wild yeast

we take our webbed feet 
& gill dresses to the heavy forest.
once my mom told me 
that she was never a child. i believe her.
instead, she was a star fruit 
& a bottle of blood. we get the car
to start again after holding a seance.
all we need is enough monsters 
to make a loaf of bread. we'll live there
all winter feeding each other catacombs.
i would steal the dough as it rose.
pinching the blubber of the lovely whale.
we are in the shower & the yeast
is all around us. yeast in the wood
& yeast in the marrow. i ask you,
"what kind of whale do you think i am?"
you joke, "sperm" & then agree with me
that i am a beluga. dough chariot. 
soft stomachs. resting my head
on my stolen cloud. the yeast talk
about an army of god. i tell them 
we are not that kind of people. we are
the spore shakers & the wood splitters.
i have never wanted 
to be holy. instead i have craved
the brief warmth of fresh bread. 
bleeding steam. i found my mother once
as a girl in the backyard. i braided her hair
just like she would one day try to braid mine.
she was covered with bugs. 
good bugs & useless bugs. the oven 
was growing. soon it would be the size
of a house. i made beds for every yeast
in the hopes that they would stay.
we banged pots & pans. we cried, 
"wake up." a staircase that leads 
only to an unused picture frame.
there is not enough time. we have 
to eat the bread. we have to call 
the milkmen. the yeast say, 
"better than nothing" & they could be
talking about their body as a feast
or they could be talking about
the family stories i have 
about how to survive. 

dustpan

i collect our butterflies when they are
banana-ripe. a television is saying,
"buy one get one half off." it is talking
about lips. a hailstorm comes
& puts craters in all the new cars.
i try to call my health insurance agent 
to talk about armageddon. "are you ready?"
i ask & then i clarify, "i am not here
to preach, i am here to learn about 
your chaos self." they hang up but i stay 
on the line fishing for an angel. 
none arrive. when i sweep the house i feel
like a clover. thank god for tools. 
the shovel & the rug beater. i sit
on the porch alone when i am angry. 
i try my best to turn all that anger 
into feathers. stuff a pillow. call my brother
to talk about everything except for 
how we feel about each other. two moons
orbiting a dead planet. the house is never clean enough.
one day when no one else was home
i came with my knuckles 
& a jar of salt. i rubbed & rubbed.
red & raw. there is still dirt 
on the baseboard that refuses to come free.
maybe the dirt is part of us. i look in the dustpan
& i see gold. glitter. a school of dead flies. 
i keep the dust in a little bowl beneath
the bed. i know if anyone found it
they would scream & toss the contents 
out into the yard where the rats held
their makeshift funerals. always i would shift
in the weeds to try to find what was left.
we lose a lot of skin. we lose a lot of hair.
enough to make duplicates. autumn selves 
to put into infomercials. i am not sure
if i am a product or a salesperson today.
which one is worse? that is what i am.
i stand & wait for the delivery truck
to bring me a toad. i am going to feed him
some of the flies & then maybe we will
be friends. i will carry him on my shoulder
& introduce him as my son. i mean he would be
my son after all. let's not get carried away.
the butterflies taste like iron. when my father 
finally arrive with his own broom
we will have a party of trying to make
one another clean. i remember even if 
he has forgotten. i have a dustpan 
full of hair to prove it. It's easier
not to tell the truth, that way no one is waiting
for a prophecy. i keep my oracles 
to myself. i spend years eating alone. 
today in the dust i find a beetle. she is holy. 
i promise her to keep her secrets.
she tells them to me & then becomes 
nothing more than a shining piece of flesh. 

anything could be cake

i am an increasingly distrusting person.
sometimes i will pick up my face from the mirror
& find it made of buttercream. smear my lips.
i lick my fingers. the sweet rotten mess.
i have grabbed doorknobs & found them
to be jelly donuts. i have fallen into angel food cake beds.
i know this is just because i am hungry
in the endless way. like how the stick men 
wander in search of a throat. i weep when
i find another lover made of sugar. it starts to rain
& i scramble. i try to find a tupperware big enough
to house my needs. by the time i do
they are gutter honey. i carry a fork & knife.
the knife is sharp & accidentally cuts holes
in the meadow. all the bees pouring
from my bedroom wall. if i could feed them enough.
if i could keep them then maybe we could
live off singing. i want to be the kind of person
who walks through a graveyard & doesn't wander
what stones are edible & which ones belong
to terrible people & which ones receive teeth
& which ones receive chocolate. it is so important
to feed the dead or else they come back like this.
like our ravenous nights. the hunting knee.
the arrow bush. a coyote screams like a woman.
i go out to help her. she is a cupcake platter.
each one with a little wasp inside. if i could be sure
that tonight everyone would be real 
i would go out. i would maybe even dance.
but i cannot even promise that of myself. 
i would love to meet someone who once was real.
to touch their hands. would they feel like marzipan 
or just like a soft furrow. moss & meat. 

