the last quail 

sometimes i still see her ghost.
her heart the size of
a sunflower seed.
quails do not live long. two years
at the most. they were going on three. 
we started with eight. 
the boy who sung in the morning
& all the girls who laid 
the most beautiful eggs.
blue shells & speckled brown shells.
those little moons 
in our skillet. yolks, like plundered suns
buzzing on our tongues. 
one lost an eye to her sisters.
the boy, taken by a hawk 
one afternoon. as a girl,
i used to pray the rosary. i did not 
even believe in god. i just needed 
something to do with my hands.
the birds, like beads.
a thumb passing over our skulls.
the promise that we are
on a string of miracles. no matter
how brief & terrifying. 
i sat with the last quail
in the morning on some of her 
final days. i told her secrets 
that i do not want to tell you.
she always listened. told me
that she saw the rest. 
heard the boy singing like a 
legless flute. i do not know 
what to means to hold on 
to one another. why is everything 
so brief? the quail's ghost comes
to scold me. she says, "our brevity
is a gift." i am still trying
to understand what that means. 

eggs on the counter 

i crack my eyes open on the side
of a smooth metal day. burry my cell phone
& dig it up again eighteen times.
dirt beneath my fingernails. 
get a call from a terrible man 
who has more terrible news. an appointment
with a shark in the driveway. 
on the side of the road on the way 
to an empty bucket i saw a ground hog.
i talked to him out the car window.
i said, "what if we don't make it?"
he said, "i am just here." is it too much
to ask to encounter an oracle?
instead, i find little bugs in the chicken coop. 
they are smaller than the tooth
at the end of a question mark. i lift the eggs,
one at a time from the pine shavings.
they are empty as they have been
for weeks but still i harvest them. still i open them
as if one might be different. like pairs
of my own eyes. i hear people say
over & over, "i do not recognize the world anymore."
my trouble is i do. i see it coming into focus. 
people i love running from police
& all their fresh & horrible names. 
hands like claw machines. a gun for a star. 
all the eggs on the counter. i name them
before i put them in a carton 
on the shelf. give them to a friend & then
we go & try to carve a hole in the yard
deep enough for all our grief. we dig
past fossils & the bodies of our grandfathers.
houses made our of shoes. square-headed nails. 
when we stop it still isn't deep enough
but we find eggs there too. 

time blind

i want everyone to be late.
i want to wait around & decide
to cancel the big beautiful something
that i didn't feel like doing anyway.
my sadness has arms. it has lungs.
there are not enough
days to grieve. i make a thirteenth hour
& i tell no one about it. i think 
i will let it sit between 2pm & 3pm 
because no one does anything then
anyway. the hour will be violet
& on occasion, iridescent. i'm sorry
i don't want to share anymore. 
inside the hour i will get more than
nothing done. i will get so real
that work i've made will come apart.
do you ever wish you hadn't given
a part of yourself to a little machine?
i do all the time. if we were all late
maybe we could laugh more. eat more.
train the clocks to hold enough moths
to keep us alive. my father was always early.
we were the first to mass. the first
to the farmer's market. 
the first in line at the diner 
on a bruised leg morning. my lovers
always tell me i can only live in extremes.
if i don't arrive at all, can we just
both agree i was a different kind 
of late. i am a hypocrite because 
when someone doesn't show on me,
i always say, "i was stood up." tiny dates
for the tiny specks we are. once as a girl
i changed all the clocks in the house
so that we would leave sooner. 
i do not remember how my parents reacted.
maybe in all their rushing
from one mouth to another
they thought, "why can't we all
do that?" i am running early for
an appointment with a pile of shoes. 
i take a flight there. 
no one else boards but me. 

