straw into gold

in the back seat of my car i kept a sheep.
she would ask, "are you proud of me?"
i held her & said, "i am so proud of you."
when it rained i went to wendies 
without her & bought a cup of coffee
using whatever parking lot change
i could find. that summer was 
full of bugs. the carpet beetles 
on the floor of the car & the bugs 
that landed on the windshield 
& heckled us. "let me taste your blood."
i did not believe in god but
i used to pray. i think maybe praying came
before god. a need to turn elsewhere
& ask, "what have i done wrong?" & for
the space spoken to answer back
"the world is a sea of beautiful hungers."
sometimes, when the weather was right
i would walk with the sheep 
at the memorial park. it was a memorial
for dead soldiers. we read names 
& knew not what to do with them. 
we would talk about gold because i believed 
i would one day wake up & be able 
to shear her & spin her wool into gold.
in several fairy tales the captured princess
is told to turn straw into gold. 
i sometimes harvested grass as makeshift straw.
it never took. never gleamed. instead,
we lived from soda can to soda can.
on the day i got an apartment again
i woke up to find her gone. i wept.
i searched the streets for her.
i told her, "i will stay here if it means
i can keep you." she did not return. 
maybe she was god or maybe she was just 
another sheep with too much wool.
when i could not sleep in the new place
i would count the window. one 
through eight. eight whole windows. 
it was like they grew tomato-like & wild. 
what i don't tell people is i still try
in the late candle wax night
to turn fibers to gold. my hair. my eye lashes.
fingernails. i am trying to understand
how & why i survived. a sheep stands 
on the ceiling. i reach for her & then she is gone. 

a heart is a lonely canister 

let's be canopic if we must.
save the liver for a trip through
the mulberry woods.
place the stomach in a ziploc bag
& run as far away as you can.
i want to get as much use as i can
out of the sun while it's still
batting its eyes. i used to wake my mother up
in the middle of the night
& ask, "how long until the sun goes 
super nova." back then my heart
was a tadpole that lived off of
breadcrumbs & television. 
i had heard a priest say in his homily,
"we never know if we will wake up
the next day." instead of my own death
i took that to mean the end of the world.
filling pillow cases with stones
for safe keeping. what do you keep
from even those you love most?
i like to think i am an open jar
that once housed butterflies 
but i know i keep my lungs 
as far away from the window as possible.
they are prone to turning into wings
of a great swan that wants to confess
just how much she would love 
to have a baby made of light.
o my little alphabet. how i have purchased
every vessel to carry my heart
& none of them have contained 
that fury & that hunger. i wake up
to the sound of it thrashing in the attic,
teeth-bared. the sun has not even begun
to rise. i tell the animal. "you are not
supposed to be the water
you are supposed to be
the gun powder." a body 
can also be defined as a terrain
of rebellion. i trace the distance between
what i want to be & what i am.
name the canyon "heart." 
now how am i supposed to fill this? 

everything bagels are why i'm trans like this

my mom & used to go to the coffee shop
at the end of the world where only 
angels & college students ate each other's faces.
i would point to the wall & ask 
"what is that?" a crucifix made of hair.
she drank coffee the color of muted bark.
i ate an everything bagel with veggie cream cheese.
licked my fingers. a lesson in the perfect kind
of excess. poppy seeds under my nails.
the gardens that grew there in the days 
that followed. how i would taste the windows
each time a new little crimson face bloomed
my marrow. the urge to sleep every night
in a fresh layer of onion. my favorite part though
was the hansel & gretel of the afterward. the trail
of seed in the wild haunted wood. 
how i could always find my way back
to that brief communion. a plate. a mug of coffee.
the gossip of monsters & children. sesame seeds 
were once a currency in heaven you know?
an angel would come & tell me, "keep those
in case they're ever worth something"
gesturing to the stray ones on the glass table.
the thing is that being trans for me
has just about nothing to do with gender
& everything to do with everything bagels.
about what choices should be made
& which ones should be answered with,
"give us more." i knew even as a child
at the coffee shop with my mother
that I wanted to dust the stray seeds
from my palms each day. i wanted a trail
of flowers to burst in my wake. 

