claw machine

i don't think i have what it takes
to replace the "i"s in my poems
with "we"s. who would want me,
speaking for a generation? i think
i should try more often than i do.
afterall, there has never been a poem
i wrote which my father's tongue
was not inside of. my brother too
& sometimes the dirt people
whose bones mix like spilled utensils drawers.
we go to the claw machines, my brother
& i. we go with our mom & do
a waiting ritual together. we say,
"one more" until we are empty-handed
in a new way. the poem had fish lungs.
the poem had a way out. the claw machine
reached in from the ceiling of the bathroom
& plucked me out in a great "almost."
if i were to write a real poem about endings,
i would talk about the arcade by the beach.
how each year there are more claw machines
& less puzzles. in the corner, we play
pinball. my mother teaches us that
if the machine "pops" it means you beat
the high score. i beat the high score
& jump when i hear the "pop" thinking
it is a champagne bottle or a gun shot.
noon runs her fingers through our hair.
each of us with waves of deep brown.
i have been growing my hair out. really, i 
should say, "we have been growing our hair out."
we get worse as we go. farther & farther
from a plush handful. the boardwalk 
tells a story about witnessing. the ocean
is always a "we." we crush. we crash.
we pull back & leave fragments
in the sand. we go back to the machines again.
we lose together. tiny chapels. a strong wind. 

sound machine(s)

i go to the sound machine place.
we used to put our ears to clouds
so that we wouldn't hear teeth.
i preferred the rain. you preferred 
the ocean.
we spend all night
removing oceans from our ears
just to put them back. i sleep on
the couch. i sleep in a pit of fire.
the machine has a pad 
of butter for one of 
our eyelids. i drown the cars.
a flood worth having. i watch
a tiktok where the speaker asks,
"do you think god should
apologize to us?" my answer,
"of course." i think he gets
all the sound machines & here
we are searching wherever we can
for a pinky's worth of full.
i have used shells as ears. i have
climbed on the roof of the old
apartment building to try & find
a bigger sound machine. one large enough
to snuff out all the thunder in me.
i do not talk enough about
the lack. god does not apologize.
what good would that do anyway?
we have soil & rocks. we have always
been left to our own devices. us & the birds
& the snakes. 
an outlet. recording the wind.
microphone swallowed in the attic.
i have storms enough to burry 
all of our thoughts for tonight.
we talk by the corner lamp.
you ask, "do you see me?"
i answer in a rare 
machineless dark, "i do." 

night beach

we walk with pearls under
our eyelids. i want to go until
there is no more land to hold us.
until something lets go. i want to be
balloon born in water, salt, & shadow. 
we talk about meeting the ocean
for the first time. my bird feet.
to be an animal is to crave smallness.
even the whales in their water
know they are shrinking. children earlier today
mistook the churn of the water
for the backs of dolphins. they asked
their parents, "when will they grow legs?"
fish with two legs in the dream time. 
barefoot & kicking at the water. 
all the footprints of the day
amble cross-path. the ghost bodies
repeat the day's march. the spirits 
of sea escape-artists reach for 
their shell fragments in the dark. 
i tell you we should build a house
on the night beach. let the night pull
us apart & smooth down the edges.
together we could squeeze the blood moon 
for orange juice & drink until 
we are nothing but sugar.
i do not want to return to the land. 
i tell the fish to quick, lose their legs.
far away we still see the lights 
of the shoreline hotels. honeycomb
sliding glass doors. towels hung
on railings. eyes, like pearls in their night.
all of us, leaning toward an infinite.
you ask me, "what does the ocean mean to you?"
i resist the cliche urge to say, "god"
& instead, i say, "an answer." 

blue heron

i follow the heron, convinced she
might take me to the underworld
or the otherworld or wherever the seams
of the land start to give. i find it harder
to plan for the future than ever before.
i hope for small pleasures. a warm day.
the scent of brine in the water. toads
in the field where rainwater pools, singing
as if they will never turn to bones.
at the creek in my hometown a blue heron
would step with me across the marshland.
she would ask, "when are you coming home?"
i imagined putting on a heron suit.
how delightful it would be to shrink 
into a flickering body capable world slipping. 
instead, i always ran from her. she turned into a 
smudge in the dusk sky. purple like
a real plum. thunderstorm dumping fruit
on the sidewalk. everything syruping from
the wild heat. the bird in me tries to escape.
dipping legs & a yearning for thread.
i lose the heron where the trees thicken 
& the sound of bugs turns into a machine.
i search. i call. she does not come. the future
feels like a bowl of weeping planets. 
i feed them honey from those little sticks 
that are supposed to be from tea. i used to 
try to make huge & ugly plans for triumph.
i used to run from herons. now they run
from me. i feel in the dirt, searching for
that little crease. a string to pluck & pull
it all apart. i do not know where the herons go.
i hope they do not talk about me there.
i am mostly embarrassed of what i am. 
so much flesh. so much hair. never enough blue. 

