picto chat

my first ds was shiny blue.
i sometimes talked to angels
using the picto chat feature.
i drew glyphs. sent them 
to their spiral hoards of eyes. really, i always
hoped the chats would land 
in the laps of other not-girls 
floating above their own moons.
instead, there was night the nightlight dark
& the angels who, despite their 
skill at witnessing, never wrote back. 
when summer came, i would wander
the town with my ds out. the angels
peered down at me. made umbrellas 
of their faces. i sometimes stood outside
a friend's house, in the hopes that maybe
they were on their ds too & we might exchange
outlines of each other's hands. 
she never was. the angels were often
selfish. they wanted me only to write 
to them. they begged for more effigies.
more thumbprints. more hours
of my glowing face. i gave it all to them.
my tiny language of eyelashes & caterpillars.
they swallowed every image. taped them
to the walls of a glass house filled with the sound
of running water. i have never been there.
once i saw someone else online during
my many tours around town. i did not know them.
i cannot remember if we actually shared
an image back & forth or if 
we just flashed across each other's screens.
either way, i felt like i had just caught
a dream by the lip. fish scales in the streetlamp. 
she gone so fast but then again so was i. 

the cows

the cows came first to 
the field behind our house. 
they did not belong to anyone
& i would stand there at the edge
of our yard taking pictures.
i could not tell if they were
small or they were farther away
than they seemed. in the night
they always climbed on the roof
& sang. i often would sleepwalk
to join them. i only learned this
because the damn neighbor's teenager
took a video of me & posted it online. 
i was in my blue pajamas 
& the moon was a toil nail
in the sky. the cows were the size
of dogs. i bought hay & laid it out
around the yard in the hopes that
they would come here & that maybe
i could coax them inside
despite the protestations of my husband.
i needed them. i wanted them to live
inside here with us. the farm inside
the farm. i wish i knew what
made them shrink. day by day they got
smaller. looked farther away. 
their footfalls on the roof, softer.
i begged them. bought a megaphone
& tried to speak their language. 
of course, the neighbor kid recorded
all of this too. somewhere along the line
he joined me though. started trying
to lure the animals to us. i almost 
didn't hear them on the night they came.
a gentle knocking like a muffled
knuckle against the wood door. 
they were the size of matchbox cars.
a whole little herd of them. i wept. 
welcomed them. feed them sugar 
& apples. we took a warm bath together
& they told me about the smell
of the first rays of sun in the morning.
of course, they were on their way
to the next realm. the following day
the cows were the size of pills. i considered
what it would mean to swallow one.
if that would get me closer to a life
without as many horrors. i stopped myself.
instead, let the herd sleep against me. 
i felt them fade. drops of water gone back
to a big holy cloud. i wept & cows
came out. i tried to catch them
but just as quickly as they came,
they were gone. my husband held me
for days after. he would say, "we can get
a farm. we can do that." i always said
something dismissive. "of course" & "maybe."
i know though that that would change things.
we all need the idea of a place we will not go.
the sugar farm. the rain dessert. 
a mansion full of birds. 

almond therapist 

my first therapist was made
of almonds. she said,
"you are a beautiful girl."
i watched windows turn into turtles.
i talked to her one the phone
while i ate my own fingers
& told her, "yes yes yes."
on the television a planet was born
& everyone held up their cameras.
took pictures & gazed at them.
two weeks later it came out that 
there had not been a planet. 
it was a just a drill. a test to see
how easy joy is to simulate. 
the sun went sour. no one had checked
a tiny expiration date on the label.
in some ways, i do not want
to get better. once in the middle
of an argument i thought,
"if i can just get away." i wonder if
madness is just a reasonable escape. 
i have had a lot of friends flush
their brains down the toilet
& i shrug & say, "i mean i get it."
i hated that therapist. she was always 
trying to comfort me. i wanted someone
to get angry. to say, "i see your wings.
god it must be hard." i put my fist
into an apple peeler. called a grandmother
from beyond the grave. she was 
crazy too. a body like an ice pick.
she hacked away at the world
& it never budged. when i eat almonds
i think of her mouth. i wonder
what she thought she could make
out of me. a girl without eyes 
or a tongue. i have always ripped out seams
& started again. she ate them 
one at a time. i make sure to always
have a mouthful. sugar & boots. 
my teeth like sidewalk squares.
i don't try to get better anymore.
instead, i try to ease the land. 
laugh when i can. grow antlers & watch
how like the buck, they fall off 
& become trees. 

