dehumidifier 

in the mountain house
i learned how to talk to centipedes.
put my ear to the wooden floor
& heard them in the basement 
summoning angels. sometimes 
i miss my old solitude there.
i felt all my seams. snipped them
when i could & watched beetles spill
from my guts. i loved to stay up late
putting on makeup in the smudged mirror.
pretty little prophet in a silk robe.
the chaos of becoming an anchor.
a place for god to bend down
& send pigeons. in the little library box
across the street, i watched the bugs go
to hold their midnight masses. 
a chapel is a place you go to lose a piece
of your body. i thought i needed
to rid the house of clouds so i bought
a dehumidifier. let it drink the sky.
fill its belly with sweat each day.
instead of helping though,
it draw the centipedes in. they congregated.
they said, "this is my new religion."
swarms beneath the tank. i told them,
"i am throwing this all
down the drain." they did not listen.
traveled from far & wide in search 
of a severed creek. we are all just looking
for water. i had to throw the machine away
but even after they kept coming.
i shouted at them, "this is not a lake."
but it was. it was always a lake.
fish skeletons in the air. all the legs
in the whole world, treading water.
the bottom not a question
of how deep but how long
you can last without using your teeth.
my words turned inside out.
there were days i could not speak
to anyone but the bugs. tuning fork tongue.
a ring of bodies where the machine was. 

giftwrap 

we make gifts of the mundane.
a toothbrush in a little red box. a dead bird
in a nest of tissue paper. 
come let's get older. let's eat nothing
but confetti until the cows have wings. 
i am hungry for a taste of luxury.
of velvet packages & mailmen in the sky.
we do not get rich enough or maybe
we get rich too often. i don't know
how to crave without betraying myself. 
i have enough. i have a little cruet 
of oil i use to bless the tangerines.
the deer come to lick the salt pillars
in our yard. i have run from gods before
but now i am safe here. 
it is better to just give them the show they want.
roll the rock. ride the horse.
rip the snakes from the soil. grow dragon beans
& eat them all on one wild night.
i have held my heart like a blue speckled quail egg.
tiny & rattling. let's not get too distracted
by the costume jewelry. there are people
who wear crowns of teeth. if you get
right down to it what i want is a surprise party.
i want every to jump out from behind 
an elephant & say, "you are not dead!"
the gift is the reminder. a kazoo in the pulpit.
chicken & wearing their glow feathers.
i find a block of gold & tell the fairies 
to come & eat it before i get
any ideas about who i am. 

beach house for snakes

let's take a get away. let's buy
the teeth they had in the window.
i have a suitcase full of mirrors,
all of the broken. a fractured moon.
let's bring the spare limbs tonight.
not to alarm you but there are
less & less summers every time you
go out to the tree house. the snakes
buried their legs to use later.
for when time comes apart
like the lips of an orange. lobe by lobe.
we stayed there once. sand in our mouths.
at night, the storms would 
shake every tree. fruit falling like fists.
i held my breath for the whole week.
a light house in the closet.
i sliced it cucumber-wise. no more fur.
no more fire, just the tongue
jumping rope in the hallway.
every draw was full of shed skins.
the snakes, somewhere else. 
always somewhere else. i covered my eyes.
drank nothing but cranberry juice.
we could get away. my mother was 
a disciple of the get away. she said,
"here is our sea shell life." my skin softer
than ever before. freckles farmed 
from breath & rain. i'm going to stay
the night if you promise to stay awake
until i fall asleep. nightlight. doorknob.
the snakes, drinking pina coladas
underneath a plastic palm tree.
we are in a new kind of folding.
the highways turn accordion. 
we miss our turn. end up at the dead end
where hope meets beet greens.
my fingers turn purple. i shave my head.
everyone goes back without me. 

