broken glass

i don't want to be little
i want to hover just above the ground.
you put me in one of those
bug capture containers & we travel
to where the town turns mud.
everything stuck & everything broken.
whenever we pass those apartments 
you ask if we can drive by
to look in the dumpsters. you sew me
clothing in smaller & smaller sizes.
first newborn & then glove-sized
& then i am just a paper doll.
you tac me to the corkboard 
of our lives. there was one afternoon
we found a piano. you told me to 
put it in my mouth & play 
& so i did. i tried so hard. all the keys
were discordant & you said i played
like that on purpose to attract flies.
i promised i did not but every word
i spoke came out as camels. i never meant
to be a music box but then there was 
a key & then it was sunday night
& no one else was around. i cling 
to my old life like a mussel. 
in a puddle i watch a miniature ship
sink. the ant-sized humans run & scream
& i say to you, "i do not want
to be that small." you say, "we'll see." 
i know my self. if we pull over we are 
going to find a tomb. you are going
to ask if i killed the man & i will make
my next false admission. i sympathize 
with every kind of prisoner.
especially the ones who grow 
so many wings they do not know
where to hide them. mostly i wonder
what you would do if one morning
you woke to find me in the yard 
as big as the red cedar? would you
still love me or would you walk me down
to where all the dead sofas & end tables live.
would you lay me down there 
& tell me to wait to be found? 

burying the grandfather

the grandfather was a compost dream.
was a cigar shop with an open door. was
meat in the fridge. thumbing through
a newspaper in search of obituaries.
i keep my own little private grandfather
in a can in my bedroom. i can hardly breathe.
i have a frying pan that is waiting
for a baby. we had the perfect hole for him.
his big clock face was trying to tell us
that it was midnight. gong gong gong 
went his throat. he was screaming,
"do not bury me here where the feral cats
play cards!" there wasn't another open spot.
his clock had a moon entombed 
inside a sun. isn't that how it always goes.
inside every grandfather is a chicken egg
with a grandmother inside. ancestry has a way
of skipping a stone across a monster's face.
i never intended to keep him above
for so long. we thought he would crawl 
beneath the house himself like all the others.
a grandfather is something that does not
go quietly. is a shock color or a class ring.
peaches in their shallow graves.
still, if you put your ear to the dirt
you can hear him telling you the wrong time.
now it is five in the morning & he believes
it is time for us to become his favorite chicken coop.
the grandfather has feathers himself. has a bond fire 
always burning. i throw in an old pair of eyes.
it does not destroy what they have seen.
instead, i see everything in smoke & stars.
bones cast for hopscotch. i keep a shovel 
by my bed at night in case i need to hear
his voice. cold winter night when the ground
is already frozen. i go out. dig until my body is
nothing but a dragon. there he is. 
just a little fist full of time. he groans & asks,
"what are you looking for?" i do not know
& so i do not answer. of course i will not find it here. 

drum

call me when you become a room.
when you stretch the skin tight enough
to yell. i promise i will help you.
my uncle had a drum that hung
on the wall of his patchwork side of the house.
premiered walls. a hole he punched
when he was full of whiskey. alone there
i would drum while he was at work 
at the battery factory. lead blood.
lead soul. i come from a long like
of heavy men. men who sink in the bath tub.
men he feed sharks with their hands.
the drum drummed me. the drum 
took up my parent's house. i sometimes
escaped with the drum & we both
turned into men. it was terrifying. it was red.
then when i put the drum down 
i felt dizzy. time travel is actually very mundane.
the drum always landed me inside
an acorn's dreams but once i was 
the memory of lady bugs as they crawled
through the walls of the house. 
a nest is a place without a drum. i promise
myself i will never purchase one.
like tarot cards, your gender is 
something gifted. here is your drum.
here is your throat. beat it until
everyone comes home. the living
& the dead & the in-between. 
there is not much to do when the world is
too loud to think. i am telling you though.
i will be there with a shoe full of candy. i will
hold your hand & wait for you to transition. 
i vibrate with you. i open all the windows
so your face doesn't get trapped 
like mine did inside the hunger 
of a palm. a half-broken plate. 
the bell tower chiming. it is time candles.
it is time for dust. 

