sweat bees

this is how i like to be eaten;
not with teeth or tearing flesh but
with a mouth the size of a blink.
my father was the one who told me
that the small striped bugs were
"sweat bees." they gave us 
two little moving crowns as we sat
on the park bench beneath 
the old oak trees. gold & obsidian.
they do not really 
feed on sweat but my father believed
they did. offered himself up
to their feast. taught me to do
the same. the creatures never bit
but they did tickle as they traversed 
our arms & our necks. 
i wondered what we were 
to the insects. were we kin?
i think we were. a part of me always hummed
in the hours after. the sweat bees
were not around long. usually just
a few weeks in the sticky summer.
when they left, i asked the trees
where they went & no one had an answer.
it is always best to leave like this.
a mouthful of salt. a thrumming ghost.
i have not been feasted on 
for years. i wonder if my father has.
does he go out to the park alone
to meet the bees? do the bees notice
that he is alone & used to bring
along with him another brethren? 
do they know i am hungry too?
also called to make a knit a coronation
where our hair meets the scalp. 

speckled carpet

the carpet in my parents' house
is the home of prophets.
i have laid there on my back
to listen to them. whenever i've been sick
my impulse is to crawl to the floor.
i remember when it was new & soft.
now it's worn away. you can see where
we've cut our deer paths. 
it always smells slightly
like stars & sugar & grass &
dandruff & black pepper. 
they chose the speckled pattern
so it would hide our spirits better.
little gods with their thumb-sized hats.
at my sickest i spent a day there
pretending my ribs
were gills & that i could breathe 
underwater. i was so hungry that
i ate clouds from the ceiling.
in the carpet there are hieroglyphs.
there are ancient words for,
"i am dying & i don't want 
to stop it." once, in the middle 
of the night, my mother 
woke me up. the house was
on fire but only we could see it.
i begged her, "we have to save
the carpet." i took a box cutter
& scrambled to the floor.
she said, "there is no time."
we stood in the yard until morning
while all the men slept soundlessly.
the house was still standing 
with the sun. i have never asked her,
"what was the point in escaping?"
 when i return the languages are older.
the tongues that the divine speaks in
come in spirals. staircases down.
i speak back into them
with my flimsy mouth. i say,
"i want to join you one day."
sleep beneath a carpet loop
like beneath a bridge. the water flows.
i have never asked anyone else
what they hear when they lay
on the floor. i did catch my brother once.
he was laying face down
like road kill. splayed out. 
convening with the speckled carpet. 
maybe one day i'll ask him,
"did you see us running 
from the house? did you see
the blaze like we did?"

monk names

the older i get the more interested i am
in becoming a river. i would like
to choose a fissure in the mountain
to fill with water.
i read somewhere that i can't remember
that in monasteries
they keep lists of all the previous monks' names.
long & unending. centuries 
of sounds used to call one another
in the darkness. stone walls.
i think a river & a name have
more in common than not.
last year i was thinking about renaming myself
for a second time. it felt too difficult though.
i have already had to once 
go around to every window 
& ask if they would never call me dead again.
i don't know how anyone 
keeps the same name for
their whole lives. i know i would 
not make a good monk but i would love
to be renamed like that. to find a place
on a spilling list. 
to hear my fresh word like a tunnel
into the soil & the rocks. i would
sing my new name. i would wake up
before the sun each day
to speak it into the cool air.
i am too wild for a monastery. 
too quiet for the city. too hungry for
our little house in the middle 
of the fields. sometimes, when i feeling
my most melancholy, i give up.
i walk barefoot on the wet earth.
tell the snow, who are just passing through,
"you can call me dead." 

