propagation 

sometimes i cut off a hand 
& grow it like a spider plant child.
there you go little hunger. paint
a wall of the house. punch a hole
in the old moon to let 
the snakes out. when my lover
was courting me, he would cut off
one of his fingers at a time. let them
sprout roots & then gift them to me 
for my windowsill. i never remembered
to water them & so they died 
one by one. the ants came like
infinite rosaries to underworld 
each of the limbs. i was not made 
to care for vegetation but i know
i need to learn. everything worthwhile 
is seed started. knees tucked into chest. i wait
for water. i wait for you by the door. 
i still feel guilty about all the arms i've
wasted on my own running.
nothing ever returns the same. 
a ferris wheel in the refrigerator 
turns, empty & waiting for tarantulas.
once i fell from a ladder. i was a girl.
i crashed on the living room floor
& came apart into thousands of genders.
i am now just what was left after
chasing the sun. i am not interested 
in living intact. instead, i am looking 
for pots in the parking lot. i am 
watering my eyes. your dried thumb,
the abandoned carrot. in the apartment
without walls, i planted a potato
not knowing it would rot beneath 
the soil. what a spleen. what a liver.
leaves reaching up for dusty handfuls of light. 

recruitment 

a big solider comes with
a money face into the television.
i sometimes wake up in camouflage
& not in the lesbian way.
there is an ad on my youtube 
brain empty machine that asks,
"do you want to have purpose?"
it is followed by a clean missile 
cutting through the dark. this country
is a wound. it always asks for more.
but the thing about a nation
is that it cannot receive. not like
a mouth. not like a hole. instead,
this country works like a boiler room. 
blood in the stomach. the sky goes 
rust thumb red. i touch the ad by accident
& my life is a pen clicked 
in an empty room. on my way home 
from a tree, i saw military vehicles 
stuck in traffic. they were mean & green.
one of them as a tank. there is the way
over there & the war here & the war
between flesh & soldier. i dated 
a girl once who was in the marines.
she told me she never wanted 
to talk about it but once 
she got drunk & told me they took
an x-ray of her lungs. inside were
helicopters. inside were guns, loaded.
that details was important. if the guns
were empty they would have let her stay.
instead she went home. stood on 
the back porch & smoked until
she couldn't feel her throat.
take every uniform i find into the trees.
the trees say, "that is not a god."
i ask, "can you take it back?" 
they explain, "no, that is not a god."
i try to say, "i know it is not"
but they do not believe me. it is probably best
that they do not believe me. 
i hang the camo in the branches.
i expect skeletons when i return. instead,
there is nothing but hair. 

sweet feed

i want to be a baby girl
in the window kind of way.
the honey of a ghost train
through the milk-white woods.
god if we could be the sweet
peach soft of a new stomach.
let me be pussy willow until we are
nothing but cattail burst & blush.
round as we are melon. stars 
climbing down their ladders
to paint our eyelashes. i want
my mouth to only hold plums.
even their pits giving in to my marshmallow. 
the blossoms are brief & real.
we smell like the pink beneath fingernails.
headlights turn into fresh moons.
a tongue full of brown sugar. 
tell me there is a tree with all our hair
growing from the top. i hide behind
the big drum. pound the door
to win another palm. there is nothing
that doesn't open for me. the fruit swell
eager to dissolve in me. blood 
like velvet. velvet like lamb's ear
or mullein. i leave the ground hungry
for my footfalls. all the corn,
every single color, knows my name. 

sugar country 

we all have latent patriotism.
i am always trying to recover 
from this place & then there is
some other glorious wound. 
i get defensive when i hear people
talk about limiting sugar. 
not in the diabetes way (i get that) but in the,
"i am holier than you because i only eat
the hair of gods" way. i do not believe
in sugar addiction. i will call it worship. 
my father & i parked in the blue jeep
beneath a willow tree on a saturday morning outside
the farmer's market. syrup sun beams. we had gone
to the candy stand. a pound of gummy eggs
& a pound of spearmint leaves. 
bubble gum cigars, banana & green flavored.
sometimes, when we were feeling divine,
we would eat our whole stash right there
& not tell mom. 
teeth ringing. organ bell brothers.
our ages collapsed & summer stretched 
all taffy in the morning bloom. 
sugar is my steering wheel when 
a thunderstorm starts asking 
if we are still here. if you dig deep enough
in the chicken yard 
you will find veins of sugar. the first girl
i loved fed me chocolate & peach rings.
we laid on her roof. the older i get the more
sugar i require. my aunt mary actullay had
diabetes but she still snuck all the candy she could.
more & more as she aged. 
licorice & mints & m&m cookies. 
once i bit a boy in the dark. his body tasted
like a statue of sugar. i wondered then too
if i tasted the same. nothing but glass blowers 
in a bright dark. i am trying to stop loving sugar
because i know it is a hole. i do not love
this country or how we suck the soil white. 
i try to think of cane. of fields. 
a spoon in a jar. in a bag. the sound of 
light snowfall. dissolved on the tongue.
i am ready to leave. there is sweetness 
other than sugar. 

