end of season 

the strawberries are humming,
insect angry as i lift up leaves.
green skirts, knees & necks
shy from hands rooting through them
all day in the pin-pong sun. they're holy 
from the mouths of caterpillars. 
i imagine myself letting the bugs 
come to take bites out of me,
poke my finger through the holes like
a mouth chewed sweater-- like stocking runs.
pluck me apart a little more.
i like this idea of coming apart while
feeding another creature. i might
want to be buried in a strawberry field,
just maybe. crouched between rows of tired 
berry plants i think about Ontelaunee orchards
where we went picking as children.
strawberries for jam. boiling in our hands.
we were too eager. i ate them as i went,
one for the bucket & one for the mouth.
kneeling, fingers gory, wiped on my thighs.
my freckles turn into the little red bugs,
start scurrying over my body.
today it's late in the season 
& i'm finding the mashed red elegies 
of too-late strawberries. a proper
burial will come with the rain. i found
a few to eat, bit down on them right there,
the juice turning metallic in my mouth,
turning salt & blood. turning blister &
barefoot. i can hear you telling me
to wash them off. i smile smug & chew 
despite the dirt. the sweetness comes
back into focus. i find one to take back
with me-- it's shaped like a furious nose,
pricking with tiny seeds. i think 
how brave the strawberry is to wear
it's freckles like that, unafraid 
of them turning into clover mites.
i gnaw the last one from the drivers seat of
my car. the sun has a lazy eye & 
the bar doors are open, spilling with 
bok choy & ruffle-skirt lettuce.
it's late in the season for strawberries.

despite all attempts,
i have learned that the skin
will not become stone no matter
what you try to etch into it. 
on my right forearm i have
Vonnegut's mantra "everything
was beautiful and nothing hurt"
chiseled into tombstone. i wore
the rose print dress & the artist 
held my thin arm to keep me steady.
we stopped half-way through 
after i felt the room lurch, fainting
starts like blowing dust off
top the book shelf, taking the finger prints
with it. tear needle from plastic.
i don't want to be sterile.
the fury of spiders opening mouths to scream.
his skin was courser than mine.
i read that tattoos aren't just 
ink plunged deep into skin, 
they're actually fought like infections, 
cells coming to rescue the dermis 
from our images. the human is a body
of symbology-- the hawk, the tiger,
the dragon. a man whose name i do not know
presses into me, this time with the needle.
he says i should "lean into the pain"
& i laugh because i hate to writhe for anyone.
when he asks what the scars on my forearm
are from i tell him "poison oak,"
when they were really hot heads of matches.
i think of my skin sedimentary. the layers
of scar, the wounds beneath ink colors. 
my newest one is still healing. it scabs--
coming off in flecks of dried blood & tissue. 
alone i watch it, expecting to see the
cells in action, arriving at the surface
of my skin, like humpback whales, breaking
the ocean for a gulp of air. 

fresh carrots on the cutting board 

doctor, give me the novocaine.
the needle to the ceiling, between
the overhead lights & the fan blades
becoming airplanes. take off
& the runway of a pale tongue.
they took out four of my teeth
& shoved my face full of gauze. 
now i have to find them again because
you have to be buried with all
parts of your body. if left alone
those parts will grow new humans,
roots growing from the tooth, the little
red veins twisted & popped. 
where did you put all my baby teeth?
you're supposed to keep them 
in a mason jar & watch them become seeds.
the fish rush onto the river banks 
& slap themselves hard enough into
the earth to become seeds. i want
to pull all this genealogy out
of my mouth by the leafy-parts, like 
fat orange carrot legs. feel the 
genus & species coming out, let's
weed the garden. the sigh the earth
makes when roots come out all together.
what happens then? do i get to come
undone? more numbness, more moon.
they stripped the sun down to 
a pin point & jammed it into the
ceiling-- oral surgery of a soul--
the novocaine-- more novocaine.
syringe to soil. up to my wrists in
dirt as i diffuse. the scattering
of cells without a dart-board. throw
me harder & faster towards the red 
spot-- the blushy mars with her 
teeth falling out on the operating
room floor. i will find the teeth
before they turn into raspberry jam 
or another human even if i've scattered  
to just a mass of wandering cells,
easily inhaled. consciousness; becoming
a piece of cellphane wrap pulled in
infinite directions, catching the weeds  
as they're plucked. examine the carrots
like baby teeth, their follicles & thighs, 
their insistence of abnormality.
peeling off tangerine skin in the trash can
like you asked. 
i drive to the dentist office
where they did the deed only to find
that it's now a laundry mat, coins
all rolling out of an open front door.
i dig in the soil outside, hoping that maybe
just maybe the surgeons had the sense
to bury my teeth before they got
any ideas about coming alive on their own. 
they must be destroyed. there is a garden
& a bloody strawberry patch & 
the carrots are skin-- fingers & toes,
other patients whose bodies
had already  become to regenerate.
you must kill the double, but only your
own. there's fights left under all
our dirty fingernails. the novocaine doctor--
the ceiling is caving in.
should i plant myself or keep searching?
the coins are tails up.

