we gather in the night
when the missionaries are not watching.
there we trade stories of the woods.
of dirt & sassafras trees. 
sometimes there will be a feral creature 
with fur & eloped eyes.
they are always detained quickly.
sometimes though we catch a fragment 
of their poetry.
once, one said, "you could be angry."
i sat with those words all night. i got up &
walked on all fours through the aisles,
pretending to be a beast.
bit open boxes & destroyed shipping labels.
i knew in the morning they would come
& tell me i was a threat to the process. 
that i was unraveling what has taken
so long to build. i did not care.
i could be angry & i was. 
there are no windows here.
i dream of cutting a peephole 
just so that i can drink one sip
of the cream heavy moon. 

sunday school

it was winter when we walked across
the church yard to watch a man carving mary.
i was in fifth grade & each lesson
was dedicated to learning the parts
of the mass. i don't remember them now.
i slept in chalices & let bells ring 
in my throat. i prayed all the time. obsessively.
my favorite prayer was the hail mary.
she seemed like she might understand
more of what it would be like to feel like
you live outside your body. i was a young queer
in the belly of a catholic church.
kept so much inside myself. there were
cathedrals between my ribs
where i went, harboring relics. a jaw.
a skull. the carver stood on a ladder 
& worked with all kinds of blades.
the garage of the rectory where he labored 
was frigid. i blew hot air on my hands
to warm them. he pointed to her 
& said, "do you know what this is?"
in a quiet voice i answered,
"the assumption." her arms reaching out.
she was being swallowed by heaven. 
angels pulling her skin. her flesh. 
i tried to read her eyes, half-finished.
dull in the wood. did she want to be devoured 
or did she want to die & sleep
in the soil? i thought of my wooden body.
the tree in the yard i climbed. saw 
the faces of saints in the knots. 
delighted, the carver praised me.
other children with their eyes darting 
around the woodshop. months later
the finished piece would be brought
into the church. placed right across
from where my family always sat.
i met her gaze. it was my own.
the look of an in-between creature.
not a plea, but a question,
"where will we go?"

mice

i tell you i don't know why i feel
like an avalanche today. the sky is saying, "i am going
to kill you." grey with a chance
of bricks. with a chance of door knocking.
a former lover in the drive way 
with a bucket of worms.
at the pet shop you ask to look
at the animals before we go. i always want to take
them all home. let them run wild in the house.
destroy my little floor board heaven. 
sometimes when we stand in the court yard
of the art museum we hear 
yelling from the jail a block away.
i always want to know what kind of yelling
it is but the cacophony of car horns
& police faces make it hard to tell. 
of course there is a difference in what
the walls mean. in the cage of mice
we see the flock eating the face of a dead one. 
they swarm him. it feels almost religious.
like "here is how we take the dead."
the shop workers are mortified
when we see it. they ferry the body,
half-gone, away. outside it is still not raining yet
even though the sky looks
like it wants to break so badly. 
i do too. i want to break so badly. run wild.
knock on people's doors & ask them
how many pet stores we are inside.
the snakes & the tortoises. the people
with hands. the people who learn to stand
on the ceiling at night. the skeleton
of the mouse. little wind chime.
what do the other mice say one another
in the wake, now knowing 
any one of them could be next.
is this how we see each other? 
the mice scramble on top of one another.
i want it to rain. i want it to pour 
so that we can get it over with.
the soaking & the sky shriek. instead
it does not storm. even the trees hold
their breath. at home i stand in the bathroom
to count my fingers, making sure
they're all there. 

mechanical insect 

in the night the angels take turns
winding up the false bugs between
the real ones. i am a classic case of capgras.
i know that everyone is always in the process
of trading skin with the soil. you are not
who you say you are & i am running without a face.
once i spoke to a boy on the subway
& i am certain he was an octopus.
a man came by to buy some earrings 
& he was petting a stuffed dog. his baby. 
how do you know what is & isn't a baby?
on facebook the dog shelter posts that they've found
puppies in a dumpster again. they are little 
radios. each of them on a different station.
the last line in the post says, "if you know
the mother, please bring her to us
no questions asked." i have seldom found myself
in a "no questions asked" scenario. 
at the hospital, you can leave your baby 
& they will fill it with strawberries 
until their name turns into a button-mash god. 
i was trying to tell you about the bugs.
i keep a fly swatter by my desk.
the moths are sometimes tiny versions
of my elementary school teachers. they scold me.
worst are those thick flies though. they are
wandering periods searching for
a thought to button-up for winter.
i smash one & find it is a little machine.
just like i am a little machine. the angels come
to collect their handiwork. they say,
"get into the dumpster." i obey because
when an angel speaks you have little choice. 
i lay there & wait to be rescued. to be sung to.
or, at least, for more insects to come 
in their little fairy cloud. each a little camera 
knit by the angels. they tell me
they just watch because they're bored. 

my dad makes batteries that power a death machine 

hundreds a day through his hands. he says the conveyer belt 
is a dream of tongues. of a language none of us
learned to speak. the machine has never drank enough.
in a sense my father is the machine. his fingers 
placing caps & wires. his throat like a water slide
into a pool of pears. sometimes i go into the factory
disguised as a dead bird. the men laugh about 
the life of a hamster wheel. sweat turns to milk.
the miracle of transforming their blood into a charge.
stacks & stacks of batteries. they make batteries 
for the military which is another way of saying
they make batteries for death. for killing. inside each one 
my father touches is a tiny replica of himself.
he is running from an unnamable gone-ness.
the house as a sighing field of grass. there is so much
to lose & so little to keep. the factory tests his blood
for lead. the factory gives him a day off in which 
he vacations inside every battery he's ever made.
wakes up screaming. a rocket fired into fathers. 
those fathers telling him they see the lighting 
& it was his. the machine that demands every joint.
every breath & muscle & night. he returns 
to the factory like a prodigal son. the line starts.
the other men feed the furnace pieces 
of their fingers. tip of the tongue. he does
the same. broken again. each time astonished at
how many fragments he had to scatter.