baby name books

when i was in fifth grade
i checked out all the baby name books
from the library. i wanted help naming
the ghost who lived in my mouth. 
she was always rattling words & keeping me up
through the dark.  i did not have a mirror in
my bedroom but i did have a glass case
that i could use for divination 
if need be. a reflection the consistency 
of a veil. i did not care that they were
library books. i would dog-ear pages.
dance inside a name that really struck me. 
none of they held though. i imagined myself
palm-sized & soft. i took shovels to the books.
said names aloud. rolled them in sugar
& ate them past my bedtime by
the yellow lamplight. this could be a poem
about transness. about something innate in me
that craved to move. instead, i think it is
a poem about language fractures.
how a name is never really a name. it is 
an attempt to get a foothold in the elsewhere
of blood & bone. cats is my favorite musical
both because it is a poem & also because
the cats all have secret names beneath 
how they are known. i collected my secret names.
created a ritual around drinking them like water. 
i cannot tell you them or they would not
be secret but i can tell you that once a name 
is yours it never really leaves. a moon in orbit 
or a place where you pick raspberries.
my fingers are dripping with nectar. 
sometimes, i would take a library book back empty. 

telephone wire shoes 

i have seen telephone wire shoes
kicking at the moon. their knots
like hands clasped in the dark.
an orpheus kind of tether. 
it is best never to ask the pocket oracle
about what a symbol means.
the truth will get collapsed.
there is an epidemic of losing the ability
to read omens. most of the time
telephone wire shoes are placed
by a divine power who harbors 
the shoes of the dead. she will saunter
to the shed & pick out a pair before
taking the journey to the wire.
inside, voices spiral. merry-go-rounds.
a boy crouched inside his father's rushed mouth.
the shoes feel all of it. that is why
they still crave to run. dream themselves
on the surface of other planets. a new life
with fresh meanings. journeys not
yet spent. sometimes a memorial 
is not a place but a motion. there was
a boy who was killed by another 
on my block. for weeks, people hung shoes.
the divine let them. welcomed them
to the spirit seam. like walking on
a railroad tracks between clementine noon 
& honey fig midnight. the placed
so many shoes that the poles came down
& the street went all spiderweb. i cried even though
i did not know the boy. found his shoes
in my shoe pile by the door. took them.
tied them together tight. never let go.
threw them over the wire with the others. 

tv dinner redux 

i come home from a bullet hole. 
don't tell me what to say. there are
self-driving cars taking children 
to the moon. i am told that on the next planet
there will be days where we all lay down
& stare at the sky. point & say,
"that is where we came from." the earth
a marble in the soup. a bean in the water.
i cannot help but love tv dinners. their poetry
is a family apparatus. here we are smiling.
here we are camering. there is something
wrong with me because when i lose my phone
it feels like losing a limb. where is my tongue?
where is the little god telling me
how & what i should want to taste?
a brownie to sleep on. mac & cheese. 
one square reserved for the ancestors.
my grandfather sets his cane down 
against the plastic wall of our cell.
the bocks of the tv dinner could be 
playpens or they could be kennels 
or they could be prisons. in this country
we are all different levels of prison nesting dolls.
i tell my friend "we are in a crisis of dreaming"
& then here i am dreaming about
a microwave thanksgiving dinner.
when i was anorexic in high school i used
to look at the turkey on the cover
of this one tv dinner & imagine them
as waves ready to engulf me. hunger is 
horrible. hunger is beautiful. 
if you cage a hunger that is how you get
a disciple. i do not want to be a disciple. 
i open the microwave like a sacristy. 
a world of altars. what is & isn't witchcraft
really just depends on who is holding
the mirror. as a child i did plenty 
of microwave sorcery. once summoned 
a mouth that craved nothing.
buried it beneath the pine tree. put my 
ear sometimes to the earth & it would
talk to me. it would say, "puncture 
the plastic seal." 

brief beautiful internet

we used to reach our hands into
the mouths of strangers. crocodile glow.
there were windows without gods.
gardens in the dark. i am getting to the age
where "i remember when" starts
to feel thick & impossible. i loved
the old internet that i would crawl into
at a library computer. the way the internet
had edges & unfurled slowly. my fingers 
still learning how to walk a keyboard.
ads were strange & few. glittering billboards.
a chain email i sent to all my friends.
curses lifted. i let my face shrink 
to the size of a postage stamp. fell in love
with other girls pretending to be boys
pretending to be girls. characters who
could disappear between a tongue
& the roof of the mouth. i craved to be
closer. to sleep inside the old internet.
i think it would feel like crushed velvet. 
like licorice without the root. i saw my reflection
in the spaceship screen. my face was round.
my eyes, sockets. the machine drinking
a world too big to hold me. i slipped through
the mesh. a fish through a net. 
my favorite websites were the ones
where i could talk to other ghosts like me.
once, i had an online boyfriend. i do not know
who he is really. maybe he is horrible &
he once ate someone whole or maybe
he is a girl like me without any hair. 
a mirror hung on the ceiling. maybe he
daydreams about the old internet too.
remembers me briefly as a gap between teeth. 

