gun dinner

all rich people's houses are confessions.
i am empty. i am hungry. i am searching. 
i saw a picture weeks ago of dr. phil's house.
he has a case of guns watching over
his dining room table. they are his children
or is it his children in a glass case & guns
sitting at the table. big guns & little guns.
guns to kill lovers & guns to kill enemies.
the myth of the intruder like a halo 
in the communion place. the truth is that
rich people cannot eat dinner. cannot break 
bread. instead they participate in mimicry 
on a large scale. the double doll house.
invite people over. talk to money. talk to guns.
i like to picture dr. phil sitting alone
at the end of his huge table. does he sit 
looking at the guns or with the guns behind him?
i imagine he asks himself the same question.
maybe he tries to consider where a stronger 
man than him might sit. the confession 
comes in medallions. my enemies are symbols
to me just like my weapons just like
my staircases just like my love. in my house
our table has only one chair because 
the other broke. it sits in the corner next
to the furnace. the windows soak us 
in night. none of my lovers are guns. 
we do not have to erect monuments to 
our emptiness. i keep nothing in a glass case. 
the dust, a blessing. our skin & hair & breath. 
the chairs made of guns. the chairs behind
glass. curtains drawn. night keeps them
at an arm's length. sleepless in a bed
of guns. may they never rest. 

amaranth 

stuck in your song teeth,
we invented red with our necks.
i watched the pearls shrink
in my mouth like throat lozenges. 
the summer did not
hold us like we hoped it would.
a porch light turned into a ship.
i sailed as far away from language
as i could. when i don't wake up in time
i pretend i am a toad in the wet 
soft earth surviving winter.
i call my father & leave a message.
he does not call me back. the jevoha's witnesses
send us recruitment letters 
& i whisper to the paper 
until they become birds.
every deserves a chance at the elsewhere.
i love shirking my duties. i love 
the rare moments when i am
not a tool of some monster machine.
when i bead a plant & the plant talks
about how she stumbled upon her color. 
the amaranth grows in my sleep world.
i wake up counting seeds, messing up
& starting again. they are even smaller than
a mustard seed. i dream of horses
fitting inside the grain. i see my reflection
the size of a blink. the size of short breath.
i give up on counting & just start
filling the bath with the tiny seeds.
on the skin they feel like snakes rolled
into pockets of night. i have never known
the sky to stay put. i have a friend
who is three feet in the spirit world.
they call me & tell me their house burned down
& i believe them. who will believe us?
ask them if they have spoken yet
to the plants in their yard. they realize
they have not. not for a long time.
sage & yarrow. they are alright for now
just like i am alright for now. for now.
the amaranth makes a promise that one day
i will be as small as one of the seeds.
relief floods my bones. i spend the rest
of the night sleep-walking in the garden.
when the plants die, they always sing. 

an ark

i call my father & ask him
to build me an ark. he is a man
of wood chips & splinters.
he does not ask where & what for.
instead he asks, "how big?"
i drive to my childhood home
where he is painting birds
into the sky. i lay down in the grass
& tell him to measure me. 
the ark just needs to be big enough
for me to lay down. what i love
about my father is that he does not
question me anymore. understands
that we are both glass ships
in a sea of teeth. moves the wood
across the saw blade. shapes the plants
& the bow. shapes the mast & the rutters.
i have never asked him about the flood.
about how our mouths filled with water
& drown out the languages there.
we speak in a wayward tongue. clips
of mountains & a drawer full of acid-burn socks.
when he is finish he will arrive an hour
early to my house. the ark, bigger
than it needs to be but, as a father,
he is always worrying i do not have enough.
together we walk through the ark.
touch the wood. marvel at it. i remind him
that once we hung a back door
to my house. it took all afternoon
with the goats laughing at our follies.
i consider briefly telling him to stay. asking if
he would live in the land-locked ark. 
neither of us are a prophet. instead, we are
survivors of a dammed river. the lamprey
that knot themselves in our lungs.
an ocean, thick as broth, rising
as the rain starts. 

