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. 

pale popsicles

i love to be unsupervised in 
the crook of august's knee. 
our brotherhood blooms & i 
get a nice scare on my elbow.
we out grow the bikes & so we
let them roam free without us
in the rolling fields now thick with corn. 
our parents never come home.
the house asks us too many questions like,
"are you hungry?" & "how old are you?"
i am maybe ten or maybe twelve. 
we melt popsicles all day in the sun.
snakes arrive & never let me catch them.
ants carry away all of our eyelashes
so that our eyes are moons, blazing & bright. 
the cars outside are all going to
a big hole in the ground. sometimes
you try to hail one down. i try to tell you
they are not stopping. the night is 
playing hopscotch at the old playground.
the old oak is still alive & keeping locks
of our hair. the popsicle 
supply runs low until it is only
the pale ones left. we are never sure
what their flavor is supposed to be.
pineapple or coconut maybe. maybe bone.
our bones sometimes get so loud that
we can see them through the skin.
they talk like wind chimes. the syrup 
is strange & sweet. we take turns trying
to name this final flavor. "hot apple."
"de-tongued melon." none of them ever stick.
we do not like them but we eat them anyway.
the soonness of the world is too much
to waste too much time avoiding sugar.
when the night comes it is cool & full of bats. 
they ask us what we are doing with our bones
on display. we run inside. crack glow sticks
& hold them beneath our faces. 
"did you see what i did?" you ask.
i did not but i lie & say, "i did." 

costume contest

how good are you at putting on
the little face? i sew my costume 
for the day from blood & butter.
eat my breakfast in the mirror
to make sure that the body doubles
know that i am always watching.
i tell my lover that it is incredibly important
to walk outside in the dark sometimes
if you want to see the same monsters
that i do. i have never won before.
the contest is strange & i do not totally
understand the rules. often there are ribbons.
on really sunny days a man in a death machine
parades around town & everyone comes
out of their houses to wave. i wait
on my podium with my makeup just right.
the judges could be a mailbox or they
could be a sign that says, "smile you are
on camera." when i was small, my favorite day
was halloween. i dreamed about it
all year. one day to feel like i was not alone
in having to try & put on a body.
school buses the size of shoes. a man 
stands challenging me to a costume contest.
i bring a spoon. he brings a gun. i tell him
the truth which is that i mostly do not
even believe i am human. i collect
the stars like pebbles. i try to call home.
no one picks up. the number goes to
a telephone booth in the middle of 
the old school my boyfriend used to go to. 
i bring a lung to a knife fight. i bring 
a television to a church. plug it in
to help me pass the time. what is a costume
if everyone is dressed? if the party doesn't happen
& instead we are looking for an outlet
to plug in a mouth. i used to lay out 
my outfit for the next day like 
a chalk outline. on the worst days
it would stand up & run around & i'd
have to go & catch it. the man accepts defeat.
a spoon is no match for a gun.
the category is hungry & i have brought mine. 

sugar

we laid in a twilight giant's hand.
movie in the glare. girl legs june hairy 
& crossed. i often found as a girl 
that my connections were brief
& intense. i loved my friends best
when we weren't in a group. when 
i could catch glimpses of their butter. 
her soft white carpet beneath bare feet.
i can't remember if i stayed the night.
the moon, like a birthday balloon 
looming in the sky's eye. we didn't
talk about boys or girls. i think we talked
about birds & where we wanted 
to go when we left this place. 
we couldn't find any snacks in her house.
i was tired. heavy. she lived near the edge
of town that overlooked the highway.
all the shops are empty now. all the 
cars have never landed where they thought
they were going. she took out a box 
of sugar packets. opened one on her tongue.
i swear my freckles buzzed like children. 
all the lamplight & the sweet mirror smell
of her blankets. she handed a packet to me.
we didn't have sugar like this in my house.
white. blooming. i tore the corner.
felt my mouth water. emptied the sugar
onto my tongue just like she had. 
instantly, everything was ringing. a bite
of sweet sand. the sharks beneath the clouds.
some movie, unraveling on the tv. 
knees brushing. not a love poem but also
a love poem. for every packet i ate she ate two.
more skilled in sugar. i felt my girlhood 
turning to sugar. dissolving in the spit 
& the streetlight. i think i walked him
despite the curfew. i think my teeth rung
like bells. i don't know if we ever did that again.