sleeping bag full of candlesticks 

i lug my nighttime over my shoulder.
there are children gathered again
in the basement. they eat fruit snacks
& have a seance for a dead rabbit.
the rabbit says, "we should light 
a fire." so we do. me & the children.
they all have my eyes. i know i am
going organism all over again.
clementines rolling through pastures.
trees full of shoelaces. i am the one
who brings the candles. gifts from
ghost bees. everyone's mother
in sleeping in their bell jar. it is
only us. only the licorice sky.
each of us with a candle. little galaxy.
flickering spirit. flies come to die 
at our feet. we are the baby teeth
& the tall tale told backwards.
the fire comes like a hole in the night.
flames that ask for more & more bedframes.
lampshades & longjohns. we feet the fire
to keep it alive. brother or father.
a fire is always what we lack. vacancies
without enough room for luggage.
i only brought with me the candlesticks.
chew wax in my hunger. the backyard stretches 
soccer field after soccer field
away from the porch. the children 
are dust. the children are no where.
it is ust me & the rabbit who says,
"you are not anymore" & i know. i know.

nail salons on mars 

a comet came 
& perched like a song bird.
we drove as far as we could
& ended up on the red surface.
headlights boring holes
through a blanket galaxy.
when you stay up 
past your own shoelaces 
the cosmos tends 
to bend like a snake.
swallowed & swallowed.
we hit a deer. we drowned
in a lake. we crawled 
on our bellies through 
a field of soy beans.
all in search of a place
to be feminine in the perfect way.
the distance through between
perfect & feminine is infinite.
two bodies always sprinting
away from one another.
the salons are like anything
you'd see on earth 
only, outside of the windows 
you can see space debris 
as it floats by. the nail artist says,
"would you like a flower?"
we each get one. the flowers open
on our fingers. she says,
"you must make sure
they do not die." we know
we will let them die
but we hope we can last
as long as possible.
outside, we stare into out nails
& see our reflections.
we are briefly just planets.
huge rocks humming to one another.
all the way home 
back through our own deaths
& the death of the deer,
i wonder about durations
& orbits. how long, i think
how long how long.

ice pillows

lay your head down like bird feet.
once, we walked for miles in the snow
over the fields where, months later
corn would grow tall as us.
when we stopped to rest
we found a town of ice. 
our reflections blurred & frost bitten.
above, the sky paced 
with a heavy tongue. more & more 
gods coming down. gloves falling
& then teeth. we made a home there.
snow pants legs swishing. a place to sleep
is a place to sleep when the world 
lays dormant & waiting.
i used to be so prepared then.
my hands, two foxes ready to be unfettered.
watching them run. melons rolling
beneath the surface of the daylight.
a stained glass sun. i do not know
how we returned but on the way
i shed a dozen faces. opera masks 
hung from the snow-laden trees.
we sang & in the snow each word 
was devoured. in the backyard again
i discovered you were not there
or you were never there. maybe you were
just a place i slept or 
a wondering corn stalk who wanted to see
how we made our homes in winter. 

madlib puberty

you (verb) your best friend.
it is an (adjective) night & everyone
is drinking (noun). walking out
to the lookout point where you can
see the whole town. little lights.
no one knows the truth about (noun).
you try so hard to be (verb or adjective).
stare into windows until they (verb).
ghosts of other (gender). 
you talk until the moon is dead.
until the double yellow lines (verb).
you body is (adjective) & too (adjective).
washing your face in a mirror,
dipping into that (gender).
only the other (genders) know you 
don't want to be where you are.
you crave (noun) & a chance at (adjective).
instead of praying like you once did
you toss (nouns) into the river.
watch them float away like fallen leaves.
your in (noun) with you best friend
or you're just in (verb) & you can't
tell yet. every inch of your body 
(verbs) you. there is no one
but the moon to ask for advice 
& she is dead. 

lipstick coroner 

the goodbye was a gender of lace 
& color contacts. i no longer want
to bite through every doorway i decide
is now a gazebo. the garden
grew heels this year. we learned to eat them
with gravy & jam. what is weathered 
& worn. darning the veil again.
weddings in the middle of the street.
the world is coming to some kind of head
& i am not sure i want to be here for it.
put my words on one at a time.
i spend so much sunlight being
careful. i do not think it is a waste
but i do think of how deer cross freeways.
putting up a sign in my neighborhood that has
instead of a deer crossing, a gender crossing.
i used to think my body was unruly
now i think the sidewalk is. 
putting on the same black tights every day
of course they are going to wear down. of course
the holes will open like singing girls.
skipping stones. the lipstick i used to love
is gone. i opened it in the dim of my living room.
this was back when i still loved you.
back when i thought, "i am going
to make this work." of course i do love you
& i still love you & that is the thing
about lipstick. once it comes & makes you
a dictionary, you always have those words.
spitting cherry pits at the moon.
it was used. a stump of indigo. i took my thumb
to touch the last breath of it
before burrying it like a rabbit's foot
in the tiny yard behind the building. 

