invented languages after diane seuss i open my mouth & a bucket of ice comes out. there must be a way to admit i was once a paper bag full of ripening bananas. take all the trips you want, your belly button will still be waiting like a push-pin. when i sleep on your tongue i always hear exactly what you really wanted to say which was, "i love you too, i love you too, i love you too." why do we deny ourselves the sugar bowl? instead i take the ice & make a dialect only we will understand. here is your tall glass of lemonade. here is your summer. let's not be hasty though there is time to come to dislike each other's breath. for now, let's be the lexicon of dust. from between my teeth a new thread emerges. one i can use to tie all the birds to the ground for the night. under this moon, no words will go missing. we will remember every ocean we've ladeled fish from to make children out of. i want again the kind of speech the burns down row houses. dark of a good collision. do you really want me to talk? because i will talk & talk until i am deep in the tongues of moss & soil & water & you will be there wondering about how i heard your dreams so loud & clean. i have a daguerreotype of all your musings. you eat ice with your fingers.
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1/26
parking lot sea gulls outside china king buffet today the earth is a powdered donut. throwing watermelon rinds at the sun to worship. we come to reclaim the wild of an afternoon. i come barefoot to the broken glass. a tea bag in my mouth painting my soul amber. the bread comes presliced. communion is communion is communion. contential breakfast served for everyone with a pair of headlights. the daughters are birds & they don't take no for an answer. all my genders turn unruly. whatever we must do to secure the dumpster when the celebrations have turned to funeral pyres. i count birds until my fingers undergo mitosis in the process. we come to catelog each others dreams. i am hungry in a way only the birds know. their ocean is a jello tray. their mothers, garbage & junk & unwanted skulls. this is where i come from: cementeries beneath cementeries. an antenae picking up the video games of whales. signals from alien spaceships unsure of where to land. the open sign says, "here is where you can feed your monsters." there is no where to park because dinosaurs are roaming across all the spaces. neon promised atrician. i dwindle in the way the human tail did. less & less until it was just a comma on a life. let's eat all we can.
1/25
trophy maker's lover some nights when we cross pathes in the wild dark of our home i see him as the golden man, the statue atop a parade of pillars & glitter. what does it mean to be triumphant? he kneels in the shadow of his idols. moves thumbs smoothly across stickers. presses down glue for plastic shards of joy. his creations are usually sold in bulk. colonies of golden men & women. every so often he makes a trophy that he loves so much he cannot part with. then, it stands in the corner of our room keeping vigil over the talk of old lovers. we met years ago when the moon was still canteloupe. now, i worry i am feasting on plates of ice cubes. there are always victors. more & more. children & men & girls & people with hungry faces. all the houses where my lover stands, a golden man atop a temple. always, he is telling them, "look how worthy you were." is it selfish to want him all to myself? his study thumbs. we drink each other dry. turn out the light. his knees. my shoudlers. the night's archetecture. i want to whisper to him, "tell me i am someone. not with plastic gold but with your mouth."
1/24
maximalism of course i am haunted by the tombs of kings. their golden bounce castles & jupiter guitars & bones of all their lovers as if you could hold on tight enough to make the big dark television forget to reap you. i am a disciple of too-much-ness. give me a graveyard of silver shoes or a wall of carnival masks to try on. we go to the goodwill again because it is raining & we are dragons. what keeps me alive is the thought that treasure will give me a place to hold my heart for the night. it always is seeking a new nest. i do not know what taught me this kind of longing. i do not think of it as "filling a void" but rather as "giving the void a home." i had a lover once with clean empty walls in her apartment. i thought, "this person is too alive for me." she had a land line. she ate kneeling on the floor. i never saw her again. but even the animals can be like me. i found once in the deep forest a nest of bells. how the bird must have harvested these little voices. am i a tomb then? or else maybe like the bird just a nest a hoarder of bells?
1/23
pie lattices for an abandoned life i folded our escape ladder from dough. all the bakers were smoking on their porches & dreaming of their mothers. an oven is not a destination, it is a tongue. an airport. strip malls & diners flicker there. wooden knuckles. laying hand over hand over hand. i used to capture doves to sell them to the moon for their paleness. bird eyes in a bowl alongside jewels. haven't you ever bitten into a piece of cake & found the baby? right there with his face a cathedral? where we lived there were bars on the windows. security systems with names like "haven" & "vigil." don't you remember how i would hold your hand & feed you blueberries until you were sick? no? or was that another lover? it is a shame to lose track of your own skin. i want someone to love me enough to weave a blanket. once, my mother made one & i lost it in a fit of yolks. what i am trying to say is there wasn't enough rhubarb or strawberries or peaches. there wasn't enough blueberries or apples. we had to eat one another. the bakers are still smoking on their porches. bells ring to signal the death of another day. nothing is lattice at least not tonight. i kiss you only when you are not looking & you do the same to me.