prayer to cardea, goddess of door hinges 

it has been a long time since i have considered praying.
i used to have a rosary that i followed like the stoplights
down main street. were you always a goddess or did
you have a mundane time where you tried
to find something to bow to? i am unschooled 
in the formation of gods. the closest i have come
to the divine in when i laid with an ex lover
beneath the blue whale at the museum of natural history.
but you don't want to hear about that. let me tell you
about the doorbell that died inside the walls 
of my parents home. you could press it & nothing
would ring or cry or laugh. in every house i've ever lived,
there is a forbidden door that i labor to open.
in the mountain apartment it was the basement. 
the door was nailed shut when i first moved in.
i could not resist. one night, in the middle of a snow storm
i caved. i did not have a hammer & so i used a fork
to pry the nails back. maybe this was our first meeting?
i did not find much. just wooden stairs going down
to a root cellar. cool dirt on the floor. there were
entrances to other apartments all around. 
i imagined a gathering of us in the basement. i did not
know most of their names. the gun salesman &
the white lady with matted hair & the man with
a worn walking stick. i quickly returned to my nest.
shut the door but considered what it would mean
to leave it open. i want to know what people
usually ask of you? do they ask for open doors because
i request the opposite. i love a shut door. both
to be inside & to be peering beneath the bottom
in an attempt to see feet shadows. i do not know
if this is your realm. are you interested in containing
or releasing? i could help with either. i buy keys
to locks that do not exist. i call my ex in the middle
of the night & hang up before she can answer.
i want to ask her if she remembers the house
in mineola with all the suitecases in the basement.
you were there too, standing on the ceiling.
i guess all i have to ask for is that the locks are useless.
that the doorways i walk through do not bite down
too hard. that when i go down to the crawlspace
that i am joined by your divinity. when you were told
you were the goddess of thresholds, did you feel joy
or fear? in the yard we have a door rotting into 
the earth. sometimes i hear a knocking. is that you? 

croning ceremony

i have yet to learn how to stop catching
on fire. i hope one day i can be 
a wisdom to someone. that they will say,
"teach me what the mailboxes taught you." 
i am less & less sure about the color of water. 
once a teacher told me in elementary school 
that the water is blue because the sky is blue which
prompted me to ask, "why is the sky blue?"
she moved on. the sky is blue because
it is worried & sometimes because it is furious.
i saw someone i know had a croning ceremony.
they gathered & knit her a crow of fingers.
she is old now & she is stunning & she is 
lighting fires instead of taking them. i feel
skeptical of the word "wisdom" but especially
in association to myself. most of my lessons are
un-lessons. i joke that in the village times i would
have been dead a long time ago from trying to eat
the poke berries that grow so bright in august. 
maybe i could have been the test creature.
the learning point where the other would find out
that not everything glowing is edible. that not
all bruises are on the surface. a stomach is
a resting place & sometimes a cage. i keep 
all the birds i can. i have to admit i do fantasize 
about being croned. about people coming to me
with their fears & their trials so that i can give them
haphazard advice. kiss the tree. climb the boy.
when you catch on fire, don't try to put it out.
instead, walk somewhere other people can see.
it is raining today in the spring so that means
the toads will be talking. i go outside to see if
any of them are interested in being my mother.
of course i have a mother but i am greedy.
none of my elders ever tried to give me wisdom.
instead, they fed me. pastrami. toll house cookies.
sitting on the shag carpet. their houses turning 
into trampolines. maybe wisdom is just a story 
between our skin & time. the toads sing. 
my hair falls out. my ancestors' bones, windchime. 

ghost kitchen

there are not enough hands. sometimes
also not enough teeth. you tell me
about a restaurant that opens 
only in the depths of your night shift.
all kinds of bones. people are renting out
their tongues on air bnb. people are
opening their trunks & offering the dead
a little place to lay down but only
for the cost of a firework. the kitchen is 
hot. sweat & phantomness. the ghosts
are tired as all ghosts are. are we all
ghosts now? i have found myself
delivering food to a stranger. the glow
of their porch. their apartment like
an obelisk on the moon's back. street parking
in a snowstorm. our mirrors, like heels.
you said you ate your heart our there.
bought everything the ghost kitchen had
to offer, worried that one evening it would
be gone for good. breading. fire. 
knees like dinner plates. i sleep in 
someone's crawl space. it is cheaper than
my parents' house. less ants. more bulls. 
you tell me to wake up with you in 
the sweet dark. to open the app circus
& speak to the ghosts. i never do. you are
disappointed. a body can only bear 
so many hauntings. a halo of grease where
ghost flesh becomes yours. a hot pan cools
on someone's stovetop. they drink a tall 
glass of tap water. each of us return
to our ghost duties. you, the night shift.
me, daybreak. 