to-do list for a true sparrow

1. worry about the scent of a dead rainbow
2. sit in another garden 
& dream myself ancient 3. talk to the ghosts
who stand at the bus stop but never board
4. eat the latter half of a granola bar 
& consider trying to become a sixteen-wheeler
to drive wildly through the night 
5. tell a story to someone who is not listening
6. pretend they are listening 7. stop & talk
to the crows who fight invisible knights 
in the field by the high school 8. crave a glimpse
at what they say 9. envy their feathers
10. try to love myself 11. find a puddle
for grazing 12. yes this is my body 
& my face 13. yes this is what the world sees
when it comes to me & says, "here is some seed"
14. when the morning comes again do not weep
15. only the dead birds & dead deer should weep 16.
you are alive so you should find a leaf to dance with
17. dance beneath the willow 18. pretend no one
has ever seen you 19. try to be the first 
to glimpse the moon when she comes 20. tell no one
as her face rolls over the hills before
taking its place in the sky 21. remember
a past life when you were a sea shell 22. do not 
worry about the scent of a dead rainbow 
or a dead planet or a dead garden 23. trust
every green you know 24. sing in morsels
25. nest in the hair of a sleeping girl 

catalog of punishments 

i thought lightning would strike me down
for everything that put on shoes
inside my head
when i sat in church-quiet.
i contemplated my wooden life.
welcomed my little 
stained glass thought experiments
that took me into boy mouths.
i want to try to unlearn 
my impulse towards punishment
but i'm unsure what will
be left of myself. i saw a car
being towed away & i thought
"now we are safe." we stood outside
wreckage of homes newly burned down.
i understand why we interpret entropy 
as castigation. deeply i want
there to be a reason why i crashed my car.
sitting on the side of the road
head newly bursting with roses. 
i thought, "please please
please." god of lamp posts.
god of windowsills. i step into my life
& ask for a catalog of everything
i will do wrong & what will follow.
no such sipher exists. there is just me
& the lightning. me & the stoplight.
standing in the sacristy 
as an altar child helping a priest
put on his vestments. my body 
is a peach. a clementine. then, a knife. 

driver's license photo

i put my head inside an official document.
gender is not just what you are but how
you are processed. i scan my gender
& buy a steering wheel from a corner store.
i learned to drive in the church parking lot
where even the rose bushes were disciplines.
have you ever thought of the distance between
disciple & discipline? i don't know how 
to live with this many questions. i am a real
& photographed person. this is proof
i am not a vampire or at least that i was not
when i entered into another system.
then there is the memory. the machine was 
a one-way mirror but i know on the other side
was someone who also carried a little proof
of themselves inside a cave. i want to give
less of my teeth to the internet. consider deleting
part of my life thus far. they say it is perminent
but one day won't i be ozymandias-ing like 
the rest of us? i select my gender as
"bird" & accept any consequence that might come.
flight risk. flower risk. information risk.
here is my advice. give yourself a secret name
only you know. hold that name like a knife
& then you can say, "you do not have all of me"
knowing full well that one day they will have
a device that can reach into anyone's past thoughts
to pluck out whatever quail egg they had tried to save. 
i do not know if i really need to be secret
but it is what i crave. to drive through the night
without a thumb print or a trail of alphabet.
just a body & a shovel & a gender still 
wet from hatching. beating my moth wings. 
stealing the eyes out of every stoplight. 

third grade autopsy 

i liked to take apart hallways. paper clips
& as ragged worm garden. lips were
a secret talismen. we talked
to bathroom ghosts & in the mirrors 
found versions of our oldest selves.
to be close to the linoleum is to be
close to god. holding communion wafers.
lighting candles. my fingers often
turned into chimney swifts,
flying off to find their consecrated towers.
in the dark, i summoned demons 
& named them after myself.
taking the dull kitchen steak knife 
& severing the day open as wide
as if could go just to look at its organs.
soft planets in the galactic water.
a pear. an apple. boyfriends with buttercups 
in their hair. the tree that fell.
branches were strewn in the grass. we looked for
our long lost limbs. to be alive was 
to break open every single tooth.
bloodied little veins. a boy liked to follow me
into my caves at night & say,
"pilot pilot pilot." i cried. the boy
was not there but his tongue was,
lapping water from a dripping faucet.
i never meant to grow older. i never meant
to become so much less wise. it is like
that gift disapated day after day.
nesting my hands. kissing a boy 
with curly hair & watching as he turned
into a dead deer. side of the road.
headlights like thrown dinner plates.
a father in the basement with the boiler, 
knocking on the pipes
all through the night. 

subtweet

some people just have to set the television on fire. 
it's almost like they have no idea 
that's where i live. once, when i was a teenager, 
i tried to grow a sunflower inside the skull of our old set. 
some people drug me by my ears 
out to the chicken coop. some people 
took a knife & carved "daughter" into the firewood.
i will tell myself, they didn't know better but
of course they did. i think we almost always do.
why do we keep pushing the stone when we know 
it's going to roll down? some people have livers 
made of gold. some people do not even remember what they do.