cheeseboard

i like my meat like i like my cheese;
i want it to look as if it never knew
how to run across the earth. square. circle. shred.
in the u.s., death 
is not knife or even bolt through skull. 
instead, it is the way the slices are arranged.
perfect rows. before famine, we knew
only berries. our eyes plucked 
from a pudding night. they used
to have picnics by the battlefield. 
butterknife. bree. bone. 
we are not the only animal who kills 
but we are the only animal that holds
executions. who stacks crackers & cheese
& wipes crumbs from our laps. 
they will tell you to pray when 
you should be moving. running into
a meadow & hiding in the grass. i do not
really eat cheese but i love a cheese board.
maybe it is the brief semblance of order.
it seems to say, "now we are a holiday."
the television becomes smaller & smaller
until it lives in our blood. we watch
another documentary about
the kennedy assassination. it should
not be a mystery. in the u.s., all bullets
are magic. they say in the mouth 
of the right queer they become 
a seed. i have seen a cherry tree grow
from the face of a deer. i have seen
someone jump from a bridge & become
a heron. i make a cheese board just
to look at it. not to eat. take a picture.
sit outside with it. take it to the doctor
with me. then, finally, go to the park
& let the other wiser animals have at it. 

she shells 

in the night i get afflicted with
a carapace. the suitcase in the brain.
we make the gnarled promises 
without any air. i build you a treehouse 
& somehow the ocean finds it. i have shells
from so many beaches but none 
that fit me anymore. sometimes i get bleak
& consider giving in to a scammer 
who is calling & asking for my social security.
i mean, don't we all deserve a win sometimes?
once my boyfriend (derogatory) & i drove
to centralia. its a city that is 
always burning. a few people live there
selling coal from the backs of their trucks.
he bought a piece for me & i put it in my mouth
when he wasn't looking. we can try all we want
but we cannot swallow what we've
gotten ourselves into. one of the coal had
pennies attached to it. now he's married (derogatory).
it takes strength to hold a grudge. i am not
into the saintly stuff anymore. forgiveness is for
the ocean, i am just a little creature trying
to be shiny & free. i go to new jersey with 
my new new new boyfriend. we are running out
of time to be honeymooning. soon we'll have
to be real. soon we'll have to start burning.
i find a really nice shell. i meany really really nice.
it's so nice i get a conspiracy in my head that
someone is stocking the beach with these
smooth treasures. i avoid googling it.
it is nice to avoid an answer every once 
in awhile. i fill my pockets. i fill my face.
we leave with bags of shells. i try each one on.
none of them fit but i keep them anyway.
you never know what your gender is 
going to end up doing. i might be a coal fire
burning one day. put on my last pair of heels.
the ones i used to make money with. 
call my ex-boyfriend & ask him,
"would you like to buy some shells?"
just so i can feast on his brief confusion.
revenge everything i've ever wanted it to be.
i run my thumb along the inside of the shell
where the animal used to sleep. 

the first intersex whale 

why is it that we are always discovered?
i have spent all morning reading about
the discovery of the first intersex whale. 
how their blood was taken & sifted like sand. 
the scientist "baffled" by all their combinations.
organs & chromosomes & cosmos.  
i become obsessed with the idea
of meeting them. of whispering into
their giant ear, "i know you are not the first."
to be a poet is to think too much about
everything. of course the scientists are just
doing their jobs & the headlines are just
writing the easy world. i want to know
the history as told by intersex whales. i want 
to know their hungers & their stories. 
i crave the story of the true first in the dark
& ancient world. how the others flocked
around them & called them, "miracle."
we are not aberrations. we are the whole
digging in her heels. i discovered myself
before a doctor discovered me. my blood
like a waterfall inside the ocean. i have 
a slingshot chromosome & a spirit that fits
inside a whale's heart. i follow their chronology
because it is ours. maybe we would talk
about what it means to use a body 
as a bridge. the whale is the vessel of return. 
the land spirit who walks back. finds legs 
in the water sky. maybe there is no such thing
as a first intersex whale. each of us like beads
counted back into the song of the world. 

