routine with toe bones & pacing. 

sometimes i waste water on purpose, leave 
the sink running all day long. it's like
spilling lake after lake. we had a project
in elementary school about conserving water
where we were supposed to tell our families
to take shorter showers. to check for 
leaky faucets. i told my brother to hold up
his hand & i noticed all the leaks
between each bone. this is the same for me--
for everyone in my family. shedding water.
puddles on the carpet & droplets 
on the kitchen floor. no i don't actually
leave the sink running. we would have to 
pay for that but in my chest there's a sink
that's pouring out. i twist the handle to try
& make it shut but no-- the knobs don't work.
there's overflowing. there's drowning.
as part of my routine i try to screw
all my bones back into place. i start
with my feet, holding one high in the air.
in the closet, my father has steel toe boots
& i put them on to go stomping 
on the ceiling. it helps to wake me up.
i am a metal storm cloud. i am grey 
& dripping. i don't know if we're geysers
or wells but each of my family members 
has always looked like somewhere to fall into.
i keep an inflatable life raft in the cupboard.
i fill the steel toe boots with water
& drink out of them. i am always the first one
awake. i can spill my water in peace. 
in school they told us we're running out
of water & i wondered if one day 
i would turn on the faucet in the bathroom
& nothing but bones would come out.
i decided to not drink water until 
my bones stopped aching with rust. 
i drank water from my father's knuckles.
this morning i will still count
the bones in my feet-- pressing gently 
on the surface as if my feet are 
tide pools. ecosystems of wanting.
i drink water all day. some rooms i own
are full to the brim. my feet go flipper.
my feet leak a whole sea & there are
starfish in my joints. i scale the wall
of a boot & climb inside. nothing can
break my feet here. i am safe 
& filling up fast with water.
i guess what i've been wanting 
is someone to tell me that the water
isn't real-- to let go & fill the whole
apartment. to let myself wake up
on the ceiling. i want a lover to
hand my feet to so she or he or they
can count the bones for me. 

surplus 

i go with my brother to try on helmets
at the flea market. there are several stalls
dedicated just to army supplies & flipped upside down
the helmet look like they could easily be used
as bowls to fill with fruit-- even fake fruit. 
there are emblems i don't recognize & he lists 
the different associations & the wars & the regiments.
i pick one up & they're heavy & metal. i knock 
on the top as if it were a skull. a metal skull.
god give me a metal skull. we fill the helmets 
with our own fruit. my head is a peach & 
my brother's is a pear. we both bruise 
but my brother is sickly sweet & leaking 
on the concrete floor. the table nearby is 
covered with medals. he shifts through them
while i stand up straight wearing my helmet.
i want to buy the helmet & take it home--
learn more about what it might mean for 
my head to be inside it. i ask my brother
if these were used in battle & he says 
they're mostly surplus. leftovers.
there are still leftovers here from vietnam 
& world war two & even world war one--
which is what my brother searches for. 
there are no dead soldier's ghosts. these are
the soldiers still waiting happen, laying dormant 
inside protective gear, listening for 
another call. more boys come & try on helmets.
one boy knocks on the other boy's head.
my brother picks out medals for us 
& pokes two into his skin, the pear
juice dripping & sweet. i ask him
why he's doing that & he says we needs
to pin himself down in time. it's easy to feel
unmarred in the flea market. a stall over
they're selling the pelts of hunted animals.
two stalls over in a circus of vinyl records.
at the far end of the market there's a room
full of sequin dresses. i want to wear 
a sequin dress with my helmet. preferably teal 
or another color too loud to be real.
i don't tell my brother this. it's the kind of desire
you should swallow. he presses medals 
into my skin too. we are seeping syrup.
we are sweet boys. we are going to war one day
in not that long in a small town where the sun
is just rind & no flesh. helmet full of grapes.
helmet full of apples. helmet full of
juice/ blood. there are empty grenades for sale.
just test ones. incapable of destruction.
soft as hand fruit. we grasp them tight
just to fill our helmets with them.

