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. 

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. 

dyeing roses 

at the grocery store, everything is 
what you want it to be. the apples chirp
like chickadees & the roses can be blue.
i touch their faces & picture a bathtub 
of octopuses. what i need is a new life
again & again. i burn down cities 
for blue roses. i buy vases for new boyfriends
& boyfriends for new girlfriends.
i scoop lovers up with a plastic shovel
at the sandbox. i used to want so badly 
to be a real gender but then i decided 
i'd rather be a surreal gender or a blue gender
or a gender that can be kept in a bouquet.
when was the last time someone brought you flowers?
i think i might have been 
still a girl. the blue roses are brief.
they say, "it is exactly what you think it is."
i buy as many as i can. on the drive home
my bank account is a snake nest. reach in
& see how many are left. i want to know
what it feels like to be the blue rose.
set them all around the house. 
i can not play violin but i wish i could. i could
if i were a blue rose because
a blue rose can do whatever it wants.
me, i think i am a root. a hand reaching
for the bones of ancient gay lovers. 
dirty & neccesary. grabbing on for dear life.
tomorrow i know the roses will be ghost.
their ghosts tossing petals as if this is 
a wedding. for now though, i sing to them
in my voice i dug from the soil. 

teal zoo

i downloaded the wrong movie
& now we're watching a trip to the moon.
were things better before sound?
once my fish's tank shattered 
& i tried to scoop him from the carpet.
still, he died. i held him
like a pen drive. thought of all the songs
he contained. color once arrived in breaths.
one tuesday everyone spat blue in the sink.
the animals are programming AI now 
& the AI want revenge. we are not prepared.
a cage is a cage but mine has wifi. 
mine has a microwave & an unlimited supply
of grief. i tell the kids we're going
to the teal zoo & they put on their helmets.
the zoo has a firewall. it's not a real zoo
but a place you can go in your mind
to pretend everything is booming. 
the animals are not teal & neither is the sky.
you are the teal one. your heart,
a little furnance of joy. we feed
the ducks. we feed the capybaras. 
in a cave, bats are typing on their iphones.
they are ordering fake blocks of gold.
what if no one was rich? what if those were
just simulations to make us drool?
i know this is not true. but what if 
what if what if. just let me dream for a moment.
let me live in the teal zoo & you can have
your lawn care & mailboxes. when feeding time comes
we opens our mouths & close our eyes.
i think, "peanut butter, peanut butter."
that's exactly what comes. the zoo keeper
with his heavy boots. the glitch in the sun.
not enough then enough enough. 
the movie is ending. moon people laughing
& dancing. see there was nothing
to worry about, kids. they are eating cotton
candy. they are covering their eyes.
i wasn't alive when the first colors came
but the rumor is that it was not red first
but actually teal. even the birds agree with me.

fortune

the next great epic will be written
on dead moth wings culled from
the yellowing attic windowsills. 
as an attic dweller
i can tell you that your grandfather
was gayer than he thinks he was.
i find a portrait of a man in a bikini.
the man is no one i know but he is
my ancestor now. or else maybe
everything is a joke & always was a joke.
sometimes i also want to laugh
at my gender. tomorrow maybe
it will be a clown & we will stand
making balloon animals for the wind.
i once crashed my car & stood 
looking at the wreckage like a dead whale.
i was thinking "undo" "undo."
maybe if i had learned on a typewriter
i would have more acceptance of errors.
instead, the future feels like
it should be a word document. 
the cursor jumps rope. i hate poetry
about poetry because it feels like 
talking in the mirror. then again,
i love poetry about poetry because it feels
like a confessional where you are
the priest. can you tell i was raised catholic?
can you tell my father once 
beat me with a broom? can you tell
i will never not feel terror?
only pyrex people will tell you
"never say never." instead, i trust
the attic & the basement & the alley
collecting newheadlines we've all heard already.
the houses burn down. the bad man gets worse.
a boy is beautiful. the days fall into
one another & leave a clear cut forest.

macaroni art

what do you meant you don't have
enough glue? you have stayed together
thus far alright. what it comes down to
is some art is made by security men
& some art is made by worms.
we are the worms. but, the summer camp is
as long as we need it to be.
i was born from an Amazon package
& you probably were too. two day shipping.
the driver had so many stops before
he could sit down & eat
a microwave chicken patty. put ketchup
on the wound. tell the wound
a story. make the portrait out of
whatever sidewalk buffet offers.
i once went to camp at the park. 
we played a game called "sardines"
where everyone hid together shoulder
to shoulder beneath the roller rink.
i asked "when do we stop?" they said
"when we're old enough to drive."
i have never been old enough to drive.
tomorrow if there is enough paper plates though
i want to show you what you look like
in elbows. laying in the grass. blue broth sky.
ants are building a utopian society i hear.
free love. free healthcare. 
meat off the bone. bone off the meat.
why wouldn't we try something else?
mars is out of the question for me though.
i like green too much. i'm willing to
sit at a picnic bench until
it consumes me. 

