blood pact

we are going to escape the meat grinder
in tendrils or as flanks. still, i will love you
pools of crimson. the butcher has
a house just for screams. i have a shed
full of bees. the bees say, "electro-shock therapy."
in the yard we dig for coins. the chicken bones
mix with the dog bones & then all of us
are marrow. i put on walking directions 
to a parking lot near my ex's house. it will be
a five year walk in reverse. there is not
enough sugar to keep me from slowly
floating off the ground. complex carbs. 
complex mirrors. a computer without 
any lungs. we make cuts in our hands. instead
of a pact we become a graft. i'll grow 
you pears if you grow me peaches. did you know
that apple trees are usually clones? one fruit
cut into thousands of hears. do the trees 
look around & see themselves repeated 
as a dream of a nightmare? i wake up sometimes
to rooms full of me. i call my mom in the middle
of the night & she picks up. i tell her
i am sick & i need a chariot. she tells me
she is coming on foot. the corn fields
& the soy bean fields. the goats, two-legged
for the occasion. we all get lost. all of us 
end up in other people's homes. the walls,
like jupiter. you know what i mean. 
empty & gigantic. once i tricked the ceiling
into raising a few inches to make more room
for us. our hair was tall & winged. our beaks,
perfect for splitting clams. i can call you
without a cell phone. you'll know i'm talking
because there is a little riverman in our blood.
he paddles on a route from our eyes
to our guts. do you hear the sun? god it can 
be so damn loud. 

stress ball

i need to close my hand around
the soft world to make it stop. 
my fist becomes a bird house & all
the lightbulbs arrive to feast. i have a neighbor
who never leaves her house. she waves
from the window, a little moon in her hand.
i ignore most of my stress because
if i peered at it too closely it would be 
unbearable. there is no money. not in the walls
or the windows or the screens. i reopen 
some of my selling-my-self accounts. i can
bring you a pizza. i can bring you 
a ghost. i can close my fist tight
& pretend something is leaving me. 
my partner tells me he is going to tie me up
& throw me in the closet so that i will rest. 
i do not think that will help. there are
dragons & computer in my brain that 
i will use to mine for coin. at a truck stop
maybe in new jersey or maybe 
in new york, i see a machine that says,
"get bit coin here." another one says,
"i can make you ice cream." i do not buy
the robot ice cream but i want it more
than i like to admit. i disappear inside my own
mouth whenever i can. i bit the stress ball open
& let the sofa stuff bleed onto the floor.
i feel like a great cloud sulking around
unable to rain. the first records of stress balls
are from 1300s china. instead of soft though
they were metal. believed to bring good health
& peace. we have been squeezing 
tight as we can for centuries. i have never learned
how to let go. not of the dark or the mailbox.
the one neighbor drives a fast car at night
down the cornfield roads. he likes to try
& punch it right at the top of the hill
so that he goes airborne just for a moment. 
a car can be a stress ball & so can a mother.
i try really hard to cry but can't manage it. 
instead, i eat a sour peach. it is not a stress ball
but at least it is a moon. it is thankfully still summer.  
there are still cicadas singing all day long. 
sometimes in the throws of their song 
i can feel like i am the stress ball instead of
the fist. wrap you fingers around me. 
hold me until i am as soft as i can be. 

the house sheds its skin

you are not supposed to help
a snake if you find it mid-shed.
still, i want to. my desire to unburden
is sometimes destructive. here is
your fresh skin. here are my teeth.
the house is crumpled, trying to find
her new body. the moon stays full
for three days. competes with the sun.
i have been trying to find a new body
inside my own for my whole life.
each answer disappears. i think i was meant
to be a cicada or a lanternfly but 
instead i was given flesh. the house 
has holes in the walls. 
the house hungers for more doors.
we do not make them. i touch 
the place where once my uncle wanted
to cut a portal. i touch the place
where my sibling once punched
the wall. the wound, never healing.
if the house becomes something else
i hope it becomes an obelisk. you might say,
"but you can't live inside an obelisk."
this is true but i am not worried about that.
i am worried about what will be left
when the shedding is done. maybe i will
just make a quilt with the dead skin. 
i know no one else will want it. maybe they
will pretend things are not changing. 
that is typically what my family does. 
i do not blame them. who wants to lose
everything in exchange for something
terrifying? the last time i slept inside the house
all the windows were crooked as if they were
threatening to fall out into the yard. 
i touched one softly. it felt like
the surface of an eye. 