on falling 

they dropped ants off the top of a skyscraper
on this tv show i was watching.
none of them broke. each fell softly like
dandelion tufts. little ambling seeds.
i want to know that kind of falling &
if it's possible in this body. 
in middle school i did similar experiments,
first with army men. opening the window a crack
& encouraging them to take the leap. 
taking risks is admirable, brave even.  
a sign of a good leader. 
there are of course animals 
who jump naturally; lemmings & humans
& i think i've seen an image of buffaloes
tumbling from the side of a mountain like boulders, 
though for the human it is less natural 
& more of a throbbing impulse. the bridge
is covered with army men & ants.
the ants are descending without harm.
there's some bridge in france where dogs 
leap off the side without warning. 
an ant can fall from any height without harm.
i have known men like that but we are not
one of them. the bed rooms in my parent's house
were all on the second floor until my brother
moved into the attic. we pried open 
the window screen up there so we could
drop stuffed animals from that high up.
we'd pause to hear the thack as they hit
the driveway below. none of them died.
this whole summer i harvested ants--
collecting them in mason jars & feeding them
sugar water. i told them i needed them
i told them we were going to try something
& last night i crawled up on the roof
of my apartment, just like an ant & 
i did not jump off it but i did pour 
the ants out. i did pretend 
i was one of them.
that silk plummet. the air & the ground 
indistinguishable from each other. 
six twitching legs & whirling antennae.
if i wanted to i could have press my finger
down on each of the ants & flattened them 
into smudge. but falling yes that is something
i need more practice with. i would 
sit on the ledge of my windowsill. dangle my legs.
i would turn into an ant before falling.
no i wouldn't fall i would light matches 
& drop them. no i wouldn't do that either
i would imagine dropping heavy
like a bucket of water. scattered & 
irreconcilable. seeping into the earth.
i told the ants to pretend to be snow  
as they fell. i fall into bed like
a night of grey. i fall into morning
like a scattered shower. damp grass &
the quiet ambling of the ants i dispersed.

a list of public bathrooms

the pink bathroom soap is blooming
between my fingers somewhere in a public place
where other men line up against a wall
& don't make eye contact with each other.
i find comfort in the idea of a peninsula,
how a mass of land can be one leg away 
from an island. sometimes i miss particular 
bathrooms. there was the women's room
in the bottom of my college library-- 
how it was long & wore white tiles & best of all
how no one else was hardly ever there. 
the pink bubbling soap told stories 
about dirt & its desire to make pure
each fingernail. the pink soap climbs wrists 
& asks where the smudges came from. 
i also miss the stalls in this restaurant 
in king of prussia-- how each was a tiny room
with walls the went all the way to the floor.
there's something about the way a stall
isn't really a stall-- how your feet
& your ankles betray you. i want to be
far far out on the tip of a piece of land.
i want the ocean full of nothing but
pink soap. the smell of sanitation. i want
a sanitary body for once. in the bathroom 
every body is a statue. in the bathroom 
all men become singular. the mirror is not
a mirror but a temptation. that small lock
on the stall door. the slick tile floors.
the only thing pink is the soap 
& of course me. if i'm looked at wrong
i lather-- the foam between fingers 
between town under tongue & teeth.
it is a project to stay clean here. 
i imagine myself building land with
bucketfuls of dirt. a place to walk out 
farther. i steal the mirrors from bathrooms
to make the ocean-- one single smooth surface.
where do you go to preen? men never 
fix themselves. men can never be alone.
in a public bathroom i sit in a stall
trying to find alone. a place to exist
& the pink soap is gushing from dispensers 
& trying to find me. i'm clean i promise.
i shower everyday & i even scrub my feet.
crawl into the bathroom sink 
& let the automatic water work me. 
is the lighting good in your favorite bathrooms?
i like a place to take pictures of myself.
white wall. tile floor. parch each cuticle 
in the hand dryer. wipe palms on my pants.
i like a place where no one can see
just how much pink we're dealing with here.
at the far end of the island there are 
surely bathrooms. all kinds of them.
each home with a bathroom & a sink & a window 
with grey clouds peering in & looking
for the hope. we are all very beautiful
in pink. we all her reflects in our 
finger nails even though they are small
& ghost like. 

