Bluetooth i traded all my teeth for blue ones: cobalt & sapphire. i watch them flicker as i talk to myself in the mirror. everyone's getting blueteeth now, you can turn on your laptop just by chewing. you can make a call on your cellphone by pressing your tongue to the backs of your incisors & play videos in your head by clenching you teeth. in my bed room i'm chewing pink gum & something goes wrong, i feel a click, in my head like a cassette tape being slid into place. i hear my own 7-year-old voice on the television downstairs. i feel all my thoughts crawling there, memories mixing together. i try to catch them but the blueteeth have made me wireless, i grasp at the air. downstairs my father watches the memories but doesn't know they're me. a boy pushes me in my friend's pool over & over, a loop. another me eats fried pirogues on a park bench. another steals 20$ from my mom's open purse: a collage of things i never told anyone. i come down & sit next to him on the sofa & he tells me that he's seen this movie before, but never the ending, it always shuts off before the ending. i nod & watch. a photograph of us playing catch fills the screen & he says that he loves this part. i touch my blueteeth with my tongue & they feel hot & angry. that night i take them all out with a pair of my father's pliers, drop each in the gravel by the side of the road.
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12/25
coconut cream each Christmas Eve my uncle brings a box of assorted chocolates (two layers deep). each family member takes turns becoming small & stepping into the box. my father eats the chocolate covered peanuts, one by one, they're each the size of his head. my uncle eats all the cordial cherries, red dripping from his mouth. my brother curls up in an empty spot where the cherries was, he falls asleep there & i wake him up so that he doesn't get eaten. we all go to bed while my mother stands in between plain milk chocolate squares & raspberry filled ones. she can never make up her mind. once everyone's asleep i sneak downstairs & take the map of flavors from inside the lid. i hold it up & notice that everything in this world is a piece of chocolate. the sofa: filled with chocolate mousse the porch light: lemon cream center i walk outside to bite into the house because the map tells me that it's caramel but the coconut filling gets me. i spit it out in the trash & feel guilty for wasting sweet things. i try to cover up the bite mark so that someone else might eat the house & i eat the sofa instead. everyone gets up on christmas & also sees that everything is chocolate. we almost eat my brother but we catch ourselves. i know i'm a cordial cherry, my uncle eyes me all day.
12/24
styrofoam this year they decided that all the snow would fall as styrofoam, a new recycling effort gone array. the flurries clump in chunks on the lawn. i catch some in my mouth & it tastes bland, like stale hot dog buns. i chew/swallow & the foam. it gets stuck in my teeth, smiling in a mirror i pick out the pieces. as the foam collects over the streets, people stop driving their cars, unable to navigate the new texture of the world. as we all known, the styrofoam doesn't decompose, it collects, several feet now & when i step outside it comes up to my waist. i miss you terribly & i had wanted to kiss you in the snow, like all couples do the first winter they know each other. i had imagined your eye-lashes collecting frost & our cold fingers forming snowballs. i wish we had been together when the snow started, even the phone calls come in blurry, like speaking through a layer of insulation. only the mail trucks & ambulance have adapted so far, so we send each other small fragile objects, packed with snow from our backyards, i'm sending you a small ceramic parrot from my desk & the glass you drink out of when you stay over.
12/23
the lion's mane grows around my hard-wood waist like a skirt-- white tassels dangling down. this is a lesson in naming, a man somewhere someday, years ago, watched a mushroom grow & turn into a lion. the lion roared & spat spores into the soft earth. the same man watched the spores turn into more lions. he was actually eventually eaten by lions. everything is alive, even mushrooms & the lions plant their paws-- their veins disperse as mycelium, form a great body underneath the forest where all the lions can speak in lion. i dig myself into the soil to become a lion & i get enmeshed with their words: the gentle turn of the soil, the reincorporation of dead leaves & dead animals as punctuation, i talk to the lions. the fungus among us is me. the mane on my waist getting thicker in the cool damp dark of the dirt. i feel myself becoming a skirt, a mushroom skirt. overhead i hear the faint footsteps of lions. you can eat them. the lions are known to have magical qualities. i eat them, chew the strange-texture body of each lion. i find that white cold heart & crush them in my teeth. the mycelium moans, i am a lion.
