walmart parking lot 

you told me to meet you 
in the walmart parking lot. 
the sky was holding a knife.
in the u.s. every highway goes
the same place. there is a gas station
without any eyes & 
a restaurant too good to be true.
in oklahoma the land lays down
like i’ve never seen. somehow
despite their hoard 
i find you in the walmart 
parking lot next to a faceless truck.
inside it’s like a portal. 
i am small again just looking
for a palm of sugar. i used to love
to run away from my mom 
in our walmart & now i just run away
from time. a blanket in the sky.
the hotel where the door opens
right to the kfc. i don’t want to
go home. i want to make a walmart 
rosary. find a well & drink deeply.
push a shopping cart until we find
each other or else a face that’s good 
enough for tonight. 
you want to get in & out. i could 
spend forever here. counting birds.
a tour bus lets out. it was full
of coyotes. they are looking 
for their teeth too. i suggest
we join them but you just furrow 
your brow. we drive through 
a hole in the sunset. collect pecans. 
start driving again. 

extinction

sometimes the gone animals
talk through the new ones.
i open my mouth & speak dodo
into a microphone at a rally
about trying not to die.
when people ask me,
"are you alive?" i respond in
the old calls of iguanodons
who carried their eggs like
footballs into the fire. when i was
small i became obsessed with
the death of the universe after hearing
a priest say, "it could come any day."
i learned the sun has a pretty long time
to go which i found unnerving.
how many more mistakes & hungers
will this little wedding ring hold?
i sometimes consider if there was
a universe before this one. if those creatures
had dreams of permanence.
if they wrote their histories in
some kind of stone. if when i open my mouth
there are fragments of their longing.
their poems & their catastrophes.
the last tasmanian tiger turned into
a rainstorm in a zoo with only
black & white photographs. i look at her
& i see my own teeth. i reach
into her mouth & pull out a star. 
she says, "do not leave me." i promise not to. 

virtual reality dad

a new experience to 
plug the drain at the bottom
of your longing. there are
several options. you can have
a supportive dad or a wayward dad 
or a dad who is furious
in the dark. the best experiences
are when you combine options
for a more lifelike experience.
he can teach you how to shave. he can
scold you when you are out too late
& the moon no longer has legs.
he can call you when he's drunk
& neither of you know what
to say to each other. in game mode
he can chase you & it can be playful
or a horror movie or 
desperate like, "please do not
leave me." there is a rumor that
the developer spent years collecting dads
in a little satchel. that he spun 
their veins like wool to make 
the virtual reality dad. i wonder 
if he managed to capture mine.
his particular melancholy. the last time
i was home i walked in on him
with his very on vr halmet on.
he was on a beach. he described it to me.
he said, "it's bermuda. it's just like
i remember it." a sweating beer
in his hand. ragged t-shirt. his
beige wrinkled feet & crooked 
toe nails. i love him & i want 
to join him. there is only one headset
so i just shut my eyes. turn on my
imagination machine & swear that
i feel the heat from a tropical sun. 

water pressure

on the night the pipes burst
there were geese in the field. 
the sound of 
a cut morning. water from
the well dungeon. our hands
soaked. our bones like oars
in water. i begged for the water
to stop. the gushing. i thought
the earth was going to flood
& we would have to become
amphibians again. my gills 
like skirt pleats. there is 
never enough time to 
stop a storm. a thumb on
the vein of a hose. sharks in the water.
ghosts in the sharks. i do not
remember which one of us
realized we could cut the power.
we stood there for a long time
just dripping, knee-deep 
in feathers. the geese did not flinch.
instead they laughed to each other.
i waited until you walked away
to weep. i remember why
it had been a long day but these last
few years have felt like rosaries
of long days. the night, always 
rushing to chew on my ear.
i cupped my hands & lifted 
this tiny pool of water. did not see
a warbling face like i hoped to.
just the dark. the earth's belly
meeting air. it is so strange the balance
between gather & burst. 
it took three days to get the water back.
by the time we did, the geese were gone. 

this wouldn't happen if i was a slug

i want a good wet place to feel sorry for myself.
give me the musty damp leaves & the handprint
of a late october rain. this time of year
the slugs around our house are feral.
they start writing prophecies all up the side
of the house. once i saw my name & i tried
to figure out which creature knew me. i never
located them. instead, i took my name off
& beat it in front of the house like a dusty rug.
i have a lot of regrets. my biggest one is probably
that i let myself return to this earth 
as a human. maybe when we were slugs
you were gentler to me. maybe i felt real
& whole & alive. i love you but sometimes
you make me crave being soft & limbless.
dragging myself across the world's hairy tongue.
i make so many bad choices for myself
that i'm not even sure which would make sense
to roll back at this point. the house. the yard.
the birds. sometimes i hear a voice 
from the trees the line the edge 
of the corn field. last night i almost followed it.
was convinced i would finally catch
the slugs talking. planning out their master pieces.
i could then maybe ask to join them.
lay my down sticky & wild. a life without
the pressure to be a little man. the slugs reject gender
& embrace the laughter of the stars at night. 

block city

the one-way street is always working
against me. our cities are full of accidents.
me being one of them. kids are trying to build a city 
from cardboard blocks at the library. they construct 
a police station & i am a stranger & so i cannot tell them
to please tear it down. when i was small
my favorite game was restaurant. 
paper money. a plastic hot dog. life is a series
of larger & larger pretend games that never
quite become real. sometimes i romanticize
the dirt times. i wonder if those might feel
more tangible & loud than whatever we're doing
right now. the city was here before me though & before
anyone in my bloodline. it opened 
& asked us how we were going to imagine
one another. when i walk down hamilton street
i like to see myself passing in the windows
as a faint ghost. inside, people are being warm
& drinking coffee & buying lottery tickets.
there are little police stations & big police stations
everywhere. sometimes i look & i see a city of 
police stations. that is my fault though. 
i do not want to look out & see only the fractures. instead,
i want to see the blocks. the places that can
be easily lifted & stacked & rolled & thrown.
the children probably built hospitals & bodegas 
& delis & pizza joints or at least that is
what i tell myself on my walk home through
a quilt of car radios all trying to sing loud enough
for the last rays of sun to hear them. 

