Did my hands smell like ethanol
when I kissed you like a pillow
and did you know the dead girl?

Did you wash your hands or did you 
stain them clean with the hand sanitizer
your mother gave you when you left again? 
You can tell me-- 
it's hard enough to hold
a dead girl-- 
did she have brown hair?
and cinnamon raisin elbows?
and the kind of fingernails
that want to be painted?

When I return I can scrub under
your fingernails with the 
solemn honesty of a bar of green soap
that they tell you smells like Ireland.
For now just use hand sanitizer.
-- repeat-- repeat--
Get around the wrists 
like sliced plums-- like pear necks
like the plastic hand cuffs from the dollar store
we used to tie up blue dragons
in the back corner of my brother's closet--
Was he wrong to set fires?

--repeat-- until you can't
smell each other's skin anymore.
Call me ethanol. Call me isopropyl.
Use me like water and drink me
like gasoline-- stay away from
the dragons-- now we're dangerous-- 
now. We taunt the fire-- 

I know that you'll look for her 
hair on her pillow when you go back
to the room you once slept in.
The room where you learned nightmares
and drank lemon chamomile like blood
or ethanol-- 
I know that the hand sanitizer will mean
you can't smell anything about her.
That is how you wanted it.
You are safe to sleep there a night
and wear the comforter like her shoulders--
tell her she's somewhere-- tell her she's
set fires in your tongue
and that there's still cinnamon
raisin bagels in your elbows
when you roll over in another bed.

This is visiting the bed room
of the dead girl you once were.
Don't open the closet-- the dragons
still want to set fires-- wash your hands
but only when you're ready to leave. 

Kiss her in your sleep--
but only like a pillow.

For kids who want glasses,
the places we elope with ourselves
and how I learned to that love is how
much you read to me.

When I was in third grade I remember all the 
words in thick books 
being a little blurry-- fuzzy-- smudged
charcoals-- mumbled voices of
grandparents from their tombstones
or from their jars of ashes in the attic
-- tell me stories--
tell me word stories-- read to me
and spell out love in other people's alphabets--
tell me that we were once Native Americans
and that we were once people who told stories
only with our lips and we forgot what
kissing was because it was only another
way of passing stories-- passing my stories
to your stories-- do you speak my
language even though reading has only ever
been a smudge-- cough-- a word
caught in your throat like pizza crusts
we shared from crossed legs when the television
only played DvDs
-- and I liked
the pictures in books because I've always been a child
who writes their own stories-- sees their 
own stories outlined page crinkle-- distorts words
in to the arches of a red-brick castle--
I've drawn pictures in every margin 
I've ever touched--
We learn to paint with our tongue and
use those muffled letters to 
see through other people's irises--
the reflection of thick glasses
in May when we stood beside the bumper
of the jeep.

I painted my own wedding
from the hymnal of a picture book that didn't
have to be about pizza or the 
written words the author wasted on me
-- I didn't want
to wear a dress-- I want to link my own
pinkies together and say 
I do
I do 
I do believe in the stories I tell myself--
And the act of reading had made us whole
my own tongue was all I needed-- no 
I'm not selfish. I'm eternal--
And in third grade when they gave me glasses
I didn't know much about sex other than that it felt good
but I did know that nothing is more erotic 
than the places we invent to elope to with our
own pinkies linked--

The glasses they gave me didn't change anything--
words weren't thumb smudged but they
were mumbled by the voice of my own brain
and I said- I said with my short cypress 
tongue-- I said with my tongue that paints 
in the margins-- I said with my tongue
that has been trying to learn the language of men
by kissing them and sharing pizza crusts--
I said 

Read to me.

We left the sunflowers to fend for themselves.
We were unfit to be parents or saviors
for ourselves or the sunflowers. 

Who was the last one standing
and did you share water from paper cups
like refugees or did you know 
that no one would survive from the start?
Did you believe in God and did you
think he was the one who used the 
sun to shrink you?
Did you feel forgotten or did you feel
unloved?

When I was in third grade my teacher handed out
sunflower and pumpkin seeds at the end of June
when we stopped packing lunches and 
wore bathing suits under our school clothes.
Like all eight-year-olds I was ready
to be a mother-- a dirt-mother-- soil
mother-- wrap my arms in watering cans mother--
till and weed a splotch behind the shed-- mother
--a burying of seeds mother-- a burying of
sandals mother-- burying of babies 
mother.

My own mother was a potted basil bush
and she sat outside the back door.
She was green and always had more leaves to give but
she died every year and waited in the snow
for someone to remove her body out of reverence.

Seeds are the only joyful part
of a garden-- like nectarines and unborn babies
we can only see what we want-- 
this is how we learn what love is--
this is how eight-year-olds become mothers--
and watch their first born sunflowers die.