1/22
house wife i put gender in the casserole dish tonight. then, my heart is in the crock pot if you want a taste of museums. tell me what a windowsill is for & i will tell you where the space shuttles launch from. in the television room everyone floats two inches off the ground but i am the only one who notices. mine is a gender of vigils. of noticing where my body is asked to move. microwave children with their steam laden faces. when the mailbox is decapitated by a neighbor boy with a baseball bat, i stand in the yard mouth open, waiting for the world to come. a door has little to do with the inside & more to do with that is on its way. when dealing in hauntings, it is best to light a candle or a match & not a flashlight. i fill the nursery with bananas & telephones. someone will call soon. someone will be sweet soon. let's not be afraid of the next gender walk into. instead, let us feast on soup bones. let us wait for everyone to vanish into their hungers. car horn. dimes. then, we will go to the basement to feed the beast. fingers like dolies. a house dress. apron. wooden spoon pounding against the wall all on its own. it's craving salted water. pasta. meatloaf. lover. lurid. fork scraping teeth.
1/21
petrify throwing stones at the neighbors house they turned into flip phones. once i texted scripture to my boyfriend & he told me he wanted to be turned into a statue. we were children in the petrified forest where all the trees wore their used-to-be through & through. my fingers fell off one by one. i begged my father to make it stop but he was already a stump. colors of moss & amber in his face. i love to sit on his back & think about perminance. the moon grew a lush beard & refused to shave. i have become more & more interested in learning what remains after transformation. is the old me inside a box somewhere for a future scientist to say, "yes here is a fragment" or is the tree living inside the stone. was the tree always a stone? i don't know what i would gain by knowing most answers but there is a pizza delivery car with it's blinkers on outside & i need someone to come & deliver a past to me just like this. i just want to know if my bones once housed moss & lichen & if maybe they will again. we walked in the forest & the forest was the inside of everyone's chest. was a glove box. was a telephone. to be a creature is to go this between. between now & then. between bones. ribs. through femurs & trees.
1/20
baby socks will i ever be small enough to fit inside your pocket dimension? i have been eating from the garbage bin all week & i discovered a photo album of lover on the beach. this is where it all goes, right? to the stomach of a wandering monster. i do not wish i wasn't human. i'm not human. i don't understand baby socks. a better use for those little pieces of fabric would be to house lost eyes. once i lost an eye & i had to dig in the yard for years. finally i unearthed the little marble only for it turn into a prism, catching every rainbow. now, i see oil spills. i see jellyfish weddings & festivals of birds. i do understand wanting to be cradled. i want to go to the biggest tree i can find & say, "could you open your arms for one last time for me." my heart is a place for bees. honey sick. the winter will thin me to the width of an envelope. don't count on me to be here when the garbage men come. we are enemies from a distance. they remove & i fill & fill. in the end, i am the guilty one. the one filling baby socks with eyes & stealing for the smaller planets. eating the rind of a soured watermelon until i am glimmering full of the fruit's black eyes.
1/19
prom night i was a blue bird inside the television. all of us with our photography desires. my friend who played piano as we ate cheese in plastic dresses. a match stick burned all night. when we kissed they were like fruit snacks. pressing your shape into that of a cartoon grape. i was never so greedy as that honeydew. your fingers as horses. the fields outside town were full of our shoes. so so many shoes. you scooped me up & we got married but only in the eyes of the foxes. forks scraping plates. a chaperone who followed us into the mouth of the cave. i was not in love with you. i wanted to be you. i wanted to be the boy inside a corsage. pin in my mouth. posing for the title sequence. i stood alone in the bathroom looking at my scattered eyes. all over the ceiling. all over the stall doors. a boy there in the girls room & i thought, "am i also?" bowling balls hurled from your roof. to be young is to not know you are young. the scrap book will say we were finite & somehow also infinite. my socks in the creek your camera roll under the dead oak tree.
1/18
grave tending i pull the weeds out of the keyboard. draft an email to god in which i tell him we should be allowed to choose the mug our spirit goes into. that is the only explanation i can think of for how many coffee mugs exist in our house. they are the returned spirits of revenge seekers. i buy weed killer & spray a sigil into the lawn. now there's a portal to hell. portals are not all they're cracked up to be. mostly, i just watch as whales come & go from the soil. sigh. if only i owned a graveyard. i would go out there every day & read to the dead. i would say "story time" & bring the hungry caterpillar or maybe where the wild things are. all ghosts are bisexual. it's just a fact. i get on my knees. fake flowers are the highest dishonor you could give a loved one. i yank them from the throat of a tombstone. what the dead need are graphics cards & motherboards. they want to play computer games. they're bored. if you're going to go with flowers you have to plant them. you have to push their baby toes into the soil & say, "make the dead happy." overall, the dead are not happy. many of them hoped for an afterlife & all they get is the kind of lingering that a july storm leaves in the minutes after it stops. sticky. humid. but never ending. i tell them, "i am here" & "i am your mother now." yes, i would be a great grave tender. the television is full of eels. i flick it on to watch a video of myself falling asleep. do you feel like a game inside a game? i do but i shake it off & eat some microwave vegetables & kick my shoes off by the door.