lock-picking practice with you

on the side of the highway we 
have to get into your face. a hawk
comes & says, "that is not your car."
on our second date you showed me 
how easily you could enter any door.
you laid out your lockpicking tools
on the kitchen table in the apartment
without any air conditioning. i remember
the fan stirring the afternoon like a spoon
in thick broth. the implements reminded me
of dentist picks. i opened my mouth.
you laughed & said, "let me work for it."
we got into your car & drove until the towns
lost their stop lights. until the mountain
was hairy & real. i build futures 
wherever the sun is toothless. the hawk
would unlock the door to my apartment
& you would come in uninvited. 
i didn't mind so much. i was in the process
of losing my sense of self. the town asked,
"are you staying?" i replied, as i always have,
"no, i have to open another basement."
you showed me how easily a lock 
can come apart in the right hands. 
gentle, never forceful. the sliding
of each tooth into place. i would wake up
with a man in my mouth who 
i didn't remember. instead of kicking
him out i would give him a key & explain,
"i do not know what i want, you can 
tell me if you like." he would respond,
"tell you what you want?" i reasonable question.
me, "yes." once when you were asleep 
i took the tools into my own hands.
decided to practice on the safe in the back
of your closet. i worked for hours. could not
remember your technique. the safe
turned into a hawk. red tail. he said,
"open yourself first." i ran away. took a walk
around the block. looked at the houses 
without windows & the empty mountain church. 
everyone was playing with their lockpicks. 
when i came back the hawk was telling you
what i did. it was actually a relief
to have a truth to suck on together.
you asked, "what are you trying to find?"

microwave egg

we could get married in the microwave.
we could invite your parents up here
& make dinner in the microwave. i put 
a sewing machine in the microwave
& start working on a veil. it is either 
my first communion again or it is the wedding. 
in college i invite boys to the microwave.
some of them turned out to be girls
& some were birds who i fed black oil sunflower seeds.
when the building was on fire i grabbed 
the microwave & ran outside. who needs
a computer when i have this? 
why would i write a book when i could
just put my tongue in the microwave
& have you all watch? i conducted experiments.
a single popcorn kernel. a telephone. an egg
that wobbled before becoming a black chicken
in the hum. i opened the door so fast & held
the little creature. she was confused but unharmed.
i raised her until she grew up to be a hawk. 
do we all grow up to be hawks? i like to hope not.
when i first moved in with you, you had no
microwave. the house was full of ghosts (derogatory).
i bought a shiny new one. i filled it with wedding rings
& turned it on high. i wanted to show you
how much i wanted to be kept. you put me
in the microwave & i sobbed. i loved to be so small. 
i did not hurt like i always thought it might. 
instead, it was like entering a pastel portrait.
oil & thumb. i survived but emerged like
another one of the ghosts. now i am asking
if we can get a second microwave. if maybe
we can decorate the inside. if you might
love me in the way that will survive 
the end of the world. i google how to make
a microwave work without power in case
one day the country folds up like a trapper keeper.
i'll be ready. our wedding, an egg. 
the birds, in the past & the future. 
you tell me i should not stand close 
to the machine while it is working but
where else would i go?

estate sale

while you look at chairs on the porch 
i stand in the yard
beneath an apple tree burdened with 
so much fruit. the street is usually quiet
& a neighbor smokes barefoot 
in his front yard, making sure none of
the visitors park on the grass. 
another neighbor is on the phone.
she's saying, "there's just so many people.
they just keep coming."
you love estate sales. they overwhelm me. 
so much emotion. the frenzy of the visitors 
& the ghosts of an emptying house. 
i try to imagine the place before
its final dissection. this one was feels special
because a gay couple lived here.
their queerness sewn into the bookshelves 
& the collections of paintings. fish 
& men & trees & birds. strings of shells.
a little bin beneath the bed with stage makeup.
feather headpieces. did he do drag? just liked
to entertain? in the basement a leak soaks
the floor. a woman shoulders past me
to get a look at a pile of frames.
in the corner i find a stack of porn tapes
like an altar. were they shared between husbands
or did they just belong to one of them? 
you pick out a cowboy hat & a leather working tool.
a painting of trout. i find an alice b toklas cook book
laying, wings spread open, on the kitchen floor. 
standing in line to pay for our fragments
i imagine the dining room set for guests.
knocking on their door & telling them
we are family even though we do not know each other.
i guess i am not sure what kind of gays 
they were. maybe they would find us strange
or maybe they would show us
their paintings. tell us the stories of where
the shells & the earrings & the mirrors are from. 
maybe there would be a bowl of apples 
on the dining room table plucked from
the tree in the yard, arms not weighed down
by the so much fruit. in the car 
on the way home i regret not buying
all the porn tapes. i would have no use for them
but who else there was going to steward them?
i could have kept them for decades. let them fade
even more from the sun. leave them in a little pile
so that one day when an estate sale finally
finds this place we dwell, that another wandering queer
might find them & take them home
with no use for them. 