We went away on vacation and left my
sunflowers-- the little ladies holding parasols
and fanning themselves with the wings of 
the gypsy moths-- night lights of fireflies
they read hymnals and sang the song that
the birds taught them while they plucked 
out seeds from their thousand spider eyes. 
I did not know what a week was without water
and I drink from plastic bottles and the sunflowers 
I had grown with bags of fertilizer 
and elephant-nose watering cans 
drank from cracked earth and ant legs.
They died like they were conceived-- in 
a suffocating plastic sleeve of heat.

Did you know your mother? Your dirt mother?
Did you love your hopeful, forgetfut, dirt mother
who could not save you from the sun
or from a God who did not see mercy as rain?

I let the sun bury the sunflowers bones and the pumpkins
who survived ate the sunflowers and swelled 
like the belly of a seed or a basil plant. 

For the hair on the tops of my feet,
the frayed skin around my finger nails,
and times I have waited like a crock pot. 

This is an apology. 
This is an apology for all the times I've 
cut my hair to be smooth and small like a stepping
stone-- for cementing shards of
broken Pale Ale bottles into my forehead just
for you to walk on your way to the back door--
(I wait for you like a crock pot of chili or that misaddressed postcard
from the grand canyon that only reads 'I loved you')
put your bottle caps over my eyes--
and cut my hair just to bleed from the tops of me feet--
wrapped them up in my dinosaur socks.

I've been the welcome mat.
I've been a broken Samuel Adams--
I've been bottle caps biting at my heel bone 
in the yard--
I've been the snapped neck of
the rotted willow tree where ten-year-olds
dare each other to kiss their best friends.
I've been a summation of pieces of this body
I've cut and sent down a drain--
the curly smiles of finger nails and
graceful decent of each strand of eyebrow
I've uprooted like carrots to try to make myself
into a work of topography.
I've been the frayed skin around my finger
nails that splits and sparks like
chewed electric wires-- frayed--
fractured and gnawed like the knees
of all my jeans after they've seen summer. 

I'm here to apologize for not remembering
I've been a garden on the tops of my
feet. I grow toad stools now
to proven my hair was meant to harbor
fairies and dandy lions. There are hyacinths 
between my toes and the ivy creeps up my ankles.
I am the potted basil plant. I am the oregano.
The sage. The dandy lions who believe
hard enough that they're flowers--
we're flowers you know-- we're toad stools 
and poisonous but damn well lovely 
to look at.
I'm sorry I waited like a crock pot on the counter
to tell you I walk in a garden-- plant
bottle caps in the tops of my feet
and they'll grow hyacinths--
I don't pluck dandy lions-- 
I roar.

Were you a child who screamed only in fire alarms?

The first time I contemplated
pulling a fire alarm I wanted
to because I thought the lever was
like a pop-up book--peeling open
a passage like an orange rind-- a hideaway 
behind the tile walls of a pre-school
where I learned my colors, 
how to summarize myself in five letters, 
and how other kids always knew
it was easy to make someone
cry who was five letters tall--
S-A-R-A-H (And a fifth of me has always been silent)
The boys with police-car sneakers said, "Everything burns
when you pull the fire alarm-- everything burns--
we'll have no more benches or books to have to read
and sit."
And I wanted to pull the lever
and see what burning really looked like.
The first time I heard a fire alarm
I was the only one not to leave the play room--
The sound did not scare me it had
come from somewhere between my throat
and my jaw (the A and the R) -- spell
me out in sirens-- I drank it
in all my pores-- I became a scream
with it too and I screamed about
the boys who said in first grade
if you couldn't do homework they 
hid you under the floor boards
and fed you only bread and water
and orange rinds-- I
coiled in the cove of my wood-
block fortress-- I said you wouldn't
take it away from me-- And my teacher picked
me up like a four letter word.
And I wanted to pull the lever
but I knew what burning really looked like.
Everyone knows that fire alarms
mark their victims in black-light ink--
that you cannot scream without a fire
but every time we practice we can
let our lungs lose for once-- for
all the days of being a five letter
word-- for all the floor boards
you stepped over and all
the books left burning behind you
as we walked single file-- as if
you could scream while you were
walking in a line.
I told the the girl who had pony tails
that I saw smoke even when
I knew we were only screaming for practice-- 
for me it was never
a drill- there was always that fire--
that tongue-fire and not the type
that licked like Jesus-- the type
that still scream when I hear fire alarms
the type that sings like boys in 
police car shoes-- there was a time for
some of us that a fire drill meant
we could walk away from our skin
for a moment and pretend
that everything we ever feared
was only a pile of ash-- that we were
a phoenix. They told you not to take anything
with you. They scolded me when they 
did head count and found me holding
my stuffed dragon with chewed ears
and a stack of books I'd already read.
I said that I couldn't let them burn--
even though I knew it was only a drill--
I was still only five letters tall
with a fifth of me silent
as the grass outside the school
while we pretended to watch it burn.

