missing 

in my phone i follow the story of a night-swallowed girl. 
the television is talking to herself. there are
milk cartons in the windows of the car
when we drive from here to the folded sun.
as a kid, we had lawn chairs. plastic. blue. 
a boy in my class told me, "we are water so
if you really wanted to disappear, you could
just lay out & wait to evaporate." i do not know
what prompted his comment. maybe he recognized
my waywardness. the lost creature
in me sees the lost creature in you. i tried becoming
a cloud & it didn't work. i only lasted an hour or so
in the fried egg light. i am surprised i am here
with how much i have tried to go missing. in the videos
the girl leaves little behind. everything seems like
an omen. a plane ticket. a laptop screen. an open window.
her sister collects facts & shares them with 
a hungry internet. a second swallowing. they ask questions.
did she have any friends? did she have dating profiles?
i find myself searching too. i check the mailbox
of the abandoned house up the street. never mind
the government, this is for our lungs. our flesh
in the sweet dark. i drove my car to hillsides. 
took planes to the haunted eyes of statues. i did not want
to be found. does she want to be found? sometimes 
a storm comes & i wonder who it is. if it is maybe
that boy i went to school with. the one who taught me
i could evaporate. when he was in high school
he played guitar. i thought he was beautiful. 
i always wanted to asked if he had tried it too. to dissolve. 
queerness is sometimes only in retrospect. 
boys without boyhood. the goneness of the moon. 
a shakey belief in returns. we are not salmon or are we? 
at a truck stop i ate ice cream with the car radio on. 
barefoot as onion grass. both of us. the missing girl
& me, eat tonight something cold & sweet. 
years later the boy messages me. tells me he's bi. that he
always knew he wanted the pulp of me. i don't remember
if i replied. the girl is still missing. i want her sister to find her. 
i wonder what it will mean if she never does. 

fishnets 

i am a story of gathering. 
flesh & gills.
the salt of our breath. i was so young when
i first got caught on the side of a boat.
did not know that men would
drag the wash for my meat. 
i thought everything was blue
& that we would swim until 
we were water. 
they mistook me for a merperson.
i was just a fish. a scout 
of the deep. my legs, like 
scissors in the air. 
i bought cameras to hold myself.
learned the fisherman's language. 
drift & knot & keep & catch. 
craved his gender. i know now
that i am the harvested & harvester.
a harpoon in the side of a planet.
i am not a species that grows 
wiser with age. instead, i find myself
on a dark street, gill-less & hungry. 
above in the night sky the bellies
of the ships wear water-ripples
like pleated skirts. did you know
that the word "hammock" comes
from a taino word for fishnets? 
to be human is to always 
be seeking rest in the tangle
of a chase. in some ways it is 
better to be in the net than outside it.
maybe that is the limits of my beliefs
in my own gender. i have been gathered.
tossed on the deck. but i have pulled 
the weight of another from water too.
had a moment to repent, a chance
to throw them back, & spent it. 

kentucky meat showers

never forget the sky delivers what it wants.
when i first learned about storks i used 
to fear a downpour of babies. what would
we do with them all? i had a brother the size
of a ham. he didn't fit anywhere.
one year hail as big as golf balls 
pummeled the city. there were parking lots of 
swiss cheese cars. broken windows & dents. 
i remember saving a piece of the storm. 
for years it vibrated in the fridge. shrunk.
returned to its haunting place in the sky.
i think i'd hoped it might bring me with it.
most days i don't know if i want to fall 
from a great height or be washed 
in a summer deluge. frogs have fallen from heaven 
still holding onto halos. in a museum i see
a jar of strange meat from the kentucky meat shower. 
all the scientist explanations sound impossible.
what is important is not why or how but 
understanding there is always another portal. 
great hunks of body spilling from the clouds.
the people covering their faces. blood & flesh.
the smell of rot. meat slapping against rock
& grass & roof. then, the horror of the after.
gazes out of windows at the small piles.
flies as the first witnesses & then the ants. 
they never learned for sure what kind
of meat it was. i think it was angels. 
a terrible mistake. i do not live in fear
of a meat shower. instead, i keep it in mind
as a possibility. keep a shovel in the trunk. 
a bundle of plague herbs in my pocket
to breathe in just in case. if i have 
the chance to fall though i have decided
i will come as overripe plums. i want to be
a sweet chaos. i could have been grapes 
but that would be too easy. 