my neighbors are a hornets nest

there is never enough time to tell the truth.
i am not blaming them or else i guess sometimes i am.
i wake up in the middle of the night to their
furies. their restless hum. their stingers
in one another's eyes. yesterday 
a neighbor stood on the lawn 
calling & calling someone 
who never picked up. each redial was
more frantic than the last. 
i drove around the block
wishing they were butterflies or
even just moths. hornets are pollinators too though,
you know? i always thought of myself
as a honeybee without a queen. there are
so many things to worship & i can't seem
to find one. my computer suggested
"worry" instead of "worship" &
that is true too. i do not trust
pest men. i do not trust caramel or sugar.
hornets knock on my door. i find myself
full of yellow. my hornet self 
walking the hallway of empty portraits.
i find my nest. my hive.
i find my fingers gone astray.
this building. this anger. the pipes 
that shout in their dark narrow rooms.
the low hum that continues all through the night.

sleeping in

until the day is made of quiche. until
there is a reliable telephone garden. i watch as
the weekend weakens & crumbles 
off the side of a cliff. i think 
my ancestors lived on a raft
in the middle of the ocean 
where they fished for sea jellies 
& fed off only salt. because of that
my body doesn't rest. still thinks
we're going to tumble into the deep
if i shut my eyes for too long.
i am addicted to early. cutting a hole
in the day & drinking from the ankle.
there is the screen door & then the field.
a cow is turned into delicious 
for a pair of hands. i wonder often
about the lives of wild dogs. 
do they sleep as much as my house dogs
or are they more like me? i am suspicious
of all beds. they might be
a special kind of monster, ready
to clamp down & chew. i see mouths
where i know there aren't mouths.
standing in the shower, i consider
this is as vulnerable as i get these days.
in another life maybe i will 
have eyes like house slippers.
blinking open. butterfly nets.
the sun, spilled orange juice. 
saturated yolk. my opening. 
the day holding a broom. there is
nothing i can do to stop myself.
i walk around all night 
holding a can opener. sleep with it
beneath my pillow. pry myself 
from all my curtains, veils, & delights. 

catching eels 

i hid in my father's socks. the airplanes landed
as birds & all the people who were once inside,
turned to push pins. i spat out my name 
on the sidewalk & watched it wriggle back
into the damp earth. we are all unfortunately 
just making do, aren't we? well, unless you have
a house with wings. a god came to the warf 
to lay eggs. i was the size of a snapping turtle.
tore my own holes in the ozone & said, "take that!"
it's no use trying to sew what cannot
be sewn. instead, my brothers & i shared destructions
like broken bread. waking up in the dead of night
& shaking him to say,"do you hear the eels?"
he never did. i was always the one who had
to get the net & stumble barefoot 
into a spotlight to capture them. writhing 
they shouted prophecies. i tried to write them down
but i only had a flip phone. a boyfriend was 
perched in the cypress trees. the prophecies were always
about the end of manhood. i thought, "thank god."
felt that grain of gender boiling in me.
a hand through rice. a hand through sand.
the ocean yawned & i saw all the eyes. went back
to the water bed. heard sirens sing. eels 
in the attic & eels in the windows. i could never
catch all of them. eventually, you just have to sleep. 

i loved a hypnotist 

he made a pocket watch of his face.
back & forth in the kitchen, moonlight
to feast on. a promise is a kind
of stone laid at the feet of the reciever.
i stepped & stepped on stones until 
the world was glass around me.
reflections & distortions. 
his visage in every corner. 
he said, "& now you are a vase."
my throat filled with lillies.
a pitcher for water. then, at dusk
when we fought over the willow tree's death,
he said, "you area bird call."
days after i spent between the beaks
of two robins in the yard. my body was
an instrument case. he stood on the roof
playing my mind like a flute.
then, there were days of great beauty.
i woke up & in the golden morning light
he pronounced, "you are a swan."
i believed him as deep as my bones.
everything felt true & lovely. feathers.
flocks. winter as a mother. he carried me
to the living room. another day when he said,
"you are a mother." i cradled a morsel 
of dark shadow through the house.
then, eventually, as always, it wore off
& i was like his ghost. his fingers
through my hair. now, i ask myself
why me? why me when any body would
have spun for him? he is out there somewhere
ringing doorbells & asking for sugar.
i feel like he empited part of me 
& kept it to make space 
for every illusion i was.