ribbon cutting for my wretched mouth

there are people who buy land
just to eat it. i have seen them
in the old field with their fingers
dug pie-deep. they talk to each other 
in money religion. i order a bird online
& she arrives dead. didn't you order
a dead bird? tell us how we're doing.
give us all your teeth & we'll refund you
the breath you used. it's not looking good.
it's not looking good at all. i once
dated a pillow. he was really a pretty good
gentleman. do the items i stole from target
when i was a different gender 
count towards my total? i braided 
my hair for years you just couldn't see it. 
i arrive at the party. there is no party
just a few people gathered around 
a ballon trying to stay warm. 
the piano is out of tune but we sing.
we sing like a revolving door.
all my friends want to move to somewhere
better. we are somewhere better. this is
the better somewhere. that is just
my way of saying that i think we have
to try. i sometimes have horrible visions
of running for a political. just like
everyone thinks they could be
a better parents, everyone thinks
they could be a better empire. if i ever do that,
take me out to my parents' garage
& leave me there for a winter, feeding me
nothing but wild onions. i am holding
a gathering that you are not invited to.
it is just for me & the flies in the kitchen. 
a little ribbon across my lips. maybe now
i can tell the truth. maybe now 
when i open my mouth you will see
the tiny girl standing there. to have
a gender is to have another gender inside.
i'm sorry we're closed. our operating hours
are from here to salvation. i am just
trying to get here. snow falls for
the first time this year. 

tomato sauce

i open all the cans 
& the vines come back to life. 
i saw you standing in the sink
eating a tomato like an apple.
it was my heart. there is not
enough basil to cover my body.
the truth always moves like
amaranth everywhere & still
somehow unholdable. there are
no trees left to cut down. you buy
a new face & wave it outside 
the window to attract the flowers
that make me sick. i call my mom
& hang up. i call a hotline & talk
to the woman as if she's my dad.
gender for me is a fallow field.
i don't have anything left to sew
so i have to run. i remember 
my mother making tomato sauce.
the house full of steam. my husbands
pressing their noses to the window.
if you marry me i think i'll die
but i also don't know what else
i would even do. can you donate
your body to science while you're
still alive? i want to be fire wood.
not burned at the stake i mean
limb by limb the way the trees go. 
a warmth in the living room
for the dogs to sleep beneath. 
if you loved me, we would have
gone to mars already. if you loved me
we would have made pasta. 
there is a house made of sauce cans
that i climb into for the night.
it is cold & no one believes me.
i have gotten to the point where
i hold onto my beliefs like tomato seeds.
small & slimy. no matter what 
my frost does, they crawl back.
i whisper, "please please. i cannot.
not yet. not now. not now." 

1 gram of gold

chewing-gum sized,
the piece of gold still glinted
in the neon light of our attic.
i thought i had found a transformation.
a way out of the number curtains
that spilled over every hunger.
my mother wore a calculator 
like a lung. we honeysuckled 
on every stained-glass vision
that would paint us. the gold was
in a little plastic sleave. i held it to my chest
as i walked up noble street 
towards the farmer's market
where the pawn stand had once bought
my fingernails & the tip of my tongue.
i started to get money sick.
filled thousands of shopping carts 
in my guts. pushed them towards
radio heaven. the shop was stoic.
wore a military green hat & had a 
lopsided beard. he took the gold piece
from me. my heart, a fruit salad. 
laid the gold on the scale. 1 gram.
it seemed like so much. i did not think
i had ever witnessed so much. 
he slid the gold back to me. 
told me, "it's too small to be worth
me buying it." confused i asked him
how much he though it was worth.
"a few dollars," he said. i did not
have any more words. i took the gold
& carried it home in my pocket.
i looked at it only once before 
placing it back in the box i found it in. 
my reflection in the metal, 
briefly glorious.

silver lining 

i open my disco ball mouth
in the rain-slick dark. the goats are hungry
& there is a felled tree to cannibal. 
i listen to a tiktok where the speaker asks,
"why are there no pronouns for the trees?"
the tree is not a tree but a man who lies
face down in the muck leaves.
i used to be good at finding positives
but i have since gone glass-half-empty.
actually, the glass just doesn't seem
to exist anymore. i am not sure it was ever there.
i have socks to catch the water. i boil
my teeth to make necklaces out of them.
it is thanksgiving & i used to watch 
the macy's day parade but now i am watching
a fire eat a man or is that tree? 
i sometimes cut off a limb (my own)
in the hopes that there is something
shiny & precious beneath it. 
the phrase "silver lining" comes from
a john milton poem. every time i speak it
i am casting a fishing line into 
the language river & pulling up a goat.
salmon rush past towards a glass-half-empty. 
my desires have always had to swim upstream.
sometimes my partner tells me 
how to do everyday tasks as if 
i've never done them before. the silver lining
is that i get to clock out of my face
& think about deer. when i come back,
no one else is awake. no one else is home.
the trees are eating the door. i mean the goats.
the door is a man. the trees do not use pronouns,
instead they should only be referred to 
if you are within arm's length of them.
this is how i want to be known. a hand
on my back every time someone speaks of me. 