heather bloom

my mother's room is full
of heather. when i was a child
i would go & pick handfuls. 
try to fill my own room too.
i am a creature of mimicry. i put mirrors
in the mouths of loved ones. i ask,
"can you see your blood in me?"
once i bought a plaid shirt to match
a boy who was using me for fireworks.
or i guess maybe we were filling each other's
rooms with heather. i dropped him off
once at the foot of a mountain 
like a dog toy. another time i pretended 
to be a gender. okay, actually it was
several. there is a celtic myth
that heather would bloom on battlefields,
the softened red color, the remnants of blood. 
my heather grows bright red. the blood,
still here & swelling. the battle, not a battle
but a ladder into a wound. i try to 
find an ex on facebook. i want to see
if there is heather where they live
or if this is just my botany. i visit my mother.
her room is unchanged from when
i was small & too curious. we talk
about the same things. the tomatoes.
the bathroom. my father laying in the yard
waiting for heather to sprout from 
his eyes. the ghost of a car in the driveway
with a cockpit full of those flowers. 
some heather is white. the legend says
that these should bring good luck because
they are untouched by battle. 
i do not believe in white heather. as if there is
a flower that does not remember anything
about blood. i try to explain myself sometimes.
i say, "my parents are like this too." by which
i mean prone to too-much-ness. likely to 
speak a language without doors. sit in
the bathtub at night with one ear to the wall
listening to the roots twisting in the earth. 

deep sleep for horses 

i too sleep standing up. the sun 
turns me into a kickball & we eat 
the feed corn until we have no teeth left.
i call a doctor to ask if they have
any treatments for being a horse.
he laughs & rides his own horse through
a thicket. in my hometown there are
hitching posts all over for the mennonites 
& me. i wait outside for my dad to be done
at the knife shop. the old beer store 
burnt down & there were horses running everywhere.
a horse only needs about 30 minutes 
of rem sleep. to do so, they have to lay down.
they have to take off their legs & 
become a tunnel in their own heads.
the doctor tells me i am late on feeding
my blood to the ghosts. i am late to
the color white. i am not sleeping
as much as i should even for a horse. 
the truth is that sleep has always been
a sand box for me. dig & dig for dinosaurs 
& only find lamp light. i remember waking
in the donut hole of the night 
to stare out the window at the roads 
full of horses. if i could be summer forever
then maybe everything would be okay.
i need berries & the sound of thunderous rain.
horses to make a herd of me. my sleep,
seldom thick like sap scabs on the tree roots
at the edge of the field. my lover begs me 
to stop sleeping standing up. on my worst days
i end up on the ceiling, somehow still standing. 
with a bridle he tries to pull me down. 
brush my mane. tells me stories about 
riding a train into the marrow of 
this sleepless place. when we first got together
we stayed up all night over & over until
there was nothing left of us. 
just horses in the wild dusk. orange 
& glowing. eyes like hoof-prints. 

skin care routine

i take my skin out of the closet &
brush the seal fur in noon-time light.
golden sun. my body is ancient.
is a pray from the water to the sky. 
there is no ocean near where i live
so it is hard to keep the selkie in me alive.
i feed her mussels & clams. i feed her 
gold stolen for neighbor's jewelry boxes. 
the body is not hungry, it is made of hungers.
give me wind & salt. give me a language 
without gods.
i lay in the bath with my body inside
my body. once you almost caught me. 
you jiggled the door handle to the bathroom.
the only rule of being a selkie is that
no one can know you're a selkie. 
i am not sure what would have happened
if you had intruded. found me there,
half boy-girl half seal-creature. maybe 
that is how selkies are born. maybe you
would have become one too. a parable 
of loneliness. to be seen is to 
be swallowed or else to become
a part of the other's eye. a piece of your spirit
leaving as a flock in the water. i managed
to slip out of my skin though 
& you waited until i opened the door.
the skin was wet as a sopping towel
wadding up in the corner. how did you 
not see it? i was so afraid. how could i explain
all the years of my hiding. 
you were furious. understandable. 
i am prone to secrets. the room smelled animal.
you asked if i was alone. i said "yes" 
of course. you knew i was lying but about what you
were not sure. i offered for you to join me
in the bath, knowing you would not
instead, you shut the door slowly.
i lowered myself in my human skin
into the water. waited still for a long time
before i pulled the seal back on. 
when i am done i always pat the flesh dry. 
i have learned i start to smell if i leave the skin
all brine & bath. i fold my seal skin
as if it's just a coat & not a whole part 
of my body. 