gun dinner

all rich people's houses are confessions.
i am empty. i am hungry. i am searching. 
i saw a picture weeks ago of dr. phil's house.
he has a case of guns watching over
his dining room table. they are his children
or is it his children in a glass case & guns
sitting at the table. big guns & little guns.
guns to kill lovers & guns to kill enemies.
the myth of the intruder like a halo 
in the communion place. the truth is that
rich people cannot eat dinner. cannot break 
bread. instead they participate in mimicry 
on a large scale. the double doll house.
invite people over. talk to money. talk to guns.
i like to picture dr. phil sitting alone
at the end of his huge table. does he sit 
looking at the guns or with the guns behind him?
i imagine he asks himself the same question.
maybe he tries to consider where a stronger 
man than him might sit. the confession 
comes in medallions. my enemies are symbols
to me just like my weapons just like
my staircases just like my love. in my house
our table has only one chair because 
the other broke. it sits in the corner next
to the furnace. the windows soak us 
in night. none of my lovers are guns. 
we do not have to erect monuments to 
our emptiness. i keep nothing in a glass case. 
the dust, a blessing. our skin & hair & breath. 
the chairs made of guns. the chairs behind
glass. curtains drawn. night keeps them
at an arm's length. sleepless in a bed
of guns. may they never rest. 

amaranth 

stuck in your song teeth,
we invented red with our necks.
i watched the pearls shrink
in my mouth like throat lozenges. 
the summer did not
hold us like we hoped it would.
a porch light turned into a ship.
i sailed as far away from language
as i could. when i don't wake up in time
i pretend i am a toad in the wet 
soft earth surviving winter.
i call my father & leave a message.
he does not call me back. the jevoha's witnesses
send us recruitment letters 
& i whisper to the paper 
until they become birds.
every deserves a chance at the elsewhere.
i love shirking my duties. i love 
the rare moments when i am
not a tool of some monster machine.
when i bead a plant & the plant talks
about how she stumbled upon her color. 
the amaranth grows in my sleep world.
i wake up counting seeds, messing up
& starting again. they are even smaller than
a mustard seed. i dream of horses
fitting inside the grain. i see my reflection
the size of a blink. the size of short breath.
i give up on counting & just start
filling the bath with the tiny seeds.
on the skin they feel like snakes rolled
into pockets of night. i have never known
the sky to stay put. i have a friend
who is three feet in the spirit world.
they call me & tell me their house burned down
& i believe them. who will believe us?
ask them if they have spoken yet
to the plants in their yard. they realize
they have not. not for a long time.
sage & yarrow. they are alright for now
just like i am alright for now. for now.
the amaranth makes a promise that one day
i will be as small as one of the seeds.
relief floods my bones. i spend the rest
of the night sleep-walking in the garden.
when the plants die, they always sing. 

an ark

i call my father & ask him
to build me an ark. he is a man
of wood chips & splinters.
he does not ask where & what for.
instead he asks, "how big?"
i drive to my childhood home
where he is painting birds
into the sky. i lay down in the grass
& tell him to measure me. 
the ark just needs to be big enough
for me to lay down. what i love
about my father is that he does not
question me anymore. understands
that we are both glass ships
in a sea of teeth. moves the wood
across the saw blade. shapes the plants
& the bow. shapes the mast & the rutters.
i have never asked him about the flood.
about how our mouths filled with water
& drown out the languages there.
we speak in a wayward tongue. clips
of mountains & a drawer full of acid-burn socks.
when he is finish he will arrive an hour
early to my house. the ark, bigger
than it needs to be but, as a father,
he is always worrying i do not have enough.
together we walk through the ark.
touch the wood. marvel at it. i remind him
that once we hung a back door
to my house. it took all afternoon
with the goats laughing at our follies.
i consider briefly telling him to stay. asking if
he would live in the land-locked ark. 
neither of us are a prophet. instead, we are
survivors of a dammed river. the lamprey
that knot themselves in our lungs.
an ocean, thick as broth, rising
as the rain starts.