lamb's ear

my father never used gardening gloves.
instead, he reached into the soil
with his bare hands. all summer we worked
on the church garden. carnations & poppies.
my favorite plant was the lamb's ear.
i would get down on my knees to feel 
the ears between my forefinger & thumb.
when my father was off working somewhere else
on the church grounds, i would lay down
against the earth. i would put my ear
to the lamb's ears & just listen to their softness.
did you know an ear can speak? a voice
full of rain & green. i once plucked a lead
to take home with me. thanked the plant
over & over & still felt guilty.
i laid the ear down on my pillow & listened
on into the night. became fluent in 
their language of softness. two ears making
a spaceship into our velvet dark. when i returned
i brought a handful of blueberries. the ears always
had room for me in their warm earth. 
my father eventually got bored of the garden.
we stopped going & the mulch shifted.
some of the flowers stopped returning 
each year. i have not been there for years
but i hope the lamb's ear remained. 
most of what i loved about church 
was not the building & definitely not
the terror words about my soft flesh.
instead, i craved the fields & the forest
around it. the statue of mary where my father
planted twelve ferns, one for each apostle.
inside each leaf we planted was a little god,
hungry & ringing. i like to imagine the lamb's ear
bigger now & wild without a tender. 
maybe still wayward children come
& find a space for their softness 
to be cradled as it should be.

lost & lost

i am proposing a cabinet beyond
the lost & found where we can put
our teeth when they no longer
fit in our skulls. where there is no 
looking backward & instead we make 
new futures where no one 
has to be on fire. i am sibling to the 
orphaned mitten & the charging cable
once plugged into a breakup machine. 
mother to the acorns who could not 
figure out how to sprout & the eggs
who went rotten in the coop. 
we can call it the lost & lost. like a zoo
that you can only enter if you too have
been left behind. maybe that is
a museum. i do not know if you can
be lost & alive. i do not know if
you can be in a museum & alive.
i could be a keeper of this place.
collect our kin. maybe then we could
get to work becoming as lost as we can
possibly be. for me, lostness has been
a way of life. it is where i go to feel
massive & free. i do not want 
to meet the version of myself who used to
be able to give the billboards what
they wanted. who used to find myself
in taffy shop windows. last night when
you yelled at me, afterward i went
to the lost & lost. it was so quiet & soft.
i thought, "i wish i would have brought
a trowel with me." i wanted to get deeper.
i never mean to leave. i am hoping
that one day i am determined enough
to stay lost. that my body becomes
a broom, leaning in the corner & 
i go so far away that all i hear is snow. 

chalk board

in pairs
we clapped the erasers behind
the school. now the school
is a hamburger. they cut down
my beloved tree years ago. 
it was the first tree i ever climbed.
i wonder sometimes where
the wood ended up & if they sold it
to become chicken nuggets.
two of my teachers have died.
i looked up their obituaries 
& they were written in chalk
on the ceiling of a parking garage
in the nearby city. it is astounding
where our stories end up. 
you don't really see chalkboards
anymore. instead, everything
has been "upgraded." i had a dream
last night that it was my first day
of middle school again. only, i was
as big & hairy as i am now. i didn't
really feel more or less out of place though.
back then, i always felt like my body 
was betraying me somehow. 
the hallways glowed. there were
street food salespeople selling
all kinds of hot flesh. i was hungry
but the hallways were crowded 
with children & i didn't have
enough hands. every once in awhile
my 3rd grade teacher let us 
draw on the chalkboard. it was like
having a megaphone. i felt my sliver
of chalk shrinking beneath 
the weight of all i had to paint.
dinosaurs & poetry & my name 
over & over. i wake up sometimes
inside a chalkboard & it is glorious. 
i think they are from all the old rooms
that used to teach me about 
just how small i was. a year ago,
my fifth-grade teacher wrote to me.
she told me she was dying of cancer.
"was i kind to you?" she asked.
she was not but i lied to her. 
i hope when i am dying that people
don't lie to me. i want the truth
& i want a piece of bark from
that old tree. take me out back to clap
erasers. clap with me. let us beat 
our wings like useless little birds.
tell me i have done a marvelous job. 