rehoming

i am in a facebook group
for people trying to rehome 
their pets. it is a flock
of all kinds of hungers.
each post, somewhere between saint card
& elegy. one post is written
in the second person
to the dog. the women concludes,
"i'm so sorry we couldn't keep you."
how many times
i have lived inside those words.
too big for every mouth
i've ever stood in.
once, we considered posting
our dog in the group but decided
we couldn't do it. we told her
"we will not be perfect
but we will hold on." i am not sure
though if to be kept 
is to be loved. on tiktok
i watch a news segment fragment
about a new wave of people
rehoming their children. 
there are facebook groups for that too.
posts with children
in all kinds of poses just like
the dogs & the cats.
what kinds of searching
happen there? the horrible
& the terrified & the lost.
i wish facebook groups
were physical rooms. all the people
standing there, holding 
their pets & their children,
saying, "i do not want this heart."
the panic in their voices.
what if to be kept is not 
to be loved? then, what do we make
of the escape? i know how i felt
when our dog bit me.
the blood & the stiches. 
i told no one the truth. not the doctors 
or our friends. a secret between
us & her mouth. what if though
to be kept is to be loved?
then, how do i explain 
all the times i have been
rehomed? sometimes on my own
volition & other times because
the sky was raining knives 
& i needed somewhere to hid. 

patron saint of broken glass

hello i am the patron saint of broken glass.
my miracles are as follows:
once a girl was trying to breathe
& her windows all disappeared.
she turned into a bird & that was me.
i was the miracle & the girl.
once a boy drove his car
off a bridge & into a school of salmon.
the salmon said, "go home."
he did not know what they meant.
he did not have the same notions
of home as them. their home
was a promise buried deep.
he was a boy of cathedral faces.
pieces put together by heat. 
i was not the boy. i was the air around him
& he learned to swim. jumped damns.
found the ocean bluer than he remembered.
then, the last miracle. the miracle
of the mirror. a boy in the attic.
he place his hand on the mirror
& it shattered into so many shards
he could no longer see his face.
he picked up one of the pieces
& found it was a glass needle. 
me, the saint, i told him, "make
a pair of lips." he did. he sewed them
from his old comforter that smelled
like moths. he used those lips
to speak the truth. "i have tried
to die & lived." a miracle is always
a place of exhalation. of truth beyond truth.
when i put my ear to any given wall
i hear everyone praying to me.
they are saying, "break me into
so many fragments that no one will
recognize me." i ask in return,
"what kind of wind would you
like to be?" 

coffin making 

my brother & i talk about becoming
trapists, monks known 
for their handmade coffins.
i imagine what it would be like
to wake up to the round iowa sun.
bathe myself in a saw.
they cut down the trees themselves.
oak & pine & walnut & cherry.
to be a conduit of transitions. 
on their website they say
their work is part of their commitment
to acts of mercy. i have never thought
of coffins as mercy. 
they sell them
to survive. cash in boxes.
the body's ache from bending. 
i have never wanted to be buried in one.
it's too much like a tiny home.
too much like a bed. 
i do not know if i think death 
is rest. i used to think that 
but the older i get, the more it seems
like a lot of work. sorting out
where all the parts of a self
will go. to the dirt & to the water.
a muddy little raffle.
birds & bugs. a coffin feels like
a request, "let's stay a little longer." 
i would make the wood shine. 
sand the edges smooth.
do they ever joke with one another,
the trapists? do they lay down
in the coffins & close their eyes
with big smiles or do they only
climb inside in secret?
i do not think we would make good monks.
we are too loud & too sad.
i could go if he did though.
we could join together. hold each other's
nails in place. hammer to seam.
each coffin a little merciful boat.

goose egg

the flock comes to our yard
with their telephones. they call home
to a nest without any location.
i try to convince you to let them inside
but you say, "my love, they are geese.
they will move on soon."
i find their eggs in the mailbox 
& their eggs in the yard like easter hunting. 
i open them & they are all empty. 
some of them, theatrically, emit a puff
of smoke. others, the sound of the ocean.
in a dream once, i laid a goose egg.
i was so embarrassed & terrified.
i did not want anyone to know what kind
of emptiness i had made.
so, i never cracked it open. 
i always wish i could go back
& see what was inside. surely, not a goose.
probably a telephone, ringing & ringing.
my boyfriend in high school once called me
thirty-seven times before i picked up.
i remember feeling like the empty insides
of a goose egg. i finally picked up 
& he said nothing. his breath. the wind.
one egg i find is heavy. i shake it, 
hoping to get an idea of its contents. 
inside, is a perfect egg made of granite.
i burry it & do not tell you.
my hope is that this means the geese
will come back every year.
anymore, i am hungry for
reassurance that the world will keep turning.
will my country kill me? will the geese
never leave? will i always be the one
to open them? 
on the morning that they leave, i weep.
you celebrate. we harvest their feathers
like ripe fruit. i find one last egg
& inside is a little doll-sized hand mirror.
i see just a thumb's worth
of my fearful face. 