12/22
chocolate bomb the server comes over to our table & asks if we want dessert. none of them sound vegan so i say "no" but you (with your love of sweet things) want her to give you recommendations. she leans in close & whispers "anything but the chocolate bomb." we ask her what the chocolate bomb is & she shakes her head a moment. she says "it's full of chocolate." i suggest to you the carrot cake but you think cake with vegetables is sacrilegious so you order the chocolate bomb. the server's face went pale & she nodded slowly. "why did you have to go & do that," i said. before he could answer we heard a whistling overhead followed by the blare of air-raid sirens. the servers instruct us to get under the tables & i take a fork, gripping the silverware fearfully. underneath you can't stop apologizing "i just wanted to see what it was, i just wanted to see-- you know?" i shake my head, i can't look at you. children across the room put their cloth napkins over their heads & an old woman curls up between the legs of her walker. when the bomb hits there is an almighty flash that smells just like melted chocolate or a tray full of brownies. it falls in the middle of your plate above our heads & scatters the cutlery around the room. knives stick in the wallpaper & the basket of bread singes black. smoke fills the room & for a moment i can't see anyone or anything-- my mouth full of chocolate bars melting down my throat-- i choke on the flavor, running my hand along the ground to find you. when things clear we are in the desert somewhere far away & there is just a white plate with an oval of layered chocolate cake on top. in the distance the sound of bombs continues, it sounds routine. i'm glad that i held onto the fork. we sit down in the sand & eat.
12/21
Personal trainer i buy a personal trainer from an advertisement on the radio. GET INTO SHAPE the radio said. i thought to myself what shape? only 10 minutes after i called, the trainer arrived at my front door in blue basketball shorts & a tank top. his muscles were smooth like a mirror cake. he inspected my kitchen, throwing all my cereal in the trash can. "No processed foods, only citrus fruit for now." he said, filling all the cabinets with grapefruit & tangerines. "i want my body to look like this" i said to the personal trainer. i held up an abstract painting, a Kandinsky: cacophony of stray lines & colors-- a big black-red circles bold in the corner of the painting, i pointed to it & said "This will be my chest." he surveyed the painting & said he'd do what he could but that i would have to eat only the grapefruits. we started the following morning & he woke me up at 3:00AM because he says that less sleep brings out the abstraction in us-- makes the body malleable. he handed me huge weights that were somehow very light & i asked "how come they're so light" & he said that meant they were working. in the afternoon we ate grapefruit on the back porch & it tasted like pancakes with syrup. "What does grapefruit taste like to you?" i asked & he said that it always tastes like bacon. at night before we went to bed i asked "where will you sleep tonight?" & he said that he wouldn't be sleeping, that this was all he cared about. scared, i looked down at my body & noticed the wild lines-- the absurd curves of my elbows the reds & yellows. i couldn't get up. he said i was so close to being done. i screamed which confused him. he said this is what i wanted & he had come & done it. "Go away! Get out!" i shouted until he scurried away. i felt bad but screaming was the only way i knew to get back into a normal body. when i look in the mirror i still see remnants of the painting-- the great big red black eye, a shadow beneath my chest.
12/20
Writer "this is the end of a chapter," you said before you left last night. i closed the door behind you like the thin page of a book. i thought to myself, if this autumn has been a chapter i want to meet who's writing us. what do they look like? i imagine him in his bedroom at a wooden desk, typing under dim yellow lamp glow. he eats microwave macaroni & cheese & sometimes orders a pepperoni pizza. he lives alone. his lover died when he was 22 & he never wanted to get over him. i said to you last week, "i don't think i will ever marry more than one person, not because i believe in soulmates, but because i don't want to go through it all again. if you die i'll go live alone by the ocean." the writer was talking about himself, speaking through his character, though, i meant every word that i said. the writer opens his window to taste a rush of december air & contemplates taking a walk. we took a walk & it was too cold for us to hold hands. he loves making us walk, especially in the city. he always wanted to move to new york but never did, he thinks it's too late for him. he has a coffee machine & he watches the dark liquid fill the pot each morning. i appreciate the writer's attention to detail, especially the work he put into writing you: the specificity of each ring he imagined on your hands, the light clinking they make when your fingers brush up against each other your eyes swirl like tide pools full of snow. i think he took them from the skull of his own lover, how else could he have imagined them? are characters allowed to have hopes for what happens next? i go out each night in search of the writer. i pace the street, thinking that maybe he's in one of these houses. i look up to the sky full of shy stars & airplanes that want to be birds & say "are you there writer? i don't want to live alone by the ocean."
12/19
on authorship i have a new ghost writer. i often catch him sitting at my desk, writing in all my journals & filling my computer with half-finished Word documents. i tell him that's not nice, that he can't just come in & write under my name. this happens more often than you might think that a dead writer will come back to haunt a living one. he won't tell me his name, when i ask he just recites my own. it is important to treat a ghost writer well, no matter how stubborn. i feed him dried fruit & granola. i brush his hair when he's upset, hanging his head & sobbing. it's difficult to get a ghost writer to open up about anything but this one did tell me that in his life he never got to publish anything. he won't tell me what he had been writing but sometimes when i'm laying in bed i imagine that stories he might have written. the ghost writer doesn't need to sleep so i learn to tune out his toiling & destroy it all in the morning: tearing out notebook pages & dropping files from the computer desktop into the trash. he thinks i'm cruel. i also think i'm cruel. there's some days where i feel like i should just let him write as me. he follows me all day after all, who better to write under my name? i buy him crossword puzzles to keep him busy. we sit across from each other at the coffee shop. i watch him while he isn't looking: his wrinkled white button-down shirt, his glasses on the end of his nose. i will miss him when he finally moves on.