centipede day care

go be him in you little boy house.
a trolley that goes from hell 
to the gas station. eating our fingers
in exchange for more legs. 
this is always a bargain. what will i give
& what will be taken from me?
i work in the centipede day care these days.
a line of mini vans come to drop off
their precious syllables. we sing.
put our tongues in the glove box.
you will not need them when you work
with insects. instead, we talk with
our feelings. i weep & so do they.
they are crying about climate change
& i am crying about the cost of funerals.
we burned my grandfather to avoid 
that kind of expense. he has un-scattered ashes.
sometimes i want to feed them
to the feral cats. let him live again
as the mischievous comet he was. 
we cannot know what the dead wanted
but we can use it to get what we want.
that is what the united states have done
for centuries. the centipedes like
to eat bibles. i feed them first
from revelation which they say
tastes like sugar. a rogue radio show host
tells the truth about the moon landing.
it was real. it was real & people starved
to death that night & the stars were all
centipedes waiting to be loved.
we can disagree on a lot & i can still love you
if you agree to go with me to dairy queen.
i can want to feel safe in the ways
i was always told we were. plastic spoon.
plastic cup. the cemetery brimming with
centipedes from work. i am polite & so 
i wave to them. they are busy 
with them gameboys. it's not enough
to be hungry for a gender. you have to
go & carve it from a piece of soap.
mine comes with more legs than you
could ever count. when the parents come
to pick up their nightmares 
& hide them. i say, "these are my horrors now."  

feather tree

when we found the dead birds
we planted them like peach pits.
i was born into the art
of making nothing
from nothing. the skunk cabbage 
harvested by the river. wild onion
like little translucent hearts
chopped & tossed in the hot oil. 
everything dissolved in my mouth.
once, we caught a squirrel 
& let her go. we all have meat.
even the trees. the willows &
the beech with. where the dead birds
were buried the feather trees grew.
first like fists & then like choke cherries.
the shrapnel of an old scream.
at night they called out to each other
from the knots in the bark. 
feathers blowing in the wind.
onto the porch & the driveway.
i liked to collect them to make myself
new eyelids after mine had run away.
we were taught
never to look away. sometimes this
turned my irises into tap shoes.
the feathers were all shapes & sizes.
a dove. a blue bird. a crow.
no birds in sight, just their wings
haunting the old sky. 
tapestry on the bedroom wall
of the tiny god who also does not know
where we are. sometimes butter could cure
the hollowing. the way hunger
expands inside you to fill the lack.
i have not yet collected enough feathers
to make a bird but when i'm done
i'll tie a letter to his leg
& send it off to whoever wants 
to listen. the letter will begin,
"will you tell me what you've swallowed
so that i don't feel so gone?" 

the garden sage plant on the windowsill always turns towards the light

i am looking for the honey wand 
to swallow like a sword. i'm not sure
if sweetness is ever not chaos. we turn the plant
each day & each day the sage reaches 
to press her leaves to the window.
i want to tell her i am sorry for our insistence 
on evenness & balance. 
i too have wanted to press my face
to the lines between where i am & where i want to burn.
i wonder if it would be so bad to just carry her
out into the yard. let her stand there
in a dead wedding dress & hold on to whatever
she wants to hold onto. i have lost so many hands
to fires that i thought would love me.
feeding them & feeding them. first they want
your eyelashes & then your hair. 
it is a brutal summer. just like every summer
comes now. the heat, in blood wings. 
so, i turn her. i let her reach again.
with her permission, pluck a few leaves
to place in my mouth. chew them.
bitter & then sound. bells turned
upside down to be used as chalices.
i am going out to the yard instead. i am 
painting my face with a cloud 
& waving to the sage plant, mouthing,
"it is better in there." 

you were my parking lot fantasy 

i used to meet you on lunch breaks
when you worked at guitar center.
once, it was raining and my car stalled twice
on the way to see you. everything felt
like an emergency. the sky. your fingers.
the way, the first time we met you promised
you loved me. i am, if nothing else,
a fool for a good confession. maybe it's because
i was raised catholic. i am still searching
for a holy person to tell me i am forgiven.
you kissed me like chewing gum. pink.
the rain came harder. my teeth like
hopscotch. your fingers around mine.
you said, "i would never 
show you to my family" as if it were
a joke. i always wore a binder around you.
i held my breath. you pulled me 
into the downpour to kiss me. i now
distrust cinema because of you. romance 
is so much more about death than 
any other genre. here i where i went
to corpse myself. you went back inside
& i sat in the car for almost an hour after.
wiped the water from my face.
cars came & went from the parking lot.
their headlights like tossed pennies.
the next day i found out you were 
seeing other people. the fires you set
in windows. my car stalled more & more
the next day. it was as if it were telling me,
"stop yourself." i am terrible at stopping
myself. instead, i speak a language
of floods until no one else knows
what i'm saying. i don't remember
the last things we said to each other. 
you were standing outside my window
with a guitar. your fingers, those wild birds.
the sky, still slate grey & rampant. 