Times I have made roses out of aluminum foil
and the chocolate chip cookies we had to
bake with our hands.

1. Anything can have petals
and anything can be a rose if you
press it with enough silence
in your thumbs-- and it was
cold and it was soft like 
all the aluminum foil we swallowed and
spit into mason
jars over the summer

2. The kitchen counter was an altar

3. We laid on cutting boards
to steal as many paper towels 
with our blood as we could

4. Were you a rose or a strawberry
because there's not much a difference
in the color of blood?

5. The kitchen counter is an altar

6. The kitchen counter is an altar 
where we could make metal breathe thorns
or was it bared wire? Or was there 
a difference? 
And did you remember to bake the cookies?

7. We roasted green potatoes instead inside each
metal rose petal--
and the thorns bled us like 
pork chops in the crock pot-- still
simmering days later on the
kitchen counter that is an altar.

8. Aluminum foil wallets hold 
enough space for three quarters and 
a half of a train ticket-- 
one half from me and one from you-- so 
at least one of us will remember
where we had gone as a whole

9. Use the last of the foil
to make a flower-- not just a flower--
a rose so we remember that the coldness
has layers-- that we can't all
be dandy lions or daffodils
but that most of us will
dye like strawberries on the 
cutting board

10. Do not be afraid of the oven.

11. The oven is not an altar

12. The oven was not an altar

13. We knew the foil was for cookies
not roses but it was worth the burns--
these roses won't bleed but they
might leave scars--

2. Our hands were an altar

3. Our hands are an altar

1. Our bare hands were enough to bake
the chocolate chip cookies without sheets or
foil-- 

My brother and I learned that
the kitchen counter is an altar.
I was ten and he was seven 
on our own that summer when we
spent days like snapped wish bones
and ate everything as if it were
a ceremony-- the cult of crock pot
pork chop potato roll fingers
still sticky from baking chocolate
chip cookies without rose petals. 

The Geography of Loving Like a Moth.

I never cut myself like a corn field.
Never in rows-- dug in the quiet vigil 
of a thin knife-- pair me down-- peeled
off the skin-- unraveling of a peach
like a plot about the person who 
thought love was a measure of 
how many pieces of themself they 
could cut off and still keep walking
by the corn fields before the sun bowed--
boil the blood for butter 
and mash through the pit like heel bones.
I have always found it too precise 
and too much like home to bleed out
all the worry I hold in my fingers--
I hurt myself with matches and with
the stumps of fingernails-- 
carve out my apologies to the Prince 
who paints the shadows beneath my ribs in
the mirror each morning-- he had never been
one man but a summary of girl-tongues
and the way boys have grabbed me
tight enough to try undress enough skin to
craft me into a woman-- I was too big for
the hourglass they built-- I learned to 
pour myself through my veins into
the trickling river lines on highways maps--
remember the scares like streets
we drive without thinking-- take the exit
that you always have even though
you know it's not the shortest way--
you want to drive through the corn fields
to remind yourself that you burn like
match sticks on forearms and split
up your apologies in the form of 
highways driven so many times
down the streets of your arms that they
are more of a home than the sheets 
you package yourself between. I have the
disease of seeing everyone as street lamps
or light bulbs for me 
to knock my head on like a front door
to the kind of love you can't
form from your own drum beat--
I want to stop slicing off my fingers
as a way of trying to make promises--
I am dizzy from trying to teach people
to love me love a drum mallet--
beat me until I'm peach butter and 
I'll still never store my hips in
an hour glass again--
We took the pit and planted it and beneath
the tree grew a tombstone to the
highways I drove with my fingers clutch
tight on the steering wheel of my forearms--
I love like a moth skull sometimes and
you need to remind me that you can't be a
butcher and a cow and a tub of peach ice cream--
I'll try to love like the butterflies
so that you might mistake me for a swallow tail
when I've only ever been a common moth
who tries to beat wings like rivers
instead of highways. 

Hide & Go Seek
for frog skeletons and your brother.