blue suitcase 

i start a runaway inspiration folder.
street signs & shoes & a house 
in an unknown countryside. 
on tiktok i keep seeing videos of people
who never stop traveling. a month in each country.
i do not want this for myself but maybe i do. 
you can get wrapped up in remedy-thinking.
this is what i need then this then this. 
the wind keeps making birds each morning. 
i see a video of one white girl
in thailand who says, "i was never home
until i came here." i feel confused about
what home means to me & what home means
to her & what the distance is there.
being a poet is maybe less about charting gaps
as it is about surfacing them. the more i talk
the less i understand language. i used to have
a blue suitcase. i packed it when i wanted
to leave home but i had no where to go.
as a little girl i would fill it with stuff animals
& sunflower seeds. i would carry it to the park.
open the suitcase beneath my favorite tree
& welcome the bug neighbors. the suitcase used
to belong to my aunts. i like to imagine what
& how they filled it. did they fold their dresses
or toss them in like i usually do with my own clothes.
they seem like fold-dress people. my favorite part
about the suitcase was its hard shell the color
of a really picture-book blue sky. if you weren't careful
it would try to return to the heavens,
socks & all. the last time i packed it i think i was
coming back from a break between semesters
of college. i wondered if i could fit my whole body
into the suitcase. if then i could beg
someone else to carry me. the girl's video is short.
i wonder if she sleeps with a fan or if
she's one of those people who like to let
the dark feast on their bones. i am the former 
though sometimes my nights are full of 
blue suitcases. i have gone our to the car & started
the engine with nowhere to go. where it is, 
i hope the suitcase is full. 

pig

i beg you to take me to the fair.
i want to look at the pigs. i want to
make my petition to join them.
i am not concerned about whether 
or not they are meat pigs. i have been meat
for most of my life & i am unafraid 
of ending things like that. i just hope
i'm a dumpling or something & not
those dry pork chops mom used to make.
the pigs are all catholic which is ironic for reasons
i don't completely remember. when my family
still did church we were all in. we went
from house to house with a group of families
& talked about bible stuff, most of which
i do not remember. most of their houses
were huge. i loved the one with hot tubs best.
i remember thinking that they must
be extra holy. i always thought my family
was missing something. 
what does this have to do with pigs 
you might be wondering? nothing at all 
except for the fact that i find them
to be holy. when i say
i want to be a pig i don't just mean
because of their size & certainly not because
they are intelligent. i mean i want to be
the cathedral when i walk down the street.
i mean just one blue ribbon could save me.
heat turns us into fried eggs. we don't 
make it to the fair. all the pigs grow wings
& roost on the power lines, which makes me question
whether or not i am in a sticker book.
i hope for more opportunities to be heretical
in the coming months. when i am a pig
i will come visit on holidays & you can
feed me your hands one at a time. 
then, i'll know how to play piano. then,
all those catholic families will tithe 
in eyelashes. did you know that pigs have
their own churches? i am ready to be all in. 
don't eat me, it's friday. don't eat me
it's lent. there is still time. the sun has arms.
you could be a pig too. 

vacancy 

we were in oklahoma when 
my ids started to vacant themselves.
i opened my wallet to find
my little portrait had escaped from my license
& then, worse, my passport. i don't 
even think i can get one of those anymore
on account of the fascism. 
the land was flat there & you could see
someone winking from miles away.
i stared out & could not find where
that small body had run to. i searched 
in the fields & beneath a pecan tree 
& in the guts of a ripe persimmon (so sweet).
i missed the abundance of trees
where i'm from in pennsylvania's 
brushy brows. next came my credit cards.
they vacated my name. became nothing
but plastic & hunger. i chewed them
as we drove & laughed. i tried writing
my name back but it would not stick.
i even lost the image of me from the 
expired license & the id from my old school
where i am not smiling & my dead name
was printed like a threat
in horrible letters. i did not tell my partner. 
i wanted to figure this out myself. 
i bought a neon sign that said, "vacancy"
in the hopes that someone, anyone 
would come & take up residence,
no matter how brief, in my cards.
there are rooms the size of refrigerators 
& rooms the size of tongues. 
i eventually found my parts. they were
on the shore of a man-dug lake
that smelled like rotten apples. i picked 
myselves up. considered leaving them there.
what if i escaped my own faces? where would
the rest of me go? i washed my forms off
in the questionable water & pressed 
my teeth & eyes back into the cards. 
birds haloed in the air as if to suggest,
"maybe there is someone dying."
once back in the hotel, i went into 
the bathroom & laid all the ids & credit cards
out on the floor & stared at them
to make sure they were really back.
people still call me about the vacancy sign.
once in while, one will arrive at my door
& i will let them sleep in my portrait 
for the night. we should make room
when one another are lost. i wonder 
sometimes if my likeness slept elsewhere
while they were lost. regardless,
they are not willing to tell me. 