pineapple greek yogurt 

i ate greek yogurt 
every day my senior year of high school.
i stood at the counter or at the edge 
of the tan kitchen table 
piled with coupons & bills & college mail
& i took a too-large spoon & dipped the utensil 
into the white smooth surface. i can't remember
a single thing that happened though i remember 
skeletons & how i took inventory of my bones 
laying on the floor of my bedroom-- how my boyfriend
would press his pelvis too hard against mine--
our clothing still on-- we were wrestling something.
i think of how quickly the leaves came down
that year & how one after noon i stood at
the end of the driveway trying to catch
all the yellow ones. the fruit on the bottom
of the plastic cup was bright pineapple
dressed in syrup. i was always hungry 
for greek yogurt. i bought it with tips
from the malt shoppe. i bought it with change
i harvested from the stomach of the laundry machine.
i was standing on the ceiling one night.
i was not in love with him anymore 
but i wanted to be. i had friends i think
& one of them had a pond behind her house
where we stood & watched the seasons 
spill over each other. i read frankenstein
in his basement & cried for the monster
with a spoon in my mouth eating greek yogurt
or maybe i made that up & maybe i was crying
for something else. the ceiling in his basement 
was made of those white speckled panels
& i wanted to push one up & crawl into
the walls of his house. he kept greek yogurt
in his fridge for me & i should remember
this as kindness. i'm stirring from 
the bottom. the sourness of the plain yogurt
& the sweetness of the bright fruit. 
somewhere the fruit grew & the sun was 
a round blood orange. i hurt myself though 
i can't pin-point why. i would take a match
& blow it out before pressing it into my skin.
a garden of round scabbed seeds. i think i told myself
it was because i was greedy. i lived a dipping
of spoons because it wasn't loving like
i was supposed to. what was 
wrong with me? when asked what the marks were
i explained they were a reaction to a lotion
an accident from baking
a rash spreading
i'm not sure i'm not sure.
he moved his hand across them & i pretended 
to be a layer of flat white yogurt to be
dipped into. i told him 
to take the spoon
& stir me.

the whole cow 

in the smokehouse there's meat hanging
on the walls like paintings. red muscle
& tendon. on a drive through my home town
you can count crumbling piles of stone
where there used to be smokehouses.
where they used to fill the meat with 
grey & soot to keep fresh longer. now we have
refrigerators but there are small tiny fires
lit all over the house. i find a fire 
in the kitchen cabinet & i smudge it out
with my thumb. we have a chest freeze 
& mom talks about buying a whole cow's meat
to last the winter. it makes me uneasy
to consider that a whole animal's body 
might live in the frost of our machines.
yes not the eyes or the bones--but the meat
where all the movement happens. we might
awake one morning to find the animal 
re-assembling itself--a bleeding cow
un-thawing in the middle of the kitchen.
i try to consider the routines of 
the ghosts-- how they carry meat to
these crumbling stone sheds. wild grass
grows tall & bows all around. turns yellow
in the heat & the sun. there's one
in the woods by the creek that we used to think
was a tiny abandoned house. my neighbor, my brother
& me would crouch on the stone floor & 
etch our names in the faded soot. wipe hands clean
on our thighs. i want to be hung up 
in a smokehouse. i watch the clouds to 
crawl down my throat & into my muscle.
there are ghosts whose meat is heavy.
there is a cow alive now that might
live in our freezer all winter until
there is no meat of her's left. i want to
live in the freezer. i want them to see me
one piece at a time. a thigh. a rib.
a hand splayed out becoming a hoof. 
how thankful we should be for our methods
of preservation-- how the devices 
let us keep eating whole animals.
will they find our fridges in centuries
& want to crawl inside. i'm going out
to rebuild the smoke house. there are 
tiny fire under my fingernails. there is
a sense of slipping in my teeth.
there might be a fire under my tongue
where a boy left it. all smokehouses 
are of course women-- the only ones
who know what to do with dead things.
i want to live there-- where she can
tell me what to do with this flesh.
there is so much body. a cow weighs about
2,000 pounds. 2,000 pounds of edible.
i want to be that much feeding. here i am 
in the debris of a smokehouse once used
by a farmer who is now bones planted
in tall grass. there are many small graveyards
speckled across the hills. a stone fence.
headstone headstone headstone. all worn
clear of names. hunks of frozen meat
in the dirt. what we make of stone 
talks to the tall grass. what we make
of meat is eventually given 
to a tiny fire to erase the bleeding.