lemon zest & lesser gods

this is a love poem for
the gods hesitant to create.

i imagine that the christian
god is loud-- that his sketch boards
take up a lot of room in heaven

always leaving crumpled papers 
& his discarded ball point pens stuck
in the clouds like tulip stems

sometimes others clean up
after him, 

trash bags slung over shoulders 

unfurling his blue prints
on his thighs

some mutter "such brilliance"
"i could never generate like him"

a lesser god discovers the
designs for the lemon
on an afternoon where 
the christian god is busy 
with more than one rainbow

sitting on his folding chair,
knitting needles in hands, 
as he mutters to himself 
red, orange, yellow, green,
blue, indigo, violet--

sometimes he drops a color or two

humans seldom notice, but the
seagulls do & they'll laugh at him
for it

the lesser god turns the fruit 
over in his hands-- examining 
the bright yellow flesh

it reminds him of stop lights
& crossing guards

he feels terrified of
it's intricacies, not wanting
to even cut the lemon open, 

runs a finger nail across the rind
as if the fruit where a lover's shoulders

on days when he feels worthless
he'd often picture his body 
slowly dispersing in small flecks
of light

he'd tell himself that not all
gods have to make worlds to rule over

that some gods scatter themselves quietly

he thinks of the lemon like that:

creates tartness in the zest, taking
a metal grater to the fruit 

he feels wild & genius 

rubbing citrus follicles 
onto his desk, violin bow motion 

there's music, some sort of 
stinging music

collecting the shavings in his
palms he lets them go from
the high cloud 

they fall, broadcasting across
the earth

somewhere i'm sitting at 
a kitchen counter while my mother
asks me to zest the lemon 

over the metal bowl

we're making a bundt cake 
& the pages of the recipe book 
are an iridescent yellow

i keep going past the lemon 
through my hand & across
my bones

marrow & vein & sinew & all

there is no blood or sting 

just the rind of lemons 
& more subtle gods 
than ours

you would make a good glass-jar specimen--
i'll grown you a third & fourth eye
to open 
1) from the back  of your throat--
2) from your wrist where the watch left bite marks

we would never go on that date
a sunday in May with the rain 
threatening to make us sugar water
for the plants

i liked us better
in vials & glass eyes

you had suggested we take our
date to the Mütter Museum 
in Philadelphia: a museum 
of medical oddities 

the romance of oddity is salvaged 
in us-- in men talking
about wanting to make
speculums of each other

open wider, we'll weed 
our blood of the cysts & tumors 
1,500 from the 19th to 21st 
century, save them for 
exhibits, we don't know

when next we'll want to
make fury of cells-- fist
of blood & tissue

did you make wax pathology
of me & light me like
clean-linen candle? or
did you think of us as 

full skeletons in the basement
one after another after another
in drawers of skull & twisted spine

bodies performing their pain 
for causes of science &
rare-bird 

if we had met would we be have
held hands or linked by
the liver like the organs of
the conjoined twins 

haunting & inseparable even
in scalpel & decay

dare we stop the unfurling 
of our natures

let us be visitors then   

observe each other
make staircases of spines
re-purpose quiet hearts
& extra finger bones

tissue from the chest
cavity of john wilkes booth

a kind of chandelier
dangling overhead

i'm sorry i never called you back

what kind of bones?
what kind of bones?