vortex

during our semi-annual
armageddon, i bought a machine
to suck the house flies from the air.
a tiny vortex that sang 
old show tunes (which i hate).
it did not catch as many flies
as i would have hoped it could.
instead, i woke up many mornings
tangled in the light. myself, a sort
of housefly with my eyes 
like shiny snow globes & the windows 
bleating for the moon. i am prone 
to traps. once, as a girl, i tried to free
a mouse from a glue trap & ended up
getting stuck too. i made it out
alive & they did not. the vortex lives
beneath the house sometimes 
& other days it lives in my ribs &
other days, when i am particularly anxious,
it lives right behind my teeth. 
i find myself the fly catch. the piles
of shiny celophane wings. the hunger
for just a needle-prick's worth
of blood. dear god the vortex is 
beautiful when you let it get big.
i imagined myself opening
all the windows & letting the plague in.
the end times like a flock of 
horrors. i never did. i hung on. 
we brushed the vortex until 
it could fit again into the palm of
my hand. the tax man has a ray gun
& he is standing at the end 
of the driveway. i do not want to be
so close to so many vortexes & yet
i also want to be inside them. 
deep in the wild guts. a turning 
not so much like a drain but more
like a microwave show. call me a hot pocket
or a house fly. i have a heart
the size of a clicked tongue
& i am terrified. 

ribbon cutting for my wretched mouth

there are people who buy land
just to eat it. i have seen them
in the old field with their fingers
dug pie-deep. they talk to each other 
in money religion. i order a bird online
& she arrives dead. didn't you order
a dead bird? tell us how we're doing.
give us all your teeth & we'll refund you
the breath you used. it's not looking good.
it's not looking good at all. i once
dated a pillow. he was really a pretty good
gentleman. do the items i stole from target
when i was a different gender 
count towards my total? i braided 
my hair for years you just couldn't see it. 
i arrive at the party. there is no party
just a few people gathered around 
a ballon trying to stay warm. 
the piano is out of tune but we sing.
we sing like a revolving door.
all my friends want to move to somewhere
better. we are somewhere better. this is
the better somewhere. that is just
my way of saying that i think we have
to try. i sometimes have horrible visions
of running for a political. just like
everyone thinks they could be
a better parents, everyone thinks
they could be a better empire. if i ever do that,
take me out to my parents' garage
& leave me there for a winter, feeding me
nothing but wild onions. i am holding
a gathering that you are not invited to.
it is just for me & the flies in the kitchen. 
a little ribbon across my lips. maybe now
i can tell the truth. maybe now 
when i open my mouth you will see
the tiny girl standing there. to have
a gender is to have another gender inside.
i'm sorry we're closed. our operating hours
are from here to salvation. i am just
trying to get here. snow falls for
the first time this year. 

tomato sauce

i open all the cans 
& the vines come back to life. 
i saw you standing in the sink
eating a tomato like an apple.
it was my heart. there is not
enough basil to cover my body.
the truth always moves like
amaranth everywhere & still
somehow unholdable. there are
no trees left to cut down. you buy
a new face & wave it outside 
the window to attract the flowers
that make me sick. i call my mom
& hang up. i call a hotline & talk
to the woman as if she's my dad.
gender for me is a fallow field.
i don't have anything left to sew
so i have to run. i remember 
my mother making tomato sauce.
the house full of steam. my husbands
pressing their noses to the window.
if you marry me i think i'll die
but i also don't know what else
i would even do. can you donate
your body to science while you're
still alive? i want to be fire wood.
not burned at the stake i mean
limb by limb the way the trees go. 
a warmth in the living room
for the dogs to sleep beneath. 
if you loved me, we would have
gone to mars already. if you loved me
we would have made pasta. 
there is a house made of sauce cans
that i climb into for the night.
it is cold & no one believes me.
i have gotten to the point where
i hold onto my beliefs like tomato seeds.
small & slimy. no matter what 
my frost does, they crawl back.
i whisper, "please please. i cannot.
not yet. not now. not now." 

1 gram of gold

chewing-gum sized,
the piece of gold still glinted
in the neon light of our attic.
i thought i had found a transformation.
a way out of the number curtains
that spilled over every hunger.
my mother wore a calculator 
like a lung. we honeysuckled 
on every stained-glass vision
that would paint us. the gold was
in a little plastic sleave. i held it to my chest
as i walked up noble street 
towards the farmer's market
where the pawn stand had once bought
my fingernails & the tip of my tongue.
i started to get money sick.
filled thousands of shopping carts 
in my guts. pushed them towards
radio heaven. the shop was stoic.
wore a military green hat & had a 
lopsided beard. he took the gold piece
from me. my heart, a fruit salad. 
laid the gold on the scale. 1 gram.
it seemed like so much. i did not think
i had ever witnessed so much. 
he slid the gold back to me. 
told me, "it's too small to be worth
me buying it." confused i asked him
how much he though it was worth.
"a few dollars," he said. i did not
have any more words. i took the gold
& carried it home in my pocket.
i looked at it only once before 
placing it back in the box i found it in. 
my reflection in the metal, 
briefly glorious.