i do not want to talk about the weather

i don't want to talk about everything.
let's talk about the weather. let's talk about
the weather for next week. i will tell you, "i heard
it is going to get colder" & you will say,
"i heard it is going to rain" & neither of us
will have consulted any weather reports.
my husband says to me, "why do you always
do small talk even if you hate it?"
i don't know if i hate it. i think i am just
a survival creature. i did a ridiculous
white lady yoga video & the instructor said,
"set your intention for today with one word"
& "survive" was all i could come up with. 
i make small talk because sometimes it is easier 
for two bodies to use words as oars instead of as water. 
my most recent small talk was on a ride back
from the mechanic. the driver & me talked
about the rain. how much rain there was going
to be. the clouds like buffalo beneath our
fingernails. i do not want to just keep
barely making it through each sun drowning. 
that is where i am though. i find myself
more & more grateful for the weather. 
at least there is still something that we 
can all feel. the water on your face, on mine.
the slight damp you feel in your socks 
no matter how quick & waterproof you thought
you were. i have to admit that sometimes
i make things up. we start talking about
about the weather & i imagine things
better than they are. i stay, "it is going to
be clear tomorrow. at night they say 
we're going to be able to see all the stars
even the dead ones." the driver dropped me off.
an hour later it down poured. my husband
was in bed with a migraine. i sat with 
all the dogs on the couch. our weather talk was wordless.
i did not need to tell them about the storm.
the air tasted like pennies & nectar. 

two

no one tells the truth about the ark.
the animals did not come in twos.
instead, they rushed. five giraffes 
& three turtles. a woman with the face
of a cliffside. noah was actually not even
on the ark. instead, he stood outside.
not a martyr but something else.
a tired man whose hands had long ago
turned into voles. they tell us the creatures
came two by two because the story
is both gender & end-times propaganda. 
there were no bulls on the ark.
the cows had to invent a way to survive.
in the dripping after-times
we carve what we must from our bodies.
god did not even mean to flood the earth. 
no one means to flood the earth
but then it is coming & we are the horrible 
& the too much. noah was his last ditch effort
to make a story out of a mistake.
there will always be noahs. hammers 
& nails. the belly of a great vessel 
that somehow can never carry quite enough.
what the story also doesn't say is that
he built most of the ark in the rain.
thunder & hail. a donkey who kept
coming back to bring more wood. the frogs
who sang in the downpour. there was no order
to the boarding. creatures arrived as he laid planks.
he did not have a family. just a love for the future
that he would not even find himself in. 
a final latch. the wind tilting the trees. 
five dogs. a haggard old person. a two-headed goat
& an intersex deer, antlers still velvet. 

birthstone

we shared rubies
in the house without a roof.
my aunt watched the phillies
while i would sneak into
the poster room where
they said my uncle used to sleep walk.
his hand prints are still 
on the ceiling. 
i was only the size of grain of rice. 
on most days, i still am.
a good breeze will take me somewhere else. 
our birth days were only three days
apart. i believe in birthstones
more than astrology.
the yearning for a color
trapped in the earth's ugly fist.
i refuse to believe the truth.
that a room of money people
picked the rocks. 
can we salvage it from them?
probably not. late-stage capitalism
is not a graveyard; it is a pit
of hair. but i do know my aunt joan
looked best in that laughing red.
not a garnet. not a blood stone.
a ruby. a fearless tooth in the mouth
of an unraveling earth. she was sometimes
the only one who listened to me. 
rooms of cousins. we sat away
in the quiet shag carpet rec room.
did not ask questions. just let me tell 
her all the nothing stories
i wanted. one day she gave me
all her birthstone jewelry.
little velvet clams & inside
a pair of earrings. a necklace. 
a stuffed bear. i slipped inside their colors. 
sometimes i woke up in her hair. i still do. 
the smell of roses & blow-dryer. 
i don't know where the jewelry went.
passing from room to room.
it is not lost. it can't be lost.
maybe a seed for a future
vein. maybe i swallowed them
when i wasn't looking. 
maybe when she died
she did not just go to the soil
but to the stone. something about
her fingers still moving 
when the light comes without
any teeth. 

entry fee

as far as i know
they are still trying to get
aunt joan into heaven.
the family pays for 
a mass each year where
like coins in an endless machine
everyone
besides me because i am a heretic
go & mumble little paper airplanes 
at the sky. i am told there is
a threshold
where you have been prayed for enough
that something shifts.
i like to imagine it like a puzzle door
in tomb raider.
she was a small women with 
hair dyed orange right up
until the end. she had alzheimer's 
& sometimes she would just
hold my hand & weep.
i loved her more than the other aunts.
she was always the one to make jokes.
the one to come with me
& sit on the porch while i picked
crabapples. i refuse to believe 
that there is some kind
of entry fee even into an afterworld.
i want to know where those prayers go though.
no to her. she is in the water 
& the crabapples & sometimes,
on the right year, she's in 
the backyard pear tree. the prayers, they spin
like flipped quarters. heads or tails
without a bet. i do not pray for her.