grease fire

the kinds of fires i have seen
do not stop. do not come when
they are called. do not yield to water.
in the house without
any windows we were trying to 
eat a bird. the bird was us or it was
our femininity. i buy my sibling a train ticket
to get out of here. they don't leave
& the ceiling falls in & the fire gets
so hungry that it turns green.
i have missed my chance to escape 
more times than i can count. the last
flight out of a slick oil place. in our college
dorm once someone was trying to fry
their hand. it caught the cabinets 
on fire & i remembered salt.
we poured salt all over the flames &
they turned into obelisks. the cabinets
smoldering. the fire alarm laughing.
no one ever came. no fire people. no gods.
from this i learned that you must have
a plan for grease. for when no one
is coming to save you. i did not want
to eat the birds & so i failed at it.
instead, i watched a youtube tutorial 
on fire eating. i have been trying to figure out
how i am going to join the circus
when that's what it comes down to.
my sibling folds the ticket into a bird.
we put it in the oven knowing
it will burst into flames. some kind of
reverse phoenix. take me back. i know 
we came from fire. i grow my hair
as long as it will go. the house rejects
every window we try to give it. 
there is no more salt. no more ticket.
just birds & our lungs like wings. 

the chicken go talk to ghosts

in the morning i let the chickens out 
& they run to the shadow forest between
our house & the fields. in there, they
begin their daily rituals. i try to give
them privacy. i know when i worship
it is strange & bruising. still, i notice them
from time to time, in a circle around
the hips of a tree. this country is
a project of violent forgetting. why 
don't we talk about how the birds
have spirits they visit too? have bright 
& dazzling hungers? one morning i ask
the chickens if they would let me join them.
they are reluctant. the rooster does not
trust me. remembers the day we pinned him
after he bit my ankles. i feel ashamed of it
& i am not quite sure why. maybe because
i do not want to be a tyrant. the hens 
feel differently. one of the cinnamon queens
recounts the afternoon we washed her
in the tub. stroked her head until 
all the dirt was free of her feathers. 
i follow them. get low to the earth
& everything smells ripe & clay. i cannot
tell you the rest because they asked me 
to believe in bodies. that secrets are
crucial to holding onto the ghosts.
i can tell you though that the ghosts 
were everything i wanted. feathered &
tall. necks like crowbars. the rooster called out
to keep us close. when dusk arrived,
i followed them all in the procession
back to the coup. did not join them.
walked back into the house. heard the rooster
call out one last time to the night. 

seasoning the wood

in the field up the street the farmer 
keep piles of split logs. a limb cascade 
stacked toward the sky. in winter 
i buy wood in the dark. i would use 
a flashlight to cut the shadows. the piles 
were always moving like thousand-fingered animals.
the farmer with his leather skin & green cap 
standing in the distance like just another
tree's shoulder. it takes two years to really
season the wood. while it waits, the wood basks
in memories. each piece becoming brothers
beneath the sun's wingbeats. in february 
the seasoned wood ran out but the cold stayed.
i wanted any escape from the fire's hunger.
more & more & more. i would drive past
to see if the farmer was still there. it could be
any time of night & he would be with the wood.
part of the wood. i saw him split. the rings
of a carousel in the mountains split
into arches. fibers from the saw. no matter what you do
you cannot rush the trees. cannot quickly
season the wood. time is not on our side. 
i think it is inside us in rings. a boy 
in the town where i grew up swallowed 
a pocket watch. turned into a tree & legend says
if you put your ear to the tree, it is still ticking. 
i know how long a log has been waiting just
by touching the surface. when they are ready
their flesh is hard. a closed fist. a smooth breaking
just beneath the surface. the farmer's teeth
in the ringing moonlight. 

the last taxi to the museum of modern elegies 

i buy a mourning dove & feed her lemon drops
until she glows. in the television i used to see
fields of lights. we do not make it to where
we thought we'd be going. i opened college letters.
small bad. big good. what did i want? what will
i want when the big statues of girls get flesh
in the afternoon. we are at the city place
with all the windows & i am stuck trying 
to be human with you. both of us sleep in bunk
beds without a way out. you tell me a story
of a chicken with an iphone & i explain that
i am just trying to find a way home. not everyone
has eaten with a fork but everyone has eaten
with their hands. the stop signs cease to work.
the forest keeps more secrets. i buy a subscription
to a lover. she sleeps in the box she came in. 
i try to coax the train out from her slumber but
it is no use. we will have to take a cab. i haven't
taken a taxi since i was in high school & the city
had too many hands. i could have stayed
forever. lived off of strange horns. the driver
has a picture of his child on the dashboard.
she is feathered. another mourning dove. i offer him
a lemon drop & he puts up his hand. explains
that he still needs more time. i understand that.
it is all our nature to put off whatever big inevitable
is coming. god or a package or a mouth. 
the driver moves wild. we climb a sky scraper. 
we listen to barreling music. at one point
he closes his eyes & the street gets smooth 
& right. the trick is we never get there. a big
long avenue with flags from all the broken places 
which is to say every nation to ever exist. 
the street scrolls. takes us back to the beginning. 
the museum just out of reach. full of something
we want to weep about but can't.
is it the hormones or all the time? the boy 
at a counter drinking coffee. the taxi, small now.
the size of an ice cube, shrinking. 