human poem 

there are too many hours in the morning.
we put on our sugar faces 
& try to cut enough wood to last the night.
i tell my dog i promise that one day
we'll move somewhere with a huge fence
& nothing but woods around us.
i have kept most of my promises.
we left the city & then we left the city
& then we left the city. i walked her
down by the water & threw spells in the current. 
now we stand in the bitter december bite.
the first snow spits geese ghosts 
down on our heads. she tell me 
she wants to be an owl & i tell her that
i do too. sometimes we see creatures through
the slats in the fence. beasts stopping 
at our little house as they roam the corn fields.
i ask her if she remember that one time she
broke free of her leash in the fields
behind my parents' house. i chased her.
i called her and she just kept going.
i ask, "where did you think you would 
end up?" she answers only by saying,
"sometimes you get summoned."
i too have been summoned. a train.
a bowl of mints. the night we ate
sweet potato together until we got sick. 
i ask my dog to promise that she loves me.
she laughs. she tells me that once
in a dream she was running, trying 
to catch up with me. all she wanted
was to be at my heel. i take a shovel
to a cloud. make a secret place for us there.
i point to it & i say, "if you are ever lost,
go there." she does not promise.
instead, we keep walking. chase bones
& she grabs one & chews it with her eyes closed. 

how a boy becomes a sculpture 

if you stay still for enough moons
the artists will come carrying stone.
to be a muse is to be dead
in the mouth of the maker. 
gender is all about death. about preservation.
about how to store enough jam
for the winter. teeth fall tonight
after a blanket of snow. teeth angels
& teeth men. i always wanted
to be adored in a way that compels someone to
inflict my likeness onto rock. 
they start with my face. they work 
with spoons. at the fair each year
artists come to carve a masterpiece out of butter.
golden little family. i have watched my reflection
in a pool of cream. i have slid a knife
through warm butter. there is a moment
when everything shifts. when you can feel
that they have captured someone 
real about you. in that way gender
is so random. i will be shaving my face
for the thousandth time & the birds will sing
& i will think, "of course i am a boy."
then the same when i am eating
a blue popsicle & it is the hairy-legged
part of summer & i feel in my gut,
"i am fading thing." there is a garden 
somewhere where my skeletons go
after the sculptors are done. i stand in
a pose holding a canopic jar. 
in another, i am running barefoot & boyless. 
when the artists are done
they never thank me for modeling,
instead they eat the crumbs
from the stone. kneel in the gravel. 
then, scramble away like spiders into the forest.
their own genders glint like halos. 
i take a picture to reassure myself
that i really saw their skulls glowing. 

healing spells

i read in an old grimoire
that if we are sick we should bury all our hooves. 
we should prepare for winter. we must 
boil a whole tree until it is 
soft as flesh.
i pickle the moon to go with it.
sweet lemon divine. i collect the hooves.
there are never enough.
forkful of rind. all the running that a night does
& yet, unslept & unwavering, it refuses to rest. 
i have tried everything. i have
cleansed myself with an egg. 
read the yolk's bloodied veil. i have called from
a payphone & asked to speak
to the birds. they have responded,
"go to the ocean & lay there 
until you are a local." once i drove my car
underwater. it was in a tunnel but i saw
all the fish. they were holy & unafraid.
i have never been holy or unafraid.
another witch book says
all you need is a candle.
i burn one until it is a thumb. i devour
the writhing peaches with beetles for pits.
i used to like a boy so much 
i went to his bible group. they were the
"lay hands on you" kind of group.
we healed a girl. she laid on her back
& gorged herself on the ceiling. 
my hands tingled after 
& i thought maybe salvation was
this easy. when we were done
we stood on chairs & sang about jesus.
she never came back but i did.
no one ever healed me. instead, i gave someone
my eyes & she made them into a necklace.
somewhere in the deepest intestines 
of the forest, there is a bird in a nest
made of my hair. if i found it
i would sleep there. i would be whole.
it is a nice story isn't it? 
that something of you lives outside of you.
more than a phantom limb.
not a child. a wild tooth. 
a language of balms. singing 
melon girl with all the sugar in the world.