executive order

i'm not afraid of kings. 
i take my orders from the sycamore 
& the ghost coyotes who stalk
the corn fields at night. i bend down
to the sage bush & tell her i do not know
anymore what to try to heal first.
there are the ruts in the driveway
from the trucks & the rain. there are
the men who marry their guns.
there is that family member 
who disappeared into a river of fake gold.
his teeth fall out & he lives bathed
in screen light. an order means nothing
to the cat birds & so it means nothing
to me. an order means nothing to the
dandelions & so it means nothing to me. 
i do not know if this is a litany or
a spell i'm casting. i become less & less
sure about who knits the world
the older that i get. i know & believe
in water & spiders. in the brief feast
the wild raspberries offer on the ridge. 
i want to believe that we are enough.
we were not meant to live like this. 
crouching inside words until they bite down.
i have seen friends lose limbs to
a word. swallowed by a chasm between letters.
the desperate reach for the other side. 
i find more & more traps each day 
in this country. 
they do not think they are speaking 
prophecies. they are not false prophets.
they are something much worse. 
what is the opposite of a poet? what is
the opposite of a hearth? 
they think they can cut a deeper & deeper gash
between us & the mountain's shoulders.
she lies down like a sleeping bear. 
but i do not take their orders. 
i hold my gender like a honeysuckle.
drink the nectar. talk to the bees. 
there are still gifts they cannot take. 

vellum

last night at the circus 
someone was singing "sheep go to heaven
& goats go to hell." i have taken to only writing
on skin. in math class, when the neon 
used to eat my eyelashes i would use sharpie
on my thighs. a teacher with a pterodactyl face
said, "you're going to get blood poisoning."
she made me go wash the poems off.
the sharpie was too strong though 
& the ghost letters always whispered 
as i walked. vellum is a paper made from
animal skin. mostly, sheep. mostly babies.
calves & ewes. something about their softness
makes it easier to receive words. everything
is gospel if you are hungry enough. i ran 
a wild red light last night. i pulled over
on the side of the highway & made paper
a car-killed deer. she was still talking to me.
us both sapling girls. she had beetles for eyes. 
i wrote about my favorite moon, 
the honeydew one that drips nectar down 
into the little stream through our yard. 
breath like a spare tire. i buy a sharpie again.
lay down beneath the sycamore 
& start writing. a math teacher shows up.
i get her to poetry herself too & then
there is a flock of lost genders. the sheep come
but not the goats. the goats are the 
only animals who have discovered how 
to write without skin. they climb the trees
& bleat. if i had a third hand, i would use it
to free myself. i don't know where 
i would go. there would be a paper maker.
a blanket of vellum. a moon closing its eye.
then, the night. 

bat in the sacristy

it was late summer when we found her.
the priest had called early in the morning.
my father, a kind of make-shift grounds keeper
for the church.
he brought me with in the blue jeep, top off. 
our hair blew wild on the way over.
i was used to playing by limestone kiln
& the pavilions on the ridge
while my father planted flowers 
& pulled weeds at the feet of a mary statue.
sun cracked open & spread across corn fields.
i do not remember the priest ever smiling.
he was a quiet man. when we got there though he
was frantic. he waved my father over
& whispered to him. i waited in the vestibule.
ran my finger across the wooden poor box 
while the two of them disappeared
into the sacristy. i was an altar boy-girl
so i knew that place well. the drawers of candles
& the closet of robes. each year i went
a size up, working my way
to the back of the flock. i still believed
in god i think. i know at least that 
i still prayed sometimes. it is hard
to trace an exact moment when you 
bury a spoon. there had been
a bat. a small soft creature. my father caught her
with his bare hands. he was never afraid
of getting bit. i had watched him 
snag snakes & snapping turtles. 
this was no different. she did not make 
any noise. my father carried her our
the heavy doors of the church. i do not remember
what he did with her. i like to think
he let her go. i do not know if he did.
maybe she was sick & he laid her in the lamb's ear
for her to turn into weeds. maybe still
he carried her to the forest line & she 
found her way into the night there. 
however it happened, she was removed
& we piled back in the car to leave.
i wished desperately that dad had let me
hold her. i was convinced i could
have helped in a way he did not. 
a little god fallen from her house. 
at home i prayed a hail mary for the bat. 
dandelions grew. at some point we stopped
going to the church as much as we used to.
i wonder sometimes if my father stopped
believing in god too. i think that is
too grandiose. he doesn't think so definitively.
his hands around the lost bat
carrying her to the dark.