cloud bone

sometimes i go take a nap
in dead people's data. an old word 
document with a blinking cursor
& three lines of poetry. when a friend turned
into a blue heron a few years ago
i found out in the bathroom at work.
my impulse was to call him. all the feathers.
he had tried to talk to me a few weeks before. 
it had been his decision. at first i thought
of his body & then all the trails of 
keys pressed in the big master cloud. uploaded femur
& blood in a spam folder. his bones
everywhere, unburied. that night i got
a shovel & i dug into the walls looking
for the internet. not just the cable but 
a portal into the big elegy. i found a few pictures
of us & an unanswered facebook message.
i tore away wallpaper until i was sitting
on his side of the glow. unsent half-letters.
a bowl of searches like a litany. ever since i have
been a frequent traveler in the digital land
of the dead. whenever someone i know dies
i spend hours on their social media profiles.
sometimes i'll send them an email. in the night
i go deeper. their ribs like space bars pressing
the dark's organ pedal. my favorite places to arrive
are destinations on the wayback machine. 
time capsule of fingers. herons in code & herons
in the sky. i will sometimes discover someone gone
who i didn't mean to. i had wanted them
to be alive in my head forever. when that happens
i have to dig myself loose quickly
run out of the house & into the hyacinth field.
all the computers there. my friends' bones 
duplicated & yet still somehow absent 
in the only way i need. i visit my friend's profile still.
no one has taken it down & for that i am 
so grateful. i don't want an memorial. i want
his ghost. every once in awhile another friend will write
on his facebook wall something like, "i saw
a blue heron today & i knew it was you." 

battery life

like any poet, i am always
fighting the moon. i want to have her
over for dinner. i want to use
my phone flashlight to find her face.
in a dream, the house catches fire &
i turn into a diamond in the heat. a diamond in
the rough. a diamond in my phone
which is sending signal to the aliens
or my fbi agent again. i believe
in all conspiracies & non of them.
maybe my agent loves me & dreams of
both of us getting free. he does not have
a chance i have a partner who picks wild onions. 
mostly, i just believe that billionaires
have all devoured children. i don't actually know
if it matters to me whether that is 
a metaphor or not. does it matter if you
eat with your teeth or a machine? doesn't
the blood go the same place? i'm sorry that
was a little too much. the world is heavy.
no one wants to be heavy. as a child i was
obsessed with one very specific space fact.
after our star goes red giant & unburdens 
us all, it will collapse in on itself into 
a tight little mass so dense that none of us
could even lift a teaspoon of it. 
i imagined eating that teaspoon. i take comfort
in the notion that this burning will let us all
be furious as we need. my phone's crappy battery life
will no longer plague me when we are all 
galloping through space. still, i plug 
my personal ghost in. i run my finger
across the screen. all the diamonds. 
the moon, standing me up again, pulling
clouds over her face. a billionaire 
on my father's television talking about
how he plans to maybe stop killing everyone
but just a little bit. i love to eat alone. 
it reminds me of early covid when 
my world fit in a shovel. do not let anyone
tell you to go all red giant. you can only
do it once. i still want to see you glowing.

bare hand 

she grips either side of the fruit. the apple
is round like a steering wheel & thick as 
a bruise. she posts a video every day on her page.
each video, the same going back months.
an apple broken into two. the flesh dripping 
on a counter. on the sidewalk. into the grass.
the comments are full of lesbians. i am not
one of them but i share their hunger to be 
dissected by something beautiful. i want to ask
the tiktok woman how long did it take you to reach
the core of it all? when was the first time 
you grabbed an apple & pressed with resolve? 
i used to eat apples whole. arsenic & all. 
i am not sure what that says about me. about us. 
my mouth, always a shovel. the core, something
to be devoured in the rush. when i worked
at the orchard, all pickers were faster than me.
their hands moving like dreams. they were 
all men. they handled the fruit like ruin because
it was. we had to work fast. rush the fruit. our hands.
our mouths. the woman never films herself 
eating the apple which leaves me to wonder 
how & when she does. i like to imagine that
she eats one half & feeds the other to a lover. 
the comments ask to be the one torn apart. 
for the woman to grab either side of a body 
& press. finally, she posts a technique video.
i consider not watching it to keep up my 
little fantasy. finally i do. she moves more slowly 
than ever. the heel of her hand. the motion seems 
almost gentle. the fracturing, yearned for. 
the comments, plead. more. more more.