wild onion

i want to scroll in a new dimension.
one that will finally use my eyes up. 
well is dry. it is spring again & we are
hunting for onions in the blue 
of our sadness. i pick so many that i start
to hear bells. knuckles & green. each, the eye
of a sleeping god. one who long ago
hung up his divinity in exchange for
darkness. i put the onions in my eye sockets
& see the world as thick as ever. you are
eating them raw. i am boiling them 
in the microwave. what did people do
before tutorials? did we just walk around
knocking on doors until someone knew
how to tan hide? how to kill the cold before
it gets too loud. i lied to you. it is not spring
at all in fact it is almost winter in the sense that
it is always almost winter & summer is always
far away even when you are inside it.
i find onions waving at me. my neighbors.
once my brother cut the tip of his finger off
& a stalks of wild onion grew from the wound.
he was little & maybe he doesn't even remember
how all our family came to feast on his bones. 
to be connected by blood is to be taken by blood.
roots like tentacle eyelashes. i smell my fingers.
they are still bright & onioned. we cook 
a pasta that is lackluster. my hair is growing back
& each strand is a little wild onion throat. 
i rest my head on the cutting board & go to sleep.
let the cleaver fall. spoon in my mouth. 
rinsing the sauce can in the sink. 

nesting

birds don't sleep in nests, they sleep
mid-flight. on a long drive back
from the city i shut my eyes at the wheel for
just a second, convinced i could survive. 
somehow i did. i have amazing luck
& terrible luck at the same time. 
i prefer the thatched nests to the ragged 
robin ones. i am a proud coveter.
i want the house to either side of us
& sometimes i make up these weird fantasies 
that the owners will sit me & my partner down
& give their farms to us.  all my dreams
are of luxury. depending on the day
i am a bad socialist or anarchist. i am impressed
by people with solid political beliefs. 
i just want to build beautiful places to sleep
& for everyone else i know to do the same.
there are no landlord birds to the best of
my knowledge but we should keep
an eye on them to make sure they stay
on the right path. this year somehow
the robins managed to have five babies.
none of them died in the nest or fell
like wet seeds. instead, i watched 
them fly for the first times. i told them,
"pretend we are not here." they said,
"who is 'we'?" i did not have an answer.
i think i would be happier if i started siding
with the birds more often. now, when i say
"us" i mean myself & the wrens who are
trying to get fat before winter. if only i were
smaller & hollow boned. then i could
join them in building nests along 
the eaves of the neighbors' houses. instead,
i linger on the street outside
while taking an afternoon walk. note
the details of the porch posts & window edges. 
i hurry along, worried someone inside
might think i'm a criminal (which i am).
to be a nest builder in an eggless world
is to be a law breaker. one day i will get a yolk
golden enough to save us. until then,
we are sleeping mid-flight. headlights
of a tractor-trailer. the mountain's 
slumped shoulders. No where else to go. 

the holy grail

my father is the keeper
of the holy grail. he does not know it
but it follows him like
a toppled tower. i have seen it buzzing
above his head & sometimes he will
be drinking from it on his fifth beer
on a weary summer night. i am assuming
this will mean i might inherit it.
i am not sure if biblical fury will recognize me
as a first-born son or not. the older i get
the more i worry about prophecies. 
about which unfulfilled ones will end up
on my head. i consider whose houses 
i will have to clean out & what ghosts
will watch me do it. the thing about
the holy grail is that there has never
just been one of them. early on, the little vessel 
started to bud & branch. i have, on occasion, 
seen another person with the same affliction.
one of my father's friends, the one with
the blue chicken coop, he had two grails
one in each hand. he didn't see either of them. 
none of us go to church anymore which has
improved our lives greatly. my father used to
sing in the choir. he had the voice of
a thumb on the rim of an ancient glass.
angels peered in the windows of the church
because they were nosy, not because
my father sang well. if i get the grail 
i hope i will be able to see it. that is the problem
with prophecies, they happen to us. 
i will fill my grail with dry cereal 
& i'll eat it in the dark. i will run my thumb
along the rim & hear my father singing
ave maria, a song i am not sure if he believes
or not. the cup filling with sound.
our teeth like bells in our skulls. once, 
as a child, i tried to tell him i could see it.
i said, "why do you keep that cup?" my father,
half-drunk in the lamp light, asked,
"what cup?" the grail was huge that night.

tree tapping 

i drink all the flowers out 
from a hole in your neck.
when you became a pilot
i had you fly me to the sun
day after day. i miss the street
where the census taker came
to ask our names. he was a short man
with an onion smell. he held
his pencil up to count the houses.
in the hours after you worried
that you shouldn't have told him
you were a girl. gender is a footprint
in the mouth of a wild timeline. 
i bought a kit to try & tap the trees.
i wanted syrup. i wanted to have
my teeth ringing with sugar.
nothing ever came out. i ran my finger
around the rim. it seemed sticky but
it might have just been the lingering
humidity of the kneeling year. you parked
the plane on the roof. i begged you
to stay & let me fill my mouth
with peonies & roses. a single knife
sleeping in the drawer. the trees holding on
to their blood. i guess i had not
earned it. did not listen to what 
the maple wanted & craved. instead, i thought
only of taking. of the relief it would be
to see amber pouring from a spigot. 
when i turned the radio on i heard you.
your voice was made of fiberglass 
& a baseball bat. i am sick of people
mulling over what is & isn't love. 
sometimes love is hungry & selfish. 
i woke up once with a tree tap
in my side. so much sugar came out. i closed
my eyes & let it happen. woke up feeling
like a lone cloud in a stone soup sky.
the plane was gone. the trails through
cut the morning blue. a rippled scar. 