butter tooth

when i try to catch 
the barbed wire, i spread
like hot butter in the mouth
of a dog. i want to keep
my sculpture when 
the ice time is over. 
never give in to the sun.
our genders used to be so long
& shiny. now they get neat.
family houses in an street lamp military. 
i am told there are still holy places
that we should just not speak about.
i discovered one as a child.
all my hair fell out & i lost
the names for my brothers. my gender
turn into butter & i ate hundreds
of loaves of bread with it all alone
in the attice with the window open
to welcome back any bats that wanted
to join me.
the thing about the self is that
it is nothing without a knife
& somewhere to lay down.
i used to call my aunts & then
i stopped. i wonder if they would
even recognize my voice with my
buttered vocal chords
& the sacrifices i have made
to the gods of the well. in the miracle
of the loaves & the fishes, did they eat
the bread dry or was it decadent?
did the witnesses, years later,
smack their lips & taste their holy meal? 
i feel that way about peanut butter crackers
eaten on the turnpike. always more
than you bargained for but never
quite enough. i keep a butter knife
in my purse just in case. 

car sleeping in the rain

did i ever tell you about my
rocket ship? it smelled like
cigarettes & it lived in a wendies parking lot
across from a redners & across from
a daycare where the children would scream
like confetti. i slept in the back seat
which was never quite enough room.
still, i liked to curl up. pretend i was
returning from a trip to the moon
or from my grandmother's. i loved
the long drives especially when
my mom was at the wheel. she was better
at radio spinning & opening windows
& games. i had a tiny moon roof
in my car. i cracked it halfway
when the rain came. made 
impressionist paintings of the neon store lights. 
i wanted so badly to be on my way somewhere.
instead, my car was still. lingered
even as the parking lot emptied. i was 
always afraid someone would come
& tell me to leave. where would i go?
this was the last stop on a journey
to the next star. no turning back. 
when i felt especially wild, i would crack 
the front window just to stick my hand out
& feel the rain. i acted as if i had never
witnessed the sky break open before.
all my senses were different when i lived
in the rocket ship. i lingered on the taste
of pink bubblegum when i bought a pack
& chewed the whole thing. rubbed my fingers
across the floor carpet to feel the softness. 
when it came time to get up & go,
i turned the engine on. sunlight sweeping away
the clouds. droplets on the windshield. 
each one with a little rainbow on its shoulders. 

mega church

at the mega church, everyone had 
bouncy-ball faces & nice teeth. my boyfriend loved
to worship a spectacle. i guess i cannot
blame him. isn't that we have always done?
my highschool boyfriend,
we'll call him hunger, church hopped
our last two years together. each visit
felt like an audition. a room of inspector faces.
they could not tell what kind of girl i was
& truthfully i could not tell them either. 
i longer believed in god, which was a relief.
this was something i did not tell hunger.
i always believed that the churches could smell it on me. 
my desire to be somewhere or someone else. 
hunger was always going to me in search of
truth. my body became a field. burst blood vessels.
an empty room. at the mega church 
the seats were movie theater. hunger devoured
all the sick words some preacher spat into the air. 
the room was huge. full of more people
than even went to my high school. i searched faces
for another person like me. someone who 
ended up in a sea of flashing tongues & halleluiah.
i am not convinced that i was alone but
i did not find anyone else. instead, all the eyes.
their pocket-watchness. on your first visit
they gave you a free donut. i did not touch
that glazed halo. instead, i wrapped it 
in a napkin while hunger at his. he held 
my hand & said, "we could get married here
& so many people would come." i managed
to not return but he did. i wonder if 
he ever stopped being hunger. if all the nights
without a single window were worth it. 
if there is a piece of me scattered in 
the stained-glass window of 
all those churches he took me to.  

chicken nugget

i fear being consumed 
in unrecognizable ways. there is
a dinosaur who comes on our
back porch at night to weep.
i feed him dried fish & beef floss
when i feel extra bad about it. 
i sometimes eat veggie chicken nuggets
which is an absurd gesture in itself.
eating the idea of a chicken. i wonder
how & where people are eating 
the idea of me. my bones are 
really much thinner than anyone 
would assume. i know there are meals
in which my people are made into
little mystery shapes. in a sense though
i think the united states is a project
of chicken nuggets. i have in fact
sat at the same highway intersection 
at hundreds of places across the country.
in ohio in a mcdonalds lobby 
all the machines were chirping. it was
the only food for miles other than
the gas station grazing. the ground itself
is made from chicken nuggets & when we,
the chickens, cross the road we are
crossing ourselves. on tiktok someone says
that the chicken crossing the road joke
is supposed to be about a dead chicken. 
i am seldom hungry anymore. instead,
i crave a body. to be butchered 
in the proper way, animal to animal.
this place is founded on manufactured ease.
a story of buried pain. i collect feathers
for this reason when i find them. chicken feathers &
turkey feathers & the occasional feather
from a songbird. a reminder that we
are not just meats but color & air. 
that even if the sky does not hold us 
it bends down each morning to say,
"as long as we have blood, we cannot
all be undone."