antennae love poem

i swear i can hear the future's marmalade.
as a child, i loved to feed the ants.
first in the yard & then in the house
& then pieces of my body:
finger, hand, lung. their antennae twitched.
i tried to grow my own. 
attempted planting twigs 
into my skull. tried removing the television's.
instead, that just made me listen 
to policeman speak: everything about order
& meatloaf.  i had to shake it from my body.
i had to eat nothing but lemon custard 
to become a human again. 
then there was the problem of still
not being able to speak to the ants.
their order was not like the policeman's.
instead their order was like a quilt or like
the way a fern knows 
to grow fronds. i craved to hear
the color of a zephyr or the mother noise
of rising bread. to crawl on all six legs
& reach towards a queen's infinite shoulders. 
i still want to be an ant most days
as i did when i was a child. i was jealous then.
sometimes i killed ants out of that envy.
wiped their stories off
on my thigh. each a little punctuation.
period. period. period. come to the end
of my hunger. i have lawn chairs.
i have lemonade. the policemen are far away
writing a ticket for a wound in the sun. 
o how i love to be guilty & whole.
i buy a whole bag of sugar
& pour it out in the front yard & wait. 

accordion graveyard 

don't be sad about the end 
of the world. on tv tonight
we watch a show on "dark tourism."
the host visits a japanese coastline 
where a tsunami swallowed people's lives whole.
he walks in a graveyard & says,
"the stones were the only thing
too heavy to be washed away."
one of his crew members takes selfies
by the rubble. what do the dead know
about reverence? i once had a friend
who found an accordion at a flea market.
it belonged to a dead man as all accordions do. 
he played it poorly week after week.
sat on the stoop outside our dorm.
whenever he played i could see the grim reaper.
he waltzed slowly & all alone.
i imagined stealing the accordion 
& burying it out behind the houses on main street.
there i could begin an accordion graveyard.
what do you tell yourself,
trying to make it true? as if it were a spell?
mine is the do not being sad
about the end of the world. i guess it is
already here & we are already making 
our homes in it & we are already walking
in accordion graveyards. the ones 
beneath our feet & the ones in our throats.
sometimes i open my mouth
to see rubble. to see a man taking a selfie
& his sunglasses. reflections of 
a powdered moon. the grim reaper 
living in every window. my friend, now a flock
of geese. now a fallen tree where no one
has heard it. at the end of the scene 
the host man says, with regret in his voice,
"this place is so sad" as if he thought
he would find something else
visiting a site of destruction. the ghosts laugh at him. 
sky greys like a mouthful of feathers. 
spirits get our their accordions & play. 
don't be sad about the end of the world.

supplement 

they can force anything into
the shape of a pill. i saw a jar
of cantaloupe pills & another jar of quail eye pills.
in place of the moon, drinking
a great big glass of milk. i feel sick 
to my stomach about the sci-fi future.
where is the beautiful bomb?
where are my forks? when are you going
to turn & ask me, "should we start
considering a life on mars."
we're driving & i ask you if we should
learn how to fly. you think i mean airplanes
but i mean wings. we should learn
some more skills for survival. in the morning
i take a supplement for the sun &
another supplement for grief. 
the grief piles one on top of the next 
& i want to keep feeling but i feel like
a parrot eating saltines. crumbs fall
like snow. i just want to stay alive
& then i am weeping over a video
of a tarantula trying to sing. how do you 
prevail through your own smallness?
i do not know. sometimes i live
whole weeks inside a pill. i'm someone else's 
100% daily value of degeneration.
take me to where the acorns go
to talk about god. i want to know what 
they believe in that spurs some of them,
still, & despite everything, to decide
to become trees. i am most often less brave. 
i swallow it down with water. 
smooth & sterile. they will try to tell you
breathing comes naturally. 

star cookbook

you must go out with bare feet.
shave your head into a felt hat
& carry the strands as an offering.
the stars begin to tremble
when the night is made of glass.
be careful to step around the wounds
in the dark. when you are ravenous 
what part of yourself do you consume? 
i used to eat my fingers. then, i would
swallow my tongue. tooth by tooth.
everything grows back. demands to be alive.
i often marvel at my own resilience. 
who is this body? surely, it is not me.
then i remember the knowledge of how
to pluck stars & shuck them from
their husks is sewn into my blood.
i come from a long line of searchers
& seers. we know that stars are a lot like tofu.
they take on the flavor of the fight we give them.
caramel & cardamom. sugar & splinter.
there is no cookbook for this work. there is 
just my baby teeth & their roots. little 
ornaments in the skull of a nebula.
this is how i make them. gloveless,
holding the deepest kind of fire. 
dropping them in the cast iron pan
with oil & garlic. stirring with 
the wooden spoon. the night is a scar inventory.
a scar is where the star is planted 
when the feast is done. tell me, when you find
the end of your hunger, who will you 
call out to? what mirror will you use
to watch your tongue grow back 
like the plucked leg of a harvestman? 