planet fitness @ 5am

out the tinted windows
i watch a crow eat a hot dog off the side walk.
all around people are
pretending to be little genders. lift the ghost
of a dead father. break faces
into fragments of breath. i have always
been a disciple of punishment.
call me a chronic catholic. i tell myself
i like it here. i wipe sweat from a machine
meant to teach men how to fly. 
move my arms like they are lead wings.
i dream of a day i walk into this place
& the ceiling bursts open from all the longing.
i cannot help but people watch. i want
to ask everyone "what do you crave 
in a body?" cis people are so fixated on 
transgender transformation but i think it is because
they are also yearners. they are also 
emptying themselves into mirrors 
& asking, "how can this be really my flesh?"
here we share a secret of discomfort.
the reality that the fact of becoming
suggests there could always be an unbecoming.
i do not believe in gender
in the same way i don't believe in muscles.
a man tenses his face
as he lifts a weight to his chin. a woman
sprints over & over on the treadmill next to me.
the crows feast on the guts
of the giant green parking lot dumpster.

side effects may include:

buying a trampoline 
& singing to a pond of dead goldfish. 
calling your father & expecting him
to be a doctor.
calling your doctor & expecting him
to be a father.
a desire to see the world burn.
what they took from me was glass
& i do not have a name for that organ.
an apparatus to filter out the grief.
seeing the ugly truth. 
kissing the ugly truth 
& calling it a future.
let's not pretend we have not
been fantastical. let's not pretend 
we've never bought a lottery ticker
& held it like a dog leash. pull me
onto my hands & knees. i used 
to pray in the pews. i used to carve
a statue of my arms from dead trees.
dancing without a partner.
wasting a night on trying
to reason with the news.
driving a car through
the window of a deli. 
i make a shrine for every catastrophe
& filling an offering bowl with eyelashes 
& empty lightning bugs.
i understand why people have
for centuries thought that the body
is a vessel. the desire to pour out.
knowing how breath becomes
dragonflies.
listening to your father's music.
mistaking someone else's music
for your fathers.
trying to salvage a sunken ship
from the bottom of a lake of fire.
getting your hands burnt.
calling your lover.
your lover saying, "i am not 
your lover."
memory loss. fatal mimicry.
telling a story that didn't happen
just to have it come true. 
becoming a prophet to dogs.
knowing all that you know
& still getting up & taking the pairing knife
to the sun's grapefruit sting.
spitting the seeds out into the sea. 

who we were in september

when i say "before times" i mean
when i still loved you in a way
that burned down train stations. 
i mean in the 3am friday night 
& aimless summer kind of way.
catching pigeons & pretending they were
our children. i named them
after moons. callisto & adrastea.
i mean as if there were a great fish net
cast over us to reap us from
our wild coral. the kinds of pink
i knew with you. the ardent fuchsia 
of every single sunday. i told you
we were going to wrestle a goose
to the ground. load all our urges
on her back & fly to the nearest mountain.
your car rattled awake. you kept
a pack of cigarettes you promised
not to smoke. watching halves 
of movies & finishing them inside 
a pillow case. i swear i have never lit
so many matches just to snuff them out
on the wall. my room had no window.
if the building is still there,
my room still has no window. 
once in the end times
you came in with a kitchen knife.
you hacked at the wall & said,
"i just want to give you your piece
of the sky." i begged you to stop.
this is how the world comes apart.
in little chambers of a horse heart. 
i was always terrified of you
though the reasons changed. 

chewing sound

why is everyone mouth? my brother asks
& it is a holiday where everyone has
a full of sky meat. don't worry about me
i say without any truth to the statement at all.
i have nothing to eat & i have resorted 
to turning each tooth into a tombstone.
underneath are buried goldfish or grandfather.
one in the same for the way they stare
& never speak enough. my brother is standing
on the roof & trying to grow gills. a species
of mixed metaphors. aren't you starving?
they ask & i shake my head. put a glove
in my mouth. the holiday is one about
killing because in the end aren't most holidays?
land turned into ice cream. i tell my brother
the best thing to do when you can't stand
the sound is to fill your ears with 
something brilliant. i show him how i do this
with a spool of indigo thread. he goes to town
using slinkies. the mouths form together
into one big mouth saying contradictory things.
we love you & don't breathe & hold still
& delicious delicious little wing. 
you can get to a point where you don't
trust yourself with noise. instead, move
as feather-like as possible until everyone 
else is so full they turn into piles of shoes.
i don't want to leave him there. i don't want
to pretend like there is not such thing 
as a hunger so deep you could not grow a mouth
that could ever hold it. but i do. i grin.
i kick down doors. i let the wasps' nests 
flourish on the throat of the pine tree outside.
he asks me if it's loud to me too. i am sorry
to say that i lie to him. i say that
if i keep moving it's almost like 
i don't hear the chewing at all. 