spoonfeedings

if you really love me i want 
to be the airplane mouth. 
i want you to cut down a tree
& carve me boxes to keep all my eyes in.
it's tick season out here which means
everyone is crawling around in
each other's hair. i really do 
want to spend forever with you
but i know it's going to turn me
into a sock puppet. my father
& i liked to make puppets as kids.
we always used pennies for eyes.
copper & glinting. a flower blooms
in the toilet. i flush it down.
i have gotten to the point where
i judge what is beautiful based on
what you'd think of it. i hedge my bets.
i hide what i can. i open my mouth 
& wait for the freight train to plow
down my throat. i am opening cabinets 
in your heart looking for something
to nibble on. sweet & salty. you tell me
you need me to sleep in the yard
with the goats. i weep with joy.
it is all i've ever wanted to finally 
become a ruminant. another stomach
to keep my sadness. the sweet smell
of fresh hay. the moon, spoonfeeding
us stories about the old earth where
there were only candles & then
even before that when the dark 
tasted of melon. you sleep longer than me.
i wake up. my teeth hurt from grinding them.
i thought i was sleeping but maybe i wasn't. 
there's a tick on my leg. i have 
pennies for eyes. the sun, a penny too
flips herself. lands on heads. 

cow songs

i wake up to a house
full of cows. they are concerned about
the possibility of the draft.
they read a news article that the government
is expanding its idea of soldiers 
to include anything with flesh. 
i try to calm them but it is not worth it.
instead, i resolve to be distraught together.
they start laying down. a sign of impending rain.
we have so much to weep over. we cannot lay yet. 
their bones, making soup of the house. 
the first time i milked a cow we were
at the town fair. she seemed exhausted.
the heat of the summer in her body.
my hands sweaty & unsure. she asked me,
"will my children be stars?" she meant
glimmering in the dark. i did not know
how to lie & so i answered honestly,
"i am not sure." if i could go back i would
tell her, "of course." sometimes we need
to be lied to. often, at night, i will beg
my lover to lie to me. he does not like
to do that but the cows do. i have always
been closer to other animals.
especially grass-eaters. they know
how heavy a root is. i admit to the cows,
"we are probably going to be eaten."
they respond, "better to be eaten than to
do the eating. then you only die once."
i take a walk with the cows down to 
the lake that forms at the bottom of the hill
after a rain fall. they lay down. the frogs
in the pond have tiny tiny bones. 
we try to savor fragments of the day.
clementine sun. strong breeze. i see the thorny arches
of wine berries that'll grow. i can taste 
their bursting. only a few months now. 
the cows do not ask again what we are going to do
about the war or about our flesh.
instead, they tell me, "lay down with us,
it is going to rain again." i tell them i am scared. 
they do not respond. in the cow world,
it is considered polite to not respond if you
have nothing else to say. tomorrow maybe
we can stampede. maybe we can 
open all the windows to the sky. today, 
the clouds unfurl. soak the soil. 
toads crawl free from the earth & sing. 

binding spell

i tie the trees to the soil. far too many
have climbed into cloud forest. 
i beg them to stay. watch foxes get swallowed
by a passing black hole. i am unsure
if i should funeral them or treat them
like childhood friends who i no longer 
see or speak to. once i did a binding spell
when my lover told me she wanted
to move away. it did not work.
i began to question the efficacy of
my techniques. candles & salt.
they looked so mundane on my bookshelf. 
her airplane was a sea gull. 
the city turned off all its lights & i felt
along the ground to find our ways home.
empty trains rattling across the tracks.
their knocking, more hollow than usual 
without all the marrow. i missed 
my own window which was taken
by fingermen trying to put a cap 
on all my dreaming. luckily, i have
never needed a hole to sing through. 
i made a secret door inside a book.
did she some back or did i make that up?
a race car tore through town & in the morning
there were huge skid marks from stopping
right before the train tracks. these days
i do not use candles. i use thorns & bones.
i use the flowers who grow along
the eyebrows of the hill. it still mostly
doesn't work. people leave. do they take
all their love with them? i bury a bottle
in every open palm i meet. when they
unearth them, they find the vessel
thrumming with minnow or, on a bad day,
a restless knot of bees.