in safe places

the grey clouds up there are drones 
& i know this because just yesterday 
instead of rain, i opened my mouth & caught
a bullet shell. like the tooth of a metal dinosaur.
i took the object out to inspect & i pushed
it into a patch of dirt. you never know what
it's going to rain anymore. sure there's
a lot of people who count on water but
what if it's thumb tacks-- what if it's
weaponry-- what if it's an open fire--
a barrage. i know nothing about drones
other than that their faces are blank
& their pilots live in safe places.
there are safe pilots moving these clouds
so i wave a them to let them know
i'm a human & i'm down here wishing
that if i'm going to die today that maybe
i could have gotten more sleep. a drop
here a drop there. red. the drones/clouds
leaked blood & a fragment fell on my
open hand. catching blood like minnows
as it wriggles from the sky. no one believes
me though when i explain that clearly 
the clouds are drones. actually, it's not
that they don't believe me it's more
that they love the clouds & don't want
to know anything new about them. they point
& say no not that cloud at least & i say
yes even that cloud. how can you trust
a landscape to not be man made? when i was
small i think the clouds were real clouds.
i think i might have stepped onto one 
just once in a thick fog that ate the whole town.
i opened my fingers wide like a frog's palm
to touch the cloud-- to try to scoop it
up in palmfuls to take back inside with me.
yes, trust me i know a cloud when i see one
& these aren't clouds. no anymore.
will they hurt us? i guess the real question
is how much will they hurt us? i watch
a neighbor boy outside who names the clouds
after distant family members. i want to
tell him to stop naming drones but 
i want to believe like he does that
the clouds are buzzing because there 
are insects nearby & not because
they are mechanisms. in my house
i cloud the blinds. i pretend i live
in a calm place where there are no bullets 
none at all. i eat an apple & find a 
metal shell inside. i spit the artillery 
out into the sink. sometimes though
yes sometimes i wake up & i look outside
& i forget where we are & i see the clouds
as just clouds & i make animals of them
& i think of the fog thick enough
to grasp a handful of.

clergy

the soften & wilting pages becoming skin
this man shouts a bible toward the morning foot traffic 
each day as i walk from penn station all the way up
6th avenue. sometimes he raises one finger
to point as if conducting an orchestra 
of un-manned violins. i feel me strings--
the ones that go all the way down my throat
& end between my ribs. of course, i never touched it
but i want to know what his bible feels like
if he reads from it every single day with more 
reliability than subway train times or electricity.
that summer there were power outages & we stood
in the dark streets like ghosts & though i wasn't
on 6th i know the man was reading from 
this bible. if not the texture of skin 
then maybe the texture of a newspaper 
left out on a street corner week after week.
the smell of newsprint crinkles with rain.
i miss walking that street & miss the man
spitting the bible towards me-- how i could look up
to him & make eye-contact with words.
how i want poetry to do that to me--
to move me to stand with an umbrella in the rain
balanced on my shoulder so as to protect 
the pages. the words emptying me of a form.
his black suite. his black shiny shoes.
his fingernails like little peach moons.
the first time i thought he was calling us
sinners & maybe that's because despite it all
i haven't unwoven the knots of god in me.
maybe he was trying to give it to us
or maybe he did believe us all to be evil.
maybe he was exorcising this old city
of all these bones. my only impulse was
to tell him to stop & breathe. he read so fast--
a kind of spilling. a block or two away 
after i passed him i would pass radio city music hall
& tourists pointing at the red bright sign.
i would pass a vegan ice cream shop &
a store full of i heart new york shirts & magnets.
i don't know if he's still there but i hope
he is. i hope his bible is made of feathers.
i hope the rain stops & he eats something
warm & crisp. i want to stop him to tell him
i'm not a bad person--that i walk fast because
i have to-- because there is a hurry 
i am part of but no of course i don't. he reads.