cranberry

the night was a flock of ancient lights.
ocean in my backpack. we met like
dimes. like the almost cost of water.
no one was on the radio. your foot
on the dashboard. oh how i believed
in jupiter & jump rope games. becoming a girl.
becoming a boy becoming a cranberry
on the end of my fork. they gave us 
a table at the edge of universe. candles
lit in the restaurant. cute bus boys 
with tattoos up their arms. we took out
our eyes to show all the times they'd broken
& we'd glued them back together.
you get to a point though where
you cannot see anything without seeing
kaleidoscope. your skin, a terrain
of stained glass. steam from a cup of tea. 
i chewed ever bright bruise on my plate
& so did you. by the time we were done
there was no one else in the restaurant.
your bedroom & the ceiling of bees.
island without shoulders. city made
of tombstones & teeth. but that night
i could feel all the fissures. where 
we could come apart like lobes of an orange.
did we go to the ocean? did we stand
on the roof of your apartment? 
i just remember standing alone
in the restaurant bathroom & looking
into the mirror knowing i would 
not be the same after knowing you. 
behind me in the mirror was a flock
of crows. incense burned on the end table.
patchouli & lavender. i bathed in the smoke. 

once upon a time 
                   after keith haring

i found my pleasure face
in a dumpster of swords. 
put on a paper machete mask
looked in the mirror & said, "this is my lover."
come with me, there is a room
no one else knows about where
all the gills go to drink air.
we can kneel. we can call each other
"cathedral" or "daddy" or "foxglove."
they say there was a time before
humans when everything was gay. 
there was no such thing as a 
right angel. instead, we curved.
spine. tongue. wing. mouth as a front door 
to a house of candles.
time was a place we stretched 
instead of spent. we said, "one more"
& "will you let me come again." 
is this my lungs or yours? a staircase
leading no where. we would climb it anyway
& take turns imagining heaven. 
field of strawberries. field of thumbs.
rejoicing in the shadow of limb
or a tree. this was where
i found my body. carved it from soap 
& bone. showered with the others
until i was as thin as glass. 
no one should have to remember
what it was like before they were gutted.
but, then again, where else 
would i be crawling back to 
but your lap of porcelain & windows.  

vacation bible school

let's go out to the fields again & play manhunt
where the angels feast on dew & rats.
when i was a girl i went 
to vacation bible school every summer.
there, i would talk to god about paradise. 
he would spit dice onto the ground
& the teachers would say,
"now let's find something to despise
about ourselves." the little pocket knives
& snack time pretzels. a television
that played VHS tapes of unkept promises & sainthood. 
sometimes, if we were good, we would
all gather in the main hall 
& get fed the tiniest slivers 
of heaven. it tasted like pear. closing
my eyes i dreamed of being an angel.
of stalking the corn & counting 
tails of animals i'd swallowed. 
once, we put on plays & i got to play jesus.
a white robe. i multiplied the fishes 
& the loaves of bread. i was surprised
at how easy a miracle can be when 
you're in a room without questions. 
then, there was a catastrophe. i was a girl
playing jesus. they burned the robe. 
they told me to eat the ashes which
somehow also tasted like heaven.
all the loaves & the fishes 
turned to bees in our stomachs.
from then on, i said as little as possible
except of course to the angels. 
to the angels i told everything.
i told them about the sacristy & about
how, as an altar child, the priest had us
dress & undress him. the angels replied,
"no one is holy" & "if you run away now
you can still be a sea gull."
i regret it. not running away
across the fields & to the highway.
hitching a ride to a parking lot
where i could sew feathers 
into my flesh. instead, i stayed
the whole week every year.
survived on those slivers of heaven
&, when no one was reading my thoughts,
memories of getting to briefly be jesus.