uses for a violin

to sleep inside. to dream of
new hands. to become a sibling again
without all the rush of a new century.
i was jealous of your playing
so sometimes i would open the instrument
without you. i touched the bow 
just like no one is ever supposed to.
the horse hairs pulled tight to sing.
to paddle in a river of ghosts. to stand
on the chimney when the storm comes.
to call to someone far away, the notes
like parachuters across the cemetery hill.
still i hear someone playing when 
all of our smallness is gone. i will open windows
& doors trying to find you. to grow up
together is like trying to find
the end of a ladder. the attic, a shrine
to dead wall beetles. to hide a set of keys. to hide
a gender. to keep a religion without a god.
to fill with coins enough to buy 
our way out of this place. i used wish 
i could wake up & play like you did. 
my fingers, like tight rope walkers into
a place with no floor. you in the ocean,
using the violin as a life raft. the blue coming
stronger now. a ladle of bones. our father
in the crawlspace looking for violins.
the violin, unlike the guitar, has no instructions.
no "here is where to put your fingers." you have
to feel for the note. a voice beneath the skin.
you, holding the song by the neck. 

cave cricket

i turn myself tangle-legged
& follow the cave crickets.
they arrive when i am too busy 
to tend to their voices like thumbs
inside a metal throat. they tell 
fragment stories. i explain to them
that i am scared of the future.
they are confused by the concept
of fear. a heart to them is just a place
you run from. their bodies
& my body, the same in this regard.
i do not sleep well. instead, i make a second home
among the night creatures. we get into
a routine of holding tiny confessions.
i apologize for promoting catholicism
even in this covert form. the creatures
are not good at confessing but they come
to learn. finally they are saying,
"i did not miss him when he disappeared
into the fields" & "i crave my mother
even though i never met her."
i get to confess too. i tell them about
my need to be liked by everyone i meet.
the crickets ask, "do you know you are
not a carnivore?" i said, "i guess i do not."
the crickets teach me how to turn my body
into an instrument. we thrum together
until i have to go & get a knuckle's worth
of sleep. the crickets stay up. i hear them
in the walls & all the creases of the house.
i am envious that they get to keep
their skeletons on the outside. instead,
mine is buried like backyard bones. 
soundless. still i find ways to make it sing. 

snow picture 

even in august sometimes i'll see 
the ghosts of my snow drawings.
roaming the yard as a kid i would write creatures 
with my footsteps. they have aged.
once soft lines, now ragged in the wind.
they have eyes like catacombs. ribs 
to row a boat. in the living room one ghost
peers in the window while mom & i talk
about death. the aunts whose house we
had to gut. the walls gone so quickly. 
my father walks with the snow animals.
he feels horrible for being the one
to gather & make sense of their belongings. 
trash bag after trash bag. ugly clothes 
& stained mugs. my aunts did not live lives
of things. no designer bags. no gold jewelry. 
batteries burst inside old alarm clocks. 
instead, they gathered pears from the tree 
behind the house. filled a broken cookie jar.
watched re-runs of the phillies. their lives 
had so little to do with what they used to live. 
they, like the snow animals, are more than
their water or their windows. still just like my father
i find myself craving to drive back to that house & find
it all the same as it always was. maybe it would
be covered in snow. icicles from the roof.
the snow animals show my father how to lay down.
we find him in the garage looking for crosses.
looking for prayer cards. looking for rosaries. 
everything, too much. the sun, never strong enough
to take all the creature out of us. my mother 
& i talk about the church of bones. skulls & ribs.
she says something like, "all of those people 
had lives." i think she is trying to say
that in the end we keep our ghosts. the animals
sleep in the kitchen with him. he asks me
if i think he's thrown away too much. 
i tell him "no" even though i am not sure. 

when i was your age

i have started to follow nostalgia instagram pages
which tells me i am on my way to being
seriously old. i am not afraid of it but
more curious what someone can do with 
this kind of longing. i don't want to be a kid
again but i crave portals into those sensations.
the texture the summer used to have.
why did it used to be softer? was it more vivid? 
with my parents, gone all day, my sibling 
& i would eat popsicles & walk to the park. 
i buy a time machine & it doesn't work. i try 
to tell my lover stories but the sounds 
& the colors & the light get stuck
in my words. he tries sometimes to do the same.
he is not as nostalgia-sick as i am though.
my family is like this too. i remember my uncle
telling us over & over about the first time
he went to wildwood or saw a baseball game. 
my dad loves to talk about the summer he went
to arizona with his dad. the quiet & the cactuses. 
at my parent's house i start to tell my sibling, 
"when i was your age..." unironically & i stop myself
embarrassed by my growing impulse to share
something un-sharable. i want to pull them
through a hole in time. show them snow
out a classroom window. fog pouring from the old
school bus as it waits to take us to a yellow tile hallway. 
feeding the turtle her minnows in the backyard kiddie pool. 
they ask what i was going to say & i brush it off.
i think of these hungers like links in a chicken-wire fence.
the way the metal always bends backwards.
tells the next eye, "i am coming home." 
the next time i see my dad i ask if he'll tell me again
about the quiet of the desert flowers. 