i dream of butter & wildness

this country fits our hungers
into envelops, kisses them, & mails
them back to us. i do not dream
of gay people in empire houses.
i do not dream of gay people talking
to drones. i do not dream of gay police
or gay people with guns the size
of the wounds this country cuts into us.
the law is not warm. cannot lay eggs
or grow roots. cannot feed you. 
when i was young, my family went
to the capital. we looked at the constitution
in its little glass box. a museum man
was seated next to it reading the ravenous paper
a bedtime story. stroking its forehead.
the paper, ugly & old & written
by colonizers, was given more love
from the country than any body
living on its land. i dream of raspberries.
i dream of butter. i dream of my friends
not rationing their hormones. i dream of estrogen trees
& testosterone bushes. i dream of
queer people unafraid of bombs on this land
or across oceans. i dream of a wildness that
a country could never hold. i dream of
this country's undoing. how the rocks
would weep for the first time in centuries.
how we will love each other the way we used to.
not like revolution but like breath. 

night uniform

i put on my night uniform
to eat the moon like a grapefruit.
stinging-sweet skin & a portal 
with tin can edges. i wear clothing
until it turns to breath. thread-bare
& breeze-worn. the same shirt & shorts
every night because i'm autism 
or because i'm a rodent. you ask me where
my skin goes in the dark. i bleed.
pen tip pressed into paper. all the flesh
going skyward. we sit in the car
& talk about horrors. small horrors &
big horrors & the one eye pressed
to the back window. in the landline times
i loved to pick up the upstairs phone
& listen in on my mom's conversations.
they were never anything ground-breaking
but the glimpse into her mouth
thrilled me. talk like i am not here.
the nighttime uniform doesn't change.
if it did it would not be a uniform.
the night does not change. if it did, it would
not be night. i consider sleeping in 
the middle of the road. plugging one
of the old phones into the dirt & seeing
who picks up. on sleepovers my friends
& i liked to play a game where we would
dial random numbers. once we got
a hole. the hole said, "i do not have
time to wait." we hung up before it could
say anything else. if we make it to the moon again
i hope i can go barefoot. i bet it is softer
than everyone says. i find my lover's grapefruit rinds
in the sink when i come home. the moon, gone.
regrowing like a severed fist beneath
blankets. i put on my night uniform
which is strange because i never took off
my night uniform. the flesh beneath 
is scattered. a handful of dice. a butterknife.
i am some kind of gathering. 

chicken worship

the chickens do not believe in god
which is a relief. on sunday they are
their most heathenish. i find them
with faces covered in sweet guts after
stealing the neighbor's wine berries. 
i too have stumbled upon a blush 
of fruit in the otherwise tangled thicket.
i once asked a boyfriend if he believed 
in god because i wanted to sound deep.
i instantly regretted it. there was no answer
that would have satisfied me. i was nineteen
& had not lived with chickens for years. 
he waffled a little but in the end he admitted
he did not believe in god. his response did not
feel like a relief. more like a disappointment.
maybe i wanted someone to tell me,
"no there has to be a great orange juice jug in the sky."
of course the chickens worship. they
venerate the soil which they cull for glinting beetles
& they speak to the sun like a fatherless eye.
i join them. i have always tried on faiths
but the chickens' practice is the one most suited to me.
i love to step over places in the yard which
they have already turned with their beaks 
& claws. the softened earth 
beneath my feet. they make my want
to go barefoot again just like i used to
when i was small. the callouses stayed
with me. then i go to yell at the sun.
like the rooster, i call, "when are you
coming home?" faith is often about 
returns. the chickens are certain that this land
will learn them just in time to bury them.
by that time though, the dirt will not be strange.
a familiar scent. i hear the rooster let the hens
know he's found an angel. they gather.
the sun dissolves in our mouths. 
i join them even if only on the outskirts.