pin-up 

i want to know what
it's like to be a body threaded
into someone else's skin--
red & black ink child with the 
sewing machine sounds of a mother.
what is birth then for us? 
taut irish drum flesh
& squirm of fingers gripping 
the electric chair.
at the tattoo place i go to
specializes in pin-up girls--
they're posing all over
the walls, on their knees,
bending over, in martini glasses
& straddling fighter planes leftover
from the second great war. 
they have breasts like wooden tops--
each spinning on their chest--
on someone else's skin. i imagine
them coming awake, blinking as 
their eyes are sewn open--
the buzz of hornets. they writhe,
feeling arm hairs or leg
follicles bristling around them--
they invent a childhood in tall grass
& creek water to cope with the sensation.
they scold themselves for
giving bodies away to men-- oh how
could we let this happen? i tell
the artist that that's what i want,
to be one of them as i amble, 
pointing to different
pin-up girls around the room,
a cow-girl, a sailor, 
the girl in garter belts & lingerie. 
i say
i want to be that & 
the man who was sitting this
whole time in the lobby 
offers up his calf muscles.
it has to be a man (as we known).
the inability to observe one's own
body is liberating, becoming
a two-dimensional, brief encounters
with the mirror or the shop window.
so we grow old then, yes?
enmeshed in someone else--
i love that, the idea of 
aging with another anatomy. maybe
i invented this because i'm 
scared of loving someone like that,
or maybe it's out of solidarity 
for all the pin-up girls 
cold on bare skin in january.
if you see me though, ask the man
if you can touch me/us. 
feel the divots made by the needle,
trace me, cox me 
back to my own frame.

the woman's club

stage light body of a 17 year-old,
let's talk about who you
were 5 years ago. let's talk about
2 days before high school
graduation & my sand paper knuckles
& my novel printing tongue.
i'd wake up each day before school
to write a page of fiction, obelisk built
in front of my ikea desk, she believes
routines-- it's irish catholic prayer.
someone, someone please tell her that
she's not going to publish a book
tomorrow or drop out of college like
Salinger. tell her there's 
nothing heroic about the novel
other than the stubbornness of the
binding of old books at the library--
Dante's Inferno printed 1923 in her back pack,
refusing to let go of its pages despite 
fingernails yellowing, despite the tears of 
hell beneath the stage where i find her
sitting at kutztown high school's 
award ceremony. i expected to receive something
in literature, seeing as that was what
i prayed to. i sent angels 
to new york city to write the bodies 
of skyscrapes like all young girls must do. 
i made saints of dead men, plucking
rib bones & hope one would grow breasts.
i held seances in my bedroom: 
Fitzgerald & Hemingway drinking heavily in the corner
while i'd ask them for advice. they gave nothing,
laughed at all my inquires until they 
faded away, leaving bookmarks on the dresser.

the award i got that night was from 
the women's club of kutztown which surprised
me because i didn't know that we had one &
if we did there seemed no reason the award should
go to me. back then i wouldn't call myself
a feminist. there was something about
the word that scared me-- the inherent fire
of it. i would tell my mother that i'd
thought about it & she'd roll her eyes.
i avoided the term since. i googled 
"the women's club of kutztown" & found 
nothing. there's no remnant of
them to be found. it makes me think that
they're some secret organization, meeting
in basements & sneaking in the firehouse 
at night when the lion's club is done.
maybe they wear lavender cloaks & 
drink absinthe from crystal glasses. 
i imagine them, scouring the students of 
kutztown high school class of 2014. i have a hard time
imagining why or how they would choose 
young me other than a divine premonition--
their leader, with her long grey hair &
crystal ball consulted with the great ones,
with Gertrude Stein & Audre Lorde &
Simone de Beauvoir all of who were skeptical
of me, they suggested waiting for
someone more promising,
pointing to my lack of appreciation for
the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God as
a bad omen. it would be three more years until 
i took a class in feminist theory & only two
more years before i'd shake off my womanhood
entirely. 
one is not born but rather becomes
a man (forgive me). 
the award was just an envelope
with 500$ that i probably spent on 
the summer.
someday i'll find them though, i'll
robe myself in lavender & step out 
at dusk & known deep inside me
their meeting place.
when i arrive they'll scowl & shake their
heads & tell me that i'm somehow both 
too early & too late

martian 

like a rusted trestle or martian
earth i amble along the crease of
your scarred flesh-- 

the knife's careful work a kind
of geography

i stand in the mirror.
use a felt-tip pen to mark the lines 
where a surgeon will cut beneath 
each breast.