carousel horse 

i find them in the yard. carousel horses 
dislodged from orbit. i too have found myself
without a sun. i meet the horses though
wherever i end up. i have seen them
in alleyways & at diners. in the city i went to
worship the carousel in bryant park each morning
before eating windows for hours.
i brought them pennies & hard candies. 
i would take a ride only when no children
were around. i'm not sure if that's more
or less creepy. i needed to be alone though
so i could whisper to the horses, "you can
leave whenever you want." they never replied.
i wanted to see them running down
the avenue of the americas. i wanted to see them
breaking windows. a friend yesterday
told me about how once she packed up & left 
for los angeles after feeling a calling. 
i don't know what is wrong with me
but i have never felt a calling. all i feel is
the hunger for a thousand escapes. maybe this
is what the carousel horses run on, a drive
towards the other side of the same world.
when i find free horses, i always bring them bells.
i know they have traveled far & they have
so much farther to go. i cannot decide if i am
the horse who turns round & round
or the marooned horse, nibbling on fallen leaves
in the backyard while the rooster calls down the moon.
the horses begin talking to each other.
i wave my hands. i tell them, "no carousel here."
i feel as gross as a landlord but i cannot watch
this happen again. the wayward horses always decide
that all they need is a new carousel. another
axis. somewhere to twist around. i point
at the murder field. it's littered with blasted corn. 
i tell the horses, "get out while you can."
they scatter. i wish i would have kept one.
i could have found him more bells. i could have
been a sun maybe if i lit my hair on fire,
closed my eyes & leapt. would we have kept 
each other from turning or is it impossible
to resist the need to follow another's back?
i know i will see them again. if i still have any resolve,
i'll do the same. watch them run off towards
a penny song that the stars are playing. 

dragon

i used to pluck out my hair
to feed the dragons who came 
breathing fire on the ghost trees.
i grew up where the creek meets
a quilt's edge. i saw dragons everywhere
as a kid. they were on the roof. 
they were eating my parents. they were
sitting in the garage at night.
my father had me change the light bulbs
on the porch because i was the only one
with hands small enough to fit
inside the old glass fixtures. as i worked
the dragons watched & their shadows
stretched long & clear when the lamp lit again. 
once, a dragon chased me to the weis market.
it was night & he did not follow me home. 
a dragon is sometimes a belief & sometimes
a desire. both are forms of reaching.
i am more of a desire person. i have never
gotten to touch a dragon despite 
all of our interactions. i imagine they 
would feel like the surface of a just-lit 
light bulb in a dark mouth. 
the texture of a garter snake. i want someone
else to have seen them. it could not have 
just been me. i am convinced 
that maybe my brother did once.
it was snowing & the sky was bare.
we both stopped. no porch light,
just the glow of white snow lighting 
our faces. maybe he saw the creature
staring down at us. maybe he was looking
at something else. i could not make out
the beast's full body. eyes. claws. 
wing tips like mountains. 

check engine 

i drive a half-ghost to all the little fires.
we are waiting for a two-truck & the moon
has a flashlight in her hand. 
at this point in my life i am more surprised
when the check engine light
goes off. that hasn't happened for months.
something is definitely wrong
& at stoplights my car will often turn
into a pile of worms. the birds come to feast.
on a particularly bad day last week
i had to beg a flock of crows to carry me
to work. they laughed & obliged.
on the phone my brother & talk about buses.
he's never taken a bus & i think,
"must be nice." instead, he sleeps in the attic
of my parent's house in a town that 
seems to get smaller each year. once in college
i fell asleep on the bus & ended up 
at the outlet stores. i thought i might as well
get out & walk around. i saw a store of
check engine lights & i didn't even have a car.
it follows you. is hereditary in a country 
of bigger & bigger cars. the glow.
the harbinger. it says this life will be expensive
& you should figure out alternate routes.
in high school i used to be obsessed
with hitchhiking. i did it only once.
i got into a strange woman's car (i chose a woman
because i had a sliver of self preservation).
on her dashboard the check engine light
was one & i felt safer. i ended up in the city 
on a corner that smelled like prunes & gasoline.
i don't remember how i got home but
until then i thought i could get anywhere.
in the rain, my check engine light
get dimmer. i have, in my last car, 
pushed on the dashboard as if i could
snuff out the future. of course it never worked
but for a moment it made me feel
like maybe it was possible to will away
an emergency. i am always the one
to turn off all the lamps in the house
on the way to bed. once i saw
a check engine light looking back at me
from the shadows of the house.
i turned away from it. told no one.
i is maybe still there, burning.