ghost chicken coop 

in the grandfather yard i would collect
phantom chicken eggs. sometimes he was
standing there, hands on his cane.
inside the eggs were stories without walls. 
a nickel, hole in the middle. gun powder. coal. 
soft fruit of the jungle's hair. he would
help me find the eggs. ask me if we 
should go in for dinner yet. i always told him
"no" & we spent all the dark on each other.
when i draw my ancestors, i draw that
chicken coop. the one that stood as tall 
as a water tower in the yard before i was here.
my family is a series of befores. before 
the ocean. before the city. before horses.
before guns. the truth is the coop was empty
the whole time my grandfather lived 
at what is now my parents' house. still,
my grandfather fed them. took his ghost to be
with their ghost. so i did the same. often i feel
like the only one interested in tending this history.
maybe we all think this though. we keep
what we can. how do i know my father
didn't harvest too? didn't try to draw all our faces
like a rosary back into the water. still, it was only me
out plucking eggs from the moon's ringing light.
once i found an egg with a picture inside.
before i could swallow it, the frame emptied
just a small square of a night. i stuck it
behind a cloud. let the wave wash it into
the night's blue. i laid down, tried to remember
who it was. i thought it was a picture of myself
but maybe it was a girl he loved or maybe it was
just a future piece of land on which i can
build a coop. i raise chickens now. my grandfather
feds them. i find him only on the clear nights.
i ask him if he walked all the way here. 
he never answers. the chickens peck at the dark.
i do too, convinced i can hold the memories 
of other bodies. my blood, like a yolk. 
a pocket watch in the sink. 

morning glory

i grow bell telephones when
i'm thinking of you. in the old house
before we were all so serious & big,
my father talked to no one 
in a morning glory. his lips
like a duck bill. at the park we fed
all the fathers white bread we bought
at the gas station. a fire truck drove 
to fill the future. when we talk 
on the phone sometimes i am your father
& sometimes i am your son & sometimes
i am your best friend. i buy seeds
or maybe i invent them. press those kernels 
into my head where i lost a tooth.
the past & the future are more alike
than the present. the present is like
a ringing phone that won't stop
even when you pick it up. i had a garden
on the porch in this timeline. 
i buy the whole street. we sleep together
one more time & make everything better.
no one is angry. no one is a father
to anyone. i find you in the flowers 
often. you are there with pollen pants 
just like all the bees. we could
have a really easy time moving into 
a cardboard place. i'll be the door
if you be the bell. we can cut a hole
where a telephone would go. do you remember
when phones were a location & not
a traveling voice? the last pay phone in
my hometown attracted so many fathers.
they wanted to talk to themselves.
i get it, i mostly do that same only
i have flowers to feed. i have a father
to comfort when his basement fills
with flowers. he once grew a garden 
at the church but couldn't keep up with tending it.
the morning glories talked to me about
how i would become a boy. i told them
to hush. to please give me more time.  

money tree

i try planting anything i can.
the rain is coming wild now. 
this is the time for uncovered bones
& the old spirits to come & make 
themselves lush. i start with money.
limp bills from the bottom of
a panic. shoved into earth. a tree
inside a tree. then i try coins. 
anything is better than nothing.
the state quarters & the toothed-edged dimes.
we could make enough to be real 
& to sleep on the moon, right? we can
keep eating apples & paper towels?
i move on to greater sacrifices. 
the tip of my tongue. a finger. a laugh.
you have not ever laughed into a hole
in the wet soil unless you're poor too.
a burn pile in my heart that won't light.
once there was a car without windows.
we empty the cabinets. there must be
something else we can sell. i plant an eye. 
i am hoping that is the key. here 
we go with the plum pit. nothing grows.
the pawpaw trees are not even fruiting
gods i want a little shrub even. a wine berry
vine to open briefly for sweet red.
when i finally accept that none of this
is going to grow, i get my shovel out.
i want it back. i find my finger but not
my eye. use a black walnut instead.
see the scent of their green scripture. 
try to have a yard sale without a yard. 
the spirits ask what i am looking for
& i explain, "a way to sleep." everyone
i know is staying up all night with
the lights on. we buy coffee because
there is a window. all the trees apologize.
i count the ones i have. wash the dirt from
the bills i could find in the sink &
hang them up to dry like dish towels. 

sudoku for my uncle

these days, how do you keep
your numbers? i remember us
standing in squares like 
goldfish neighbors. everything
was pencils. we would sit
in your side of the house 
playing sudoku. newspaper smelling books.
i don't know 
where you went or when.
we would drive into a 6 like
a dinosaur throat. added our faces
together to get biology. sometimes
our kin words are not enough
to convey our griefs. you lived 
on the other side of a wall.
i put my ear there to hear
all your numbers. so many twos,
the number of teeth you had lost to 
fireworks. then seven, how old i was
when you said you would teach me
how to paint. i made just one flower
on a thin green neck. we drew
squares around it. captured the colors
& turned them into siblings.
these days you don't talk in anything
but eights. round towers. me,
the top bunk & you the bottom.
driving your car to my heel. 
i knock on your door. all those 0s. 
tell me we can play without 
adding anything. spill numbers
like words unspoken. open
the doors to our little cauldrons. 
a swimming pool without calculation.
i keep telling you to visit
& then i don't tell you where i live. 
i do not even remember 
how to do the puzzles. i think i want
to learn again but only if you promise
we are the same people as we were
ten years ago. i know you cannot promise.
instead, let's talk in numbers. 
a have been saving a seven 
in case it rains. a little awning. 
the sun, a 9's head in the clouds.