blood magick

we did the puppet work & reached our hands
inside each other's stomachs. worship me like ice worships
the eaves. we sat in a circle & made our sacrifices.
me, a warm bowl of tongues. you a braid
of red fox tails. blood is always more than blood.
a river. a sleeping ocean. a memory of us
in the big king-sized bed talking about knives.
you always wanted to take a cruise. i wanted
only to float as a dead leaf. no one is coming 
to make a shrine for you. instead, you have to know
where you want you blood to go. i have filled
chalices. i have held special emergency holy weeks.
let's not pretend we haven't tried to be gods. 
instead, the carnivores have always been the disciples.
the radio talkers. the fathers of flightless birds.
where do you go when you are hungry 
for danger? i have loved so many people as a way
of hurting myself. is that love? magick? 
i have been abandoning all ideas of purity.
instead, i go to the river after it has finally rained
for days. mud & laughter. the drowned rabbits 
carrying each other's paws for luck
in the next life. you said, "i want to hold
a knife to your throat." i swallowed your hands.
the dorm room. you in the parking lot.
you on the ceiling as a chandelier. don't tell me you
weren't following my trail of blood. 
i saw you lick your fingers. in your stomach
i always found broken statues. you would 
pull nuts & bolts from mine. a machine
shedding its structure. coming apart as if you
were the fountain who could spit me out.
fill my lips with coins. spending each
on a spell where the not-birds carry you 
out of my past & into an old raspberry jam jar. 

mandrake

we would go out in the yard 
burying microphones. the talk
of worms & mandrakes.
they would say things like,
"buy one get one free." tongues
from the plastic water. a little flute
in the sky saying, "you are not
you are not you are not."
once i fell in love with a soil person.
he reached up only a hand from the earth.
pointed upwards. there was the piano falling
it was too late. when you are starving
even a radio is an oasis. sometimes
i would pretend i was a host too.
"up next is a terrible rain." the mandrakes 
are always telling lies about the worms.
the worms insist that they are beautiful.
pocket mirrors. a collection basket
full of mice. is it enough to talk to an angel? 
is it enough to see the figure
of a man in a mandrake or are we just
too pastel-thumbed. blurring the lines
between ghost & girl. between horizon 
& a deadly cliffside. the view is everything.
the sky bleeds from a tiny slit
in its side. sticky jam red. orange bruise.
i pluck the mandrake 
from the soil & he scrambles to cover
his unmentionables. my heart breaks 
as it should. i clothe him in a doll dress.  
put him in a bassinette. he asks,
"were you ever a mandrake?" i tell him
i was not but once a whole tree
grew from my head overnight.
i had to find a lover to chop it does
but it still sways. the phantom limb.
songbirds come to me in search
of the branches. 

parking lot burial 

she asks me, "what are you doing
to yourself?" i get in the car
& drive & drive until i reach the parking lot.
there are sea gulls
who come here just to die.
they watch television on their backs.
make vlogs about the garbage they find
in the dumpster behind the stop & shop.
i come here too on a night in the winter
looking for somewhere to hide
all my feathers. they keep spilling
from my mouth & i can't ever conceal them.
i thought i could make a person
for her to love. i hear waves even though
there's a highway between here & the beach.
the ocean has always been just
a mania away for me. i remember 
parking my car in jersey once just
to look for jellyfish, i found none
but i did find a funeral the gulls were having.
in my religion, a parking lot is always
a holy space. a shrine to longing.
& waiting. a stolen mouth. elegy for 
the meadows that used to bloom 
& their ghosts 
who still search in the broken glass
for the color blue. i cannot go home.
my gutted place. plastic drawers
full of everything i want to be. 
i always join a gull funeral when i see one.
say a few words, "i'm sure 
he cut the sky like butter."
the birds chatter. i tear a button 
from my jacket to leave as an offering. 
they birds disperse & only i remain.
a little knot in the ground 
where, in the summer, dandelions
punched their way through the asphalt. 
i know she is waiting for me by the window
with a bowl full of all my feathers i left.