pet black hole

i have always tended the void. 
some people have guardian angels.
i have a black hole. my earliest memories
are of bringing him/her handfuls of spearmint leaves
from the bush crawling up the side
of the old house on franklin street.
the black hole is much gentler than
people assume. we curl up with each other.
the black hole is slightly warm. hums 
with all the universes he/she has swallowed.
when i put my ear to the black hole i can
hear all sound at once. i can also her
sounds turned inside out. the other side
of a shout & the inverted bird song 
from a planet with red dirt. the black hole
is the best creature to get sad with. 
when i want to weep the hole says,
"why don't you devour?" in my family,
you do not eat when you're hungry you eat
when there is an emptiness. all hunger
is emptiness, but not all emptiness 
is hunger. with the hole i feast on
mailboxes & knuckles & car kill. 
i do not usually feel better when we 
are done swallowing but i do feel less alone.
company is made from whatever 
you can find. i take my black hole
for walks in the late winter rain. i am troubled
sometimes that the hole has gotten smaller.
i had always hoped i could grow 
my black hole. that maybe one day he/she
would take me into his/her maw.
i have seen her/him open his/her mouth
& it is shimmering & gold. i would love
to be drenched in that light. instead,
my pet black hole has continued to 
get smaller. i feed her/him as much 
as i can. i ask her/him sometimes,
"do you want to take me now?" the black hole
always declines. says he/she wants
to be hungry with me where the moon
is still huge & on the right day 
we both feel soft. i cannot disagree
but when she/he is gone i do not know
who i will have to witness my cravings 
for the dark syrup of the nothing place. 
at least for now i bring the black hole
an ear of feed corn & a shoe. he/she is delighted.

script writer

my words are always like kites.
i steer them across a purple-bruise ceiling
in search for what i am supposed to say. 
an ex once told me i am not even a script writer.
that everything i say was handed to me
by a little man beneath my desk.
this is not true. the script is written
by angels which are even less trustworthy 
than a strange man. when she told me that
we were on a beach or maybe we weren't.
maybe it was a busy city street & maybe 
it was easy to stop talking. i am also always
trying to talk. trying to person. trying to
keep the clouds from laughing at me.
i can be a little self-centered. i blame
the script. i blame the angels. the autism.
the onion grass my brother & i ate as children. 
our hunger that surfaces in the middle 
of the night. the scripts are sometimes sensational.
i am not a good actor. i am supposed to be
a man who lives along the gooseneck 
of a farmville road. sometimes i consider
becoming my own script writer. bought 
a typewriter & started smoking in the house. 
i don't know if that's even what writers are
supposed to look like. often i feel grateful
for the scripts. i will be reading it & feel my body
pulling away from my mouth until 
i am the kite looking down on the body.
once i found one of my ex's scripts. she had
left it in the bathtub & so the words were
warped & stuck to the side of the tub. 
i followed a line. all it said was, "please." i had
seen that line too. knew how hard it was
to be so close & so far from what you want. 
i wanted to keep her pages but i stopped myself.
i mashed them up & ate them. they tasted
like turnip & butter. not as bad i thought they'd taste. 
on my best days i get to confess. i bent down.
scriptless, i talked to the bees haunting
a swathe of new flowers. 

crop circles 

i used to be more invested in aliens
than i am now. sometimes, on a cool night,
i would go out to the corn fields 
in the hopes that i might see a crop circle
being born in late august. i never witnessed
an arrival but i did find a fox path 
that led to an old limestone kiln built
into the side of a hill. the foxes 
were very secretive & i do not blame them.
humans are the worst of all animals
at keeping secrets. most crop circles were not
made by extra-terrestrials. i do understand why
people decide to become architects 
of the otherworldly. our shared hunger
for a rupture. one pair of friends in the 90s confessed
to pressing hundreds of crop circles 
in fields throughout their lives. all kinds
of patterns. rings like ripples pulsing away
from a dropped stone. interlocking hoops.
a language only the birds know. 
i like to imagine them working silently. 
they used nothing but a wooden board
tied to a rope to press the stalks to the soil.
walking in circles. lately i end up
talking in circles more & more. i tell my lover 
we should get a farm which is just my way of saying
i know i am an alien & it is time that i accept it.
press the corn. call home. a flash in
the dazzling deep sky. the foxes, in their hollows.
keeping our secret. i think we all just want
another species to talk to. someone to say,
"yes we are real & the sky is as vast as it seems."
of course, we could just talk to the cicadas or 
the chickens who sift in the earth for seed. 
i take a walk down the farm roads. rolling hills. 
not a crop yet to carve a signal into. 
old cobs from last year are still strewn about
like yellow clenched teeth.