12/18
an ode/elegy to the train station & my body last night i want to get lost alone in this big wild bird's nest city. i want to climb in between twigs & tinsel, place my blue glittery earring on the curb. on the subway car we find yellow plastic seats & sitting makes liquid sleep of me, maybe orange juice. i thank the train station for having so many people. there's a little boy kicking his legs & a woman who turns the newspaper page at every stop. so far this is a cliche poem about the city. the reader asks, "what else does he have to tell me?" i was grateful for my body, when was the last time you were grateful for your body? no, not appearance-wise, i mean the utility of it; i was thankful that my ankles could move so far in one night & that my calve muscles felt heavy like mangoes. a man was selling fruit on Christoper street & i wanted to stop & buy a red delicious apple, but we had to keep going. the city makes me think of fruit & water. water, because the train goes deep sea-- full of angler fish lights. fruit, because all the buildings are full of nectar. i plucked a stop light & bit down: an overripe plum. somewhere near penn station a tall man stared me in the eyes & asked "what are you looking at fruit?" my only thought was that if i were a fruit i would probably be a peach & my lover, a nectarine. i also thought how nice it was that the crowds might deter him from hurting me. is there no safe water for a queer body? an un-forbidden fruit? the train is an eel or maybe a snake. the curb swallows the blue glittery earrings & i'm thankful for the holes in my earrings that minnows can pass through. if i died in the city last night, i hoped that i might come back as a cluster of grapes in that man's fruit cart or maybe as the farthest sliding door of the train back to long island. i said thank you body for being so tired, thank god thank god thank god & out the train window i could only see rooms full of dead people & bowls of fruit, never the two at the same time. yes, & they were always under water. no cars pass me on my walk home & the train station behind me becomes a goldfish in a pile of glass on the floor. no more fruit. i'm happy that no cars pass me. i look over my shoulder & i see the earrings on the curb but i don't get them, i hear the man asking me "what are you looking at you fruit?" i thank my body for not being attacked. i thank the train station for being gentle enough to me. i thank headlines for telling me gently that two gay men were stabbed in the bronyx. i thank the water for turning everyone's words into nothing more than bubbles rising & turning into fruit above the skyscrapers. at home in the dim kitchen light eat an orange.
12/17
autopsy on a blue jay the birds dropped from the sky like purses, spilling outside, the sound of feathers on pavement (if that makes a sound). i collected them: the cardinals the robins, the swallows, & the blue jay, stacked them all on a crystal plate to investigate what's ailing them. with the fabric scissors i cut them apart, even though my mother warned me not to play with dead things. first the cardinal, full of black & blue wires-- spitting electric at me, i look for a plug to maybe recharge the animal, but there doesn't seem to be one. the swallow came apart easier, Velcro was all that held his chest together. i pried gently so that the collection of stolen keys from inside didn't fall out. i tried them all in my front door, thinking that might revive him. i had to do the robins mid-day when no one would notice the loud classical music pouring out of the every incision. i fill balloons with the songs & send them out the apartment window for someone to find. the last one was the blue jay, i remembered him from the fence outside, the tilt of his head & his chipper pacing. i thought about how similar we were, be up so early watching nothing. still on the crystal plate i hesitate because i don't want to know what's inside the blue jay. i imagine him full of gumballs & engagement rings. full of thimbles or blue ring-pops. i open the bird from the zipper on his spine. he's the inside of my mother's purse. i remember it well from stealing quarters as a kid. the check book, the bank envelope, the gift cards to the Peanut Bar, the swishy tan lining & the black wide-toothed hair clip. i steal two quarters & put them in my pocket which instantly causes the bird starts thrashing again. zipping him up quick i throw open the window & the blue jay goes back outside to pace the fence. i think what's happening to the birds has to do with me, i see them on the ground everywhere & i wonder what they're all filled with. are they that susceptible to nostalgia? i should have been more careful dreaming alone in my bed. when i see you tomorrow i will tell you about the blue jay, because you like him too. if you don't believe me that's alright, i'll lay you down on the crystal plate & show you what kinds of trinkets you've filled yourself with over all these years.
Robin Gow 