ancestor soup

i mostly avoid my ancestors
when i run into them in the dark.
but sometimes, in a pot of broth
i'll see a walking stick & take it. 
my grandfather would braid his hair
& his beard. lean his legs against
the wall. we are shrinking people.
memory is not so much a state
but an act of invention. what were we?
the resewing of a gone blanket. 
i keep keys in my pockets so that
if they ask for a gift i have something
to keep them busy. i have never seen
a picture of any of my great grandfathers.
it is possible one does not exist. 
we are not sentimental people but we are
collectors which is just another word
for hoarders. if i were to try to summon them
i think i would go into my parents' attic
where there are pocket watches & 
rings & hair pins & beads & skulls & letters. 
gather a good bunch of them up 
& put them in a round-gutted pot. 
bring it to a boil. the smell of metal 
& mildew & leather. they would come
& try their keys in my mouth, each tooth
a door into a buried life. i have blood 
like syrup. i never heard my grandfather laugh
but i think it was sticky & wild. serve them
the bowls of soup. our mismatched spoons.
an emptied sky. all the stars down to visit. 
the mule deer & the elk & the spiders.
we feast & the ladle never comes up empty. 

live stream jesus 

i don't tell anyone but i watch him
each night. my palm, a theater.
live stream jesus has a face
just like my father. sometimes he walks
on water for galaxies & coins. other nights
he rests his head in his hands & talks
about carpentry. the way wood splinters 
& nails join the walls of a future confessional.
some of the comments are mean. they call him
a wannabe & lots of words i don't want
to repeat. others are fair. they tell him 
he should do more if he is the son
of god. one night he is distraught. 
he turns his wine into water. he begs 
us on the other side, "tell me where
we are?" and "i do not even remember
what i said." i once listened to the bible.
it was strange. not a religious experience
but a funhouse one. the book reads to me
as a thrust toward an end. the last pages
like the unhemmed edges of a great skirt.
live stream jesus isn't even a top streamer.
his followers are mostly transient. some of them
haven't been to church in years 
& just want to remember why they stopped.
there are of course the worshippers 
who spam the comments with praying hands
& cross emojis. i picture them weeping 
in their sliver of the dark. i am sometimes
envious. what would it be like to trust a god?
others, like me, watch him like a mirror.
in church i was told that we were made
in god's image but i know 
from watching live stream jesus
that the reverse is true. instead he was made from
our image. a hunger for a less cosmic husbandry.
my father on his knees joining 
planks of wood. the wood of crosses & trees.
i one of only a few who almost always
lingers until the stream ends
in the purple dark where one day twists
towards the next. 

bodyguard

i don't need a bodyguard but one
arrives anyway. he was a tree in a previous life.
he stands outside the door whittling branches 
into vampire stakes. i don't know what
is wrong with me but the worse things get
the less i am afraid. my life used to be a watercolor
& now it's a pastel. easily smudged. the oil
on my fingers. sometimes i feed my bodyguard
a steak. i used to think only rich people
had bodyguards but sometimes one will choose you.
mine is not armed & i'm not sure
how much of a difference that makes. 
i read obama's memoir because it was free 
from the library & sometimes i want to know
what powerful people are thinking. we all write
myths about ourselves, some of them just grow bigger
than others. he talked about the secret service & how
they follow the president with quarts of his blood type
in case he were to need it. i think of how many people
die needing blood. how my bodyguard never speaks 
to me, instead, he mumbles into a cellphone.
it's a flip phone. he's calling his mother.
she lives in another dimension. one without war.
i do not know what brought him here. i do not
even know if he likes me. i guess that is like
asking a gun if it likes the bullets in its throat. 
there is a gun shop up the street from my house.
on their billboards they show sexy ladies 
toting ar-15s. i tell the bodyguard this & he shrugs 
as if to say, "isn't there always a gun shop 
up the street?" i like to imagine the inside. 
maybe there really is a sexy lady there, cradling
a gun like a little god. i ask my bodyguard 
if he would like to come in for the night. it is 
getting cold & autumn will be here soon. 
he refuses. stares the moon in its eyes. remains
as still as a stone. his faint shadow on the porch steps.