parking lot graveyard

on the day you died the parking lot
was empty. the city had turned into
a pile of shoe boxes. gardens without tenders.
i drove in circles. looking for someone else.
what i wanted from them, i am not sure.
maybe to tell them, "my aunt died today." 
familial terms in english always fail me.
"aunt" sounds like distance. i wanted to close
every distance. sit with you again in the rec room. 
my partner was at home packing pigeons
into her suite cases. the trains glided by 
empty of passengers. the graveyard 
up the block was spreading. i found
tombstones in the bathtub & 
down the alley to the apartment.
i found myself wishing i could have
talked to you a few more times. 
nothing wild. no confessions. maybe just 
coffee & morning tv. your mug, stained from
years of coffee turned decaf. 
the summer i lived with you & aunt flo 
was hot & frantic. i told you stories
about the daycare kids & then i drove away & parked
outside grocery stores. i called lovers weeping.
i did not know what i was supposed to be. 
you set your alarm clock to wake you up
with the radio. a man hurried-talking
in the purple hour. once, half-asleep,
i thought there was someone else in the house.
a ghost maybe? one of your old lovers
or maybe your father blown from the top
of a steam engine? i built you a grave 
in the parking lot because i couldn't 
drive to see yours. it was made from
stolen daffodils & kitchen sage. in every 
parking spot i found graves. it was like 
by making yours, i had created a channel 
from with all the dead could gather. 
i wish i could have shown you
my corner of the city. the lights &
all the colors of the pigeons. you would
have loved it.  strangely, i wonder if your grave
is still there in the parking lot
behind the flower shop & the sushi place.
you taught me when i was small
that anywhere could be divine. a diner 
or a porch or the shag carpet turning animal 
after all the years of keeping. 

august highway 

i have summer by the collar saying,
"please i need more time." the weeds
in the yard are wonderful & lush & lawless.
i keep dreaming of a world without lawns.
remove the "n" & i dream of that too. 
we drive farther than we ever have together.
it is a heat advisory & the tires melt into
the pavement. the earth's crust opens 
& all the dragons are out gnawing on trees.
i pick you a mushroom as a gift.
the kitchen at home is smelly like mildew
& dogs. god i want to be there. i think 
i am suited to a boat house if i didn't
enjoy jumping up & down so much.
some houses have two bathrooms. mine has
a goat & half a door. the heat makes me 
into soup. i hope i am good soup like
thick & meaty not any of this thin broth. 
in a parking on of a gas station we talk 
on the phone with our friend who is 
trying to time travel. we say, "just put
the phone down." she says, "but what if
i can see everything." lately, i think sanity 
is not fun at all. i think when i'm seeing bugs
that that is probably the big truth. 
the little truth is that it is harder than it should be
to walk in the tall grass. to find the heron
& request a fortune. it is getting hotter.
still this is my season. the kind of mirage 
it casts is the only place i want to live.
between radiating highway hills & the deer
who manage to browse & find sweet 
greens to eat in the shade. i join them 
& you scold me. you say, "we are trying
to find an exit." in august every day 
is a back door. i knock. you let me in.
we let night come. moon heavy 
& threatening to burst. 

landlord guillotines  

i think i got my impulse towards
retribution from being raised catholic. 
i read dante's inferno in high school
for fun. drew circles of hell on my bedroom wall
& then swam in them. fire & ice & weeping. 
i keep seeing a post on instagram 
that reads, "it's not communist to care
about people." i am trying not to feel
despair about how far we have to go.  
i am not a guillotine kind of girl. 
in a renter's facebook group a landlord posts
whining about how no one wants to pay rent.
he says, "i have two empty rooms 
i'd rather give to stray animals." i try to sketch
his cruelty. a wad of wet socks in the corner
of a mcmansion. his empty lettuce bags
in a tall trash can. i am fascinated by 
the reasons other people have for being alive.
if it is not to love each other than why are 
you here? does this man want money?
does he want to feel powerful? does he feel
he was promised more than he receives?
i get my punishment brain involved.
i dream of a land of doors where landlords 
have to walk. it is cold or it is raining. no door
will open for them. they will want to sleep
but never feel that release. an endless hunger 
for a place to rest. sometimes when they 
quiet their own breath, they will hear 
a laugh behind a door. the wood will 
feel warm but they will not reach it. a storm will
open up & they will be drenched to the bone. 
i have been keeping a folder of screenshots
of horrible things i have seen people say online.
i do not know what i intend to do with it.
maybe i am compiling evidence 
for the angels or else it is for myself. evidence of what?
i type out a dozen responses to the landlord's post
& don't send any of them. he is hiding behind
a blank profile. i imagine him just as 
fist in the dark. his future rain, coming.