I don’t know why you thought I wouldn’t know where you would be hiding when you tried to run away– I know you said it was hide & go seek but we bot knew we wanted to end up somewhere without a mailbox– I knew where you were because we both painted birdhouses with pomegranate juice we find in the anxious hinge of the refrigerator in July and we lock bed room doors to keep out the noise of the history channel no one is watching in the sun room and we both perch under desk lamps like street lights and imagine the delight of walking down the back road in the flux after it rains– we are addicted to the first two pages of novels and trail off near the last chapter so we can design our own endings– so I knew you would be seated in the back of the birdhouse splattered in orange and red acrylic. You were reading the last sentence of a book you never finished and I told you it was okay and that we could wait there. You told me that you were thinking that you might end up like the frog that ran away when I was three and you were nothing but a potato in a basket– I asked how you remembered and you reminded me how we have always shared memory. You said you think of it’s skeleton often and wonder if it had a sibling who knew where it was running away to and knew that it liked to eat banana bread standing at the kitchen counter and that it sometimes comforted itself with the hinge of the refrigerator in July– I told you that you don’t always need a burial to be remembered that it’s sibling probably put a tombstone where the skeleton was left to fade into the carpet. You said that sometimes you feel like you’re fading into the carpet. I reminded you that you couldn’t even play a game of hide & go seek as long as I was around. You didn’t want to leave the birdhouse so we ate breakfast there standing at the counter with our rustic hunks of banana bread and talked about how there was only enough pomegranate juice left for one of us to have a satisfying glass– neither of us wanted to pour it but we both knew I would get it for you. You said you were sorry like you always do but there was never anything to be sorry for other than leaving the fridge door open in July.

The Abundance of Uninhabited Birdhouses
and cinnamon chai tea.

I'm entering into the housing market.
The buying and selling of bird houses that 
finds themselves neglected on grandmother mantels
and in mildew-laden cardboard boxes tucked under
Christmas decorations in the basement.
There are a great many people who
have painted a bird house without ever having
the intention of the home being inhabited
but yesterday morning I was informed by a pair
of swallow tails who sat with me for cinnamon chai 
tea that there was actually quite a shortage--
that since before they could remember 
homes for birds were rapidly diminishing--
The cardinals telegraphed explaining 
how they had sat at the entrance to many 
craft stores in the hopes of making
a down payment on any number of the ornate
and blank bird houses that lined the aisles
only to have the retailers waive their
hands at the couple furiously. They were
holding temporary residence in the hollowed
out knot of a birch tree--
The blue jays blamed the squirrels for the issue
and the blue bird couple with the
adopted chickadee for a son tried to calm 
the blue birds down before they rioted--
seeing as blue birds are the type for violence.
I didn't even need to take the bird houses outside--
I just opened my windows wide and let the
waiving of the blue curtains beckon in the birds
from up past the strip mall and down to the
park when the cardinals went for the best 
brunch of mulch worms. They negotiated my
payment in stolen rings and keys 
to garages  without addresses-- I figured I 
could make them into earrings. 
Only the blue jays complained that the 
home they were able to afford only had one
fake chimney instead of two--
and each morning the birds sat with me for 
cinnamon chai tea and bickered only
in whistles and chirps so that they
could hardly be heard over the tea pot.

For who did you leave the table set for tea
and re-fold the napkins every morning?

There is a porch dangling off the corner
of main street where a table is waiting for
tea. The tea pot is the color of strawberry milk
and the napkins are green like spearmint leaves--
dried up and waiting to be steeped--
The tea cups lay on their sides--
crooked smiles of forgetfulness in their saucers 
and I left a folded note asking
if someone would come out and sit with me
if I waited there-- or if the
two settings are pausing in memory of people
who might not have time to steep tea anymore--
I wonder if they bickered over which type
to put in the pot-- I don't think I've met
a pair of people who could pick one flavor of tea--
one party always has to relent.
A reply letter on my own front step
explained they drank crisp teas--
early grey or black or breakfast blends--
I wouldn't reveal I like my tea mist to 
bloom in ginseng and lavender-- mincing words
with mangoes and apricots--
I would drink anything to see those
napkins and saucers held in warm hands instead
of sprinkled with yesterdays and rain storm grit. 
So the next day I arrived in the chair. 
I picked up my cup. I knew it was mine
because it was the one with a chip taken
out of it-- I perched it in the saucer
and poured imaginary earl grey while I anticipated
my companion-- she could come
draped in a night gown printed with
mangoes or lavender or alley cats-- 
maybe he was from the west with an accent
from everywhere and no where--
Maybe she wore glasses at the precipice of her
nose and maybe they drank tea for show 
and coffee for purpose. 
Whoever they were they had known me--
the space was for me all along and I knew
because I could see dried ginseg leaves
in the bottom of the chipped cup. I read
my future and my past in them and they 
explained how this was the chair I would
always drink tea in-- so as night fell 
I kept a vigil for my tea partner and 
she or he or they were too shy to arrive
on that day-- I left them a note 
telling them that the tea alone was nice as well
and that I had poured earl grey for them
but that it would be cold by the time
they came to it at our table. In the morning
I folded the napkins.
before I departed I took a last sip of
the earl grey-- cold and nostalgic 
like the empty place setting across from me.