tongue fire 

every time i cut my tongue off 
it just grows right back.
the tail of a lizard. i am talking like scabby tree sap.
i'm talking like a sidewalk lighter. 
when i try to tell you why i do not want
to be the pineapple machine
all that comes out are sea gulls. i want to be
loved like sourdough bread. i want to be tucked 
into your pocket & taken to the moon.
have you ever been someone's secret?
i have. i have kissed inside an envelope.
i am have met on the side of the road 
& heard them say, "we have to be quick."
a boy in the driveway. a boy on mars. 
tell me you think of me not as an aloe plant
but as a violet or a lily. tell me that you love me
even as you set fire to my tongue. there are
stories in the bible of men filling
their mouths with fire so that they could speak
to anyone who passes by. these are a story 
of how if you empty enough of yourself
anyone else can rush in. my water lovers.
my garden hose-mouthed sweet melon. 
i know you have a special box of matches 
you use just to burn your clothes 
when you get back from loving me. 
i would like to crawl into that little cardboard coffin.
have you reach inside with you plum fingers 
& lift me out. i would say, 
"go ahead. let me be your flint." 

the first window

we watch it blossom 
in the flesh of your chest.
ribs moving. topiary elephants.
the whole nine yards. dear god
how holy it was. we kneeled. 
light shown like stadium forevers.
a cheering man in the sky. 
we thought greedily. we thought,
"guilty guilty guilty" not enough frenzy
& not enough forest. i said,
"here is how we'll invent birds."
you wept. your tears streamed across
the glass like a rain storm. like a simile 
yet to be born. we did nothing else
but look at your window for weeks.
maybe even years. the seasons changed.
men jumped from buildings & 
we saw them plummet past. 
begged you to open it to let in 
a gust of breeze on a july night. 
you hogged that private delight.
we stood on the ceiling 
to antagonize you. walkie talkies
that reach ghost channels. 
"hello?" i asked. the voices said,
"we hear you have a window."
you button-up shirt. oh i am so sorry.
i know i only loved you for your grease
& your willow tree view. 
the dead horse who we say is just sleeping.
there is no escape plan. this is the body.
this is the ghost. get me a rental boat.
water floods the kitchen. 
i wanted mine to bud so badly.
in the mirror i would stare at my expanse 
of blank flesh. come on come on come on.
instead, a fire escape grew 
& then an alarm to pull. your window 
widened until you were just a frame.
no longer a boy i loved.
still i lean against you & say,
"let's not worry about the sun yet,
let's just be orchid-faced & dew-hungry." 

myrmidons

who am i to disband the ants?
we are all born of a colony. 
zeus with his echo fingers & coin-laden teeth
telling me, "come forward."
i saw my folds compress.
skeletons into skeleton. still, at night,
when the fire talks my old language,
i remember what it was like to have fragments.
to build the ant hills & lift 
the dead flesh of animals into our city. 
now, i open my palm to shadows. i ache 
with the desire to search out sugar.
to devour a rose & tell no one.
i was created to be a warrior. to destroy until
the sky falls down in stained glass eyelashes.
hungry as any child though, all i dream of is sweetness.
the legs i was & two legs i have become.
my fantasy is my unraveling. the exhale 
of becoming soil & escape. instead, 
i must hold tight to this body. it is a man's body
or so i am told. i often wonder
if i would have preferred to be a woman.
how do you make peace with one form
when you are myriad? i sometimes 
catch my reflection in a pool of water.
i think to myself, "there we are, the ants
of the island."zeus feasts on the guts of 
a fallen wing. tells us, "you are 
my perfect workers." whenever 
he departs i take that time to weep. 
pluck a flower from the water's edge
& eat it fast as i can.