fear of it being too late 

in the kitchen we trip on our own reflections.
on the wall, there is an old iron bean grinder
full of teal aquarium rocks. in each rock, 
a little version of the scene. this is the night 
the fridge stops working & i see my father furious-cry
as he grabs a pack of grapes & a baggie of lunch meat,
tearing the fridge's guts apart & saying,
"i can fix this." for weeks it had flickered 
& he had smacked its side. "piece of shit," he said.  
i had too many fingers & all i wanted to do was help.
a little girl. the holes hunger made in that house.
all our faces in the rocks. tiny desperate ghosts. 

electronic milk

i look for nourishment in mint wrappers.
forkfuls of flywings. a disciple of "not enough." 
plug a charger into the muck river & wait for my phone
to tell me i am a good little citizen. 
where i come from, a tank sleeps in the corn field.
the water tower is a beacon, a place
for lovers to crawl towards. nothing is better
than eating sugar packets in the yard. i do not want
to be sustained, i want to be consumed by static. 
an update informs me my life has been downloaded 
& saved to the cloud. am i relieved? the cloud is heavy. 
i am still snacking on whatever i can find. 

peacock seed

i was small when i planted the iridescent boy
in the back of my throat & walked around
like a jar of jam. everything sweet
has been boiled by sun or by fire. in the fields
we would work for hours harvesting tomatos.
they are the shape a heart should be. roma, heirloom,
cherry. from the dirt, i collected feathers too.
they were palm branches. lay me down. a divine is coming 
in the form of hair. there is no other body like mine.
i flock & fallen & fallow. deer watch as we work
waiting to become skulls. boys like me are all teeth
& then none. we have & are harvested. make blue of our star. 

decorative faux books

at my worst i am just waiting for you to enter.
hoarding my nothing like a hope chest. 
here is a dust jacket where i gather unkept promises. 
the shelf, brimming with letter "o." meaning "oh no" 
& "oh please" & "open me now." sometimes i glue my lips shut
for fear someone will ask me to tell them a story. 
really, the truth writes itself. i was made 
a conduit of searching. last year i had my palms read. 
her finger across my lines. 
she said, "you will. you will."
then, back at home, i could swear 
i looked at my hands & saw no lines at all.

poppet family

when i do witchcraft i often don't know
what to ask for. it is years of my tongue
being a bottled bird. tonight i sew poppets
of my mom & dad & brothers. i dip them in honey & 
arrange each in a circle around me.
knit promises into their mouths. they are saying,
"yes yes yes-- you are our good skeleton." or maybe
i do know what i want & i am scared to tear seams. 
in the kitchen, moths arrive like oldest angels. then, 
ants come to feast on the honey. isn't this always how it goes?
glistening & then eaten & then they find your bone. some day
i will have the courage to bind the poppets one to the other.

gravestone eating

the end is cake & so is your face. 
we go for a cemetery walk, forks in hand, 
& the grass wants to argue about global warming. 
i say, "there is still hope" & the grass says,
"if only you knew what all the green knows."
it is my birthday again for the fifth time this week. 
i am exhausted with wanting to want. on my phone 
i scroll through custom funerals. you take a bite 
of a tombstone & say "it tastes like raspberries." 
i forgo the fork & dig in with my hands. sugar under nails.
swallow the surname. then, it is stone again. rubble.
you lead me away as if my hunger didn't happen. 

my brother's box of eyes

each day the internet screams him awake. 
buckets of blinking toads & bed-ridden lilies. 
once in a chat room a man told me 
i was all he ever wanted. he had hairy knuckles. 
he mailed me eyes in ring boxes. i never told anyone.
my brother says his brain has too many tabs open.
i do too. i have seen videos of people on fire
& trap doors & guillotines. he puts an eye
in his mouth like a grape. i spill apricots 
wherever i try to speak. there is no answer
to the call. the image is gone like a rock in water. 
he hands me the ruin so i can see it too. 

ceiling w/o

hand me the box cutter.
there is a delivery from demons
seething on the porch & i'd like
to let it breathe. yesterday, all the lights
turned into raccoons & ravaged our trash.
i wish i was them: eating coffee grounds & banana peels.
fill my hands with all indulgences again. online i order
a god & he comes in a shiny urn. 
we sit & wait for rapture. it never comes.
instead our bodies float like dead balloons. 
last night i believed i could dig a hole 
in the ceiling with my bare hands. i could not. 

ghost pipe mushrooms

give me the gather of wedding worms.
choral like greying sky. a flock 
of our fallen chickens. we blew smoke 
from our eyes. laid in the forest 
& watched the color lift from our faces.
do you remember being alive? i only recall
darkness. how it fed us bones. singing with 
a wilted throat. arm in arm we take
lipstick off the moon. hang our heads.
welcome ghosts of exiles & ex-kings. 
they carry their heads in their arms
like summer melons. the night wears no gown. 

forest fire

tell me i am not the only who is here to swallow flames? 
i don't want to be a fighter anymore. i want to be the moss
whose grandchildren talk about green like it is
a gone island. i look at my block & see a colony of matches. 
walking with a bucket of water. i can't do this.
i can't anymore, seeing how many burns 
a building can wear before it is condemned. 
my first boyfriend & i used to collect lighters.
flick them open & find anything to light. 
calendars & brush & bruises. each other's tongues.
i am no longer convinced grow-back is coming. smoke comes
like antelope, galloping alleys. i'm asking then, are we gone?