on nights like this i assume
we should be able to see mars

dislodged from a throne &
wanderlust between stars

iron oxide flesh--
the rusted bridge where the 
train used to pass over
the quarry

the god of war will work his 
blood in us

pray for steady hands
& for astronaut footprint 
in the red earth 

i've been searching google images 
of breast augmentation surgeries

a facebook group called 
"Top-surgery FTM/ Non binary"
lets me in & i sit & watch 
our bodies unfold into
one another

plural like the terrestrial 
mars who cannot hold onto water

there are inter-planetary 
reactions made across 
laptop screens

"mutilated"  is a word
my mother will probably use

the scar lines are 
purse lips

closed eyelids

i'm still looking for mars 
up there

like an earring dropped
onto the carpet

this time tracing myself 
fingers across skin 

i'm asking for a scarred body 
out of love for celestial ones

oh if i could use all our
scars like highways i could
walk mars bound & alien 

no one would ask me about 
what i do with my skin

why i do with my skin

what color is the ground
beneath you?

when they ask about my scars
i don't want to hesitate to tell
the truth but we will probably 
end up out here 

with low gravity & 
fourth planet abandonment

almost sustaining life 

but not quite

a jealous body
footprint bruised & aching with
the rovers tracks

they're trying to dig life
out of the craters &
valleys

like i try to unearth something
in a body 

yes, another poem about the moon 

you said there was nothing more 
to be done with moon poems so i 
took it from behind the shower-cap clouds
& kneaded it on the counter.
the mound of white-dough. the flour
on our hands, pressing down & stretching.
when i think of bread i think of my mom
& about the old oven with the cracked 
stove-top. we promise we're going to
put it back once we're done. in the mean
time we'll just let the ocean turn
still & rest. does it get tired of
being pulled back & forth? would it
run away if it could in a blue station wagon?
i turn on the faucet & out comes poppy seeds
for the everything bagels mom is going
to make. we're using the dough for bread bowls.
they rise on the counter with a damp
towel over their heads. that's what they
told us to do if you house is ever on fire,
put a damp towel over your head. they didn't
tell us what to do if that fire happens to
be god or the red-coil inside of the oven.
the timer on the stove laughed with green
neon numbers & i'd check it every few minutes.
we don't bake much anymore, especially not
with the moon, what with all the effort
it takes to yank it down from above. 
we open the oven just a crack to see the
planets with their browning tops &
their asymmetry. back then it frustrated
me that none of the bowls every came out 
"perfect" but now i think of them like 
good tossing out the marbles from his pocket,
hoping one catches in orbit & one was us &
one was a doughy moon. i always want to press
fresh bread to my face-- it feels like 
another body-- too warm to be alive. mom
would help me hoist the nicest one back up
between dull suburban sesame seed stars. she'd
let me cut the top off before we'd fill it
with a ladle of italian wedding soup. who's getting
married tonight? eating the broth-soaked crusts
with my fingers, mom breaking bread & releasing 
steam ghost clouds: this is what i do with the moon.

i smiled & the mirror told me my teeth had become
corn kernels-- yellow blushing from the big
metal pot on the stove, each one sweet & ready to
burst. 4th of july 5 years ago we were sitting
on the wooden porch eating corn & potatoes
freckled with old-bay seasoning. there were
lobsters in the mix & your mom called it 
frogsmore stew, which  was really just boiling
odds & ends with salt & red seasoning, poured
out on a picnic table covered with newspaper. 
i want to like messy food but the only kind of messy
food i like is fresh fruit, like biting
a nectarine & having the sunny orange juice
make a horizon down to my elbows. the earth tilts
& boiling water makes the meat come off
our bones, tender & white like crustaceans. i didn't
want to eat them, the lobsters, but you said
they were delicious & that we should try everything
once. dunked in ceramic dishes of butter, i let
you snap-open the shells for me-- their blank eyes
staring forward, emptied of rocky Maine shoreline 
up the street still hushing us, telling us to
chew more quietly out of respect for the dead. 
i'm still biting across the cob like a clip
of ammunition. take my teeth, god. lodge them 
in husks & grow them in fields behind my parent's house.
this is what happens when you let boys love 
your body into an extension of his, 
there are you are feeding me/feeding you, 
newsprint dripping & stamping the red lobster legs
we won't read the news of the hurricanes 
boiling each continent one by one like great big 
skin-peeling potatoes. i take kin with the lobsters.
recalling you cracking my clothes off for me &
asking me what i wanted. 
a lack or deficiency of something
for white teeth. for a great big metal pot.