high school graduation speech 6 years later 

why did i ever want to give
a high school graduation speech?
i don't know what i would have to say to 
a room full of bodies i knew very little about.
there was a guest speaker who told some 
story about cows though i don't remember
the moral. in 6th grade i became acquainted 
with a pervasive discomfort. the school was
made of paper & my skin was made of 
water balloons. there were a lot of 
birthday parties. there were also a lot
i didn't get invited to & i scrolled through
photos on facebook. there were lights 
at all those school dances & our shadows
obscured on the linoleum floors of cafeterias 
& gymnasiums. not once did we ever play 
dodge ball though i felt as round & as red
as one of those games. was there something
i intended to say? one afternoon they piled 
old books from the library into a dumpster
& told us we could take whatever ones we wanted.
i found a psychiatry guide book from the 1950s.
our school was old & in the one hall i remember
they had photographs of each class that ever 
graduated. aimlessly we might comment 
on the students hair styles or their stoic faces.
there was a sense here of digging like one day 
they might hand us all shovels & tell us
to encounter the earth beneath us. we had no pool
though we swam laps in soupy september heat
that made murky the second floor halls.
there was fog on the windows. no one was
dissecting sharks yet. how the years came around
in perfect circles-- the return of the sticky heat
as a sign that we were almost nothing & no one again.
i never did anything interesting with a summer
though in middle school once i went to a dog training camp
& once i might have been in a play. what happened 
between? i'm asking not for closure but 
as a body who lived in rift. i wore the same
gym uniform from middle school to high school:
grey shirt, blue shorts. maybe i too would have told
some story about cows, about pulling over on 
the side of the road & marveling at these great
huge animals. how they eat almost all day 
to have enough energy-- faces to the the grass.
the smell of sharp green. a few times we noticed
deer out the window of the one science class.
a doe & two babies & all the sapling legs.
that pause while everyone looked to the window
& the teacher glanced too. i would have told 
everyone i only ever wanted to be
one of those animals.

when i grow up i want to be a live stream 

i refresh the page like curtain--
like the lapping of milk from a milk.
my grandmother had cat after cat after cat
& all of them live in the internet now.
there is a whole menu of instant food
waiting to be here in an instant.
i have no patience for these such things.
the eggs are dried into flakes. the ceiling
is a gaping wound made blinds. i pull
them back & outside there is nothing
but waiting. i want to wait longer
for this than anyone ever has. there's an oven
that we never use. there's astronaut ice cream
on the counter readying itself for the first 
footsteps on mars. when they make a colony up there
i'm going to lose so many friends--
all of them zipping themselves into 
onesies & grabbing that dangling rope.
i love the smell of burnt hair. i am refreshing
the page & hoping to find a garden there.
a live stream of birds hatching because
none of us know where they are.
i check my hair for ticks--nails to scalp.
there's enough frozen here to last me 
a lifetime. i keep frozen planets 
& frozen skylines & frozen birthdays &
occasions. these are all my innovations.
i am creative to a certain extent. i have 
had my fair share of siblings though
none of them will emerge here on 
the computer screen where i want them.
he gets down & licks my feet humbly
like jesus washing the heels of each 
apricot. i have a light fuzz to my skin
& i am acidic when bit down upon. 
the page is loading & there's no telling
what kind of bird this will be. if i'm 
being honest i'm praying for an albatross
or at least something else big & angel-like
something that suggests i am very small
& at a desk & doing nothing until i too
lay a nest of pixel-eggs & become a live stream.
i want so badly to be a live stream--
i want to call my parents & tell them
to refresh the computer. i need an instant
swallow to keep me company. the walls
are petal-ling apart from the latest arrival 
of winds. some say they come all the way
from dangerous planets-- down from 
mars to tempt us. i don't know who says that
but maybe i'm just listening harder
than i should. when the page finally loads
i'm going to speak through the screen 
& become one of them. a nestling & i'm going
to be sticky with egg white & i'm going
to teach the birds how to freeze everything
they need. no rotting none of it & even 
the unhatched eggs we will slip into 
that beautiful cold to become light as 
ping-pong balls. we are so close.
i am so close. the cats were so close to 
a life other than the one they had &
any day now everyone of substance
will live on mars. it will be me here 
& everyone will watch my live stream & say
they feel each echo of my face & each 
angle of each bone. i will drink milk
& they will watch--
tongue into curtain, an opening.