resurrection of the family dog 

no one misses her more than me.
i am not home when she turns into 
a jar of bees. then, a silent thumb. 
i drive around the block for hours
because i am afraid to see her. 
all the bananas in the world
could not soothe me. my parents try to say,
"she is just an angel now."
i have met angels & i want nothing
to do with them. i buy gardening gloves
from a twenty-four-hour store. 
go out to the backyard while everyone
is dreaming of smoke. she used 
to eat my hands each night & in the morning
i would feel so much relief. we would walk
together into a hole in the forest.
there, we could speak the same sadnesses.
her desire to chew on a cloud. mine 
to be the daughter everyone wanted. 
the family dog is always a conduit. 
she would say, "they do not know what they want." 
i build a replica of her from broken plates
& loose screws. once she ran away &
i found her not far from the house at all.
she was standing & staring at a ghost
at the corner of the property.
i said, "it is best to ignore them."
she said, "that is not how you should treat
the dead." i do not know if this resurrection is
what she would want. i take the statue
out to the yard. bathe her in moon glow.
shake her & beg. i try all her the commands 
that i taught her which was only two.
"sit" & "come." "sit," i say. "come."
finally, she rattles to life. i forget
all the questions i want to ask her
& instead, we chase each other.
our midnight shadows, fresh children
in the cool grass. i climb the pine tree
to reach the clouds. manage to pull one down
for her to chew on. by dawn
she is just a pile of broken plates again. 
i do not clean her up. instead, i decide
this is the shrine for her brief return.
when the others find her, my father & my brothers
& my mother & my uncle i wonder if 
they will know this was her or if
they will just think i came urgent as always
& left a holy little mess. 

human bones

i have gone on too many dates
in which all we talk about are bones.
once, a boy drove me inside his dream wagon
until we reached the edge of town.
he lived there in a feather house. 
a shovel leaned on the wall by the door 
& he picked it up. 
invited me to see where he went to dig. 
i sat on a folding chair while he told me
about how he broke his first bone by
punching a hole in the wall because
his brother had turned into a moth.
i felt scared of him. worried he was going to try
to bury me. i made up an excuse. scrambled
out of the house. he chased me
not like a horror movie but like 
a runaway dog. he wasn't the first
or the last boy. all the bones. the next with 
gravel lot for a tongue. the one after that,
all his ribs laid out on the counter.
he asked me to pick one to take with me.
i don't really believe in gender
but something i think a lot of men have in common
is they think to give means
to dismantle the self. no one wants 
your bones. at least, i do not. i want to see
what kind of dragon you build with them.
my favorite lover though he had used his bones
to make a windmill. femurs & fibulas.
we stood beneath it while the shadows kicked. 
"i want to love you," he said. i basked 
in his honesty. wondered then
about the difference between wanting 
& being. gender of course, the strange
city between nest & nightmare. 
of course i still have one of his ribs. 
i use it as a soup spoon though on most nights
i do not think of him. 

herd of air conditioners 

i promise you we're going to catch
enough summer spit. i put on my dead boy gloves 
& we try to find the air conditioners 
where they're roaming around the town's
glowing red border. some people set traps
but we are honorable. we do the work
with our own bodies. which is to say
we die a little bit with the beast. we used to have
such a great one. fed him chicken bones 
& pocket watches. then he died & his soul
turned into a video game. we can feel the end times 
on the tips of our tongues. the hotter august.
the bleached trees growing like cauliflower. 
parrots roosting beside bats in the attic.
i just want a quiet cold night. to breathe in
the crimped air. to my luxury is cranking
the air conditioner as high as it will go 
& falling asleep. i did this only once 
in awhile as a child. my parents always found out
& scolded me for wasting my teeth on the dark.
chewing holes through the wall to stick
my urgent fingers through. you could of course
hire someone to grab an air conditioner for you.
they get down on all fours & run alongside them.
i tell you not to give up. night comes
& the air conditioners are more vulnerable.
less vision more feast. i carry a blue raspberry ring pop
on my finger. hold it out & hope for the best.
when one comes, leaving his herd behind,
i let him eat. i know i need
to grab the cord or his horns but i don't.
sweat down my face. he runs off, trotting back
into the fields of broken cds. i hear 
on the other side of town they are setting up
the biggest seance yet. i do not know if we 
will go. there is still a creature to catch. 

brooklyn museum

that summer i brought everyone to the museum. 
the boy with pigeons for eyes 
& my uncle & my father & my brother.
once, just a stray dog who looked 
like he might want to wander with me.
we stood in a secret hallway 
where there were rows & rows of family portraits.
no, i lied. they were just images of waves.
crashing & calling. the windows
like submarines. i don't know what i hoped
they would see. i guess i thought maybe
we would all stay. i think i would make
a good exhibit. i could pose & everyone could
take out their sketchbooks. each drawing,
a different species of mushroom. i remember
what my friend told me.
"do not try to show them something
you love. show them something you are
unsure of." we sat at the place settings 
of the dinner party. forks the size of arms.
dresses fashioned into salad. i thought i would
grow out my hair. i thought i would
become a window of a sky eater. 
we sat one afternoon in the garden out back.
i was a cranefly & everyone else were horses.
i asked my father, "what did you like best?"
he said, "the train leaving the city."
streets knotting. sidewalk trees plucking
their hungry handfuls of tangerine. 
i thought if i returned enough times 
someone would see exactly what i saw.
the station of lucifer in the lobby. 
his ribs like oars. this was my home. 

fabric

i rode my bike between wing beats
of summer corn to the fabric store. 
i did not have to be barefoot 
but sometimes i was. i think i wanted
to be like the mennonite kids 
who played & worked out back.
the pedals on my bike had metal grips 
so i had to push with just the pads of my feet.
bone & sun. gravel between toes. sweat on my eyebrows.
through middle school, i sewed all the time.
there was a machine set up for me 
upstairs by the window. threads of light
across rows of stitches. i was never very good.
i was more of a fabric collector than anything.
wandering in the aisles of colors,
i found thick fake leather & white fur
& tea kettle prints & shimmering scraps.
tucked the bolts of fabric beneath my arms.
i carried as many as i could, convinced that
if i set the fabric down i might not
be able to find it again. 
watched the women at the counter 
as they measured a yard or two yards for me.
they would fold each precious tongue. 
spoke to each other in german
& i did not know what they said.
at home, i kept the cloth in a trunk. 
so many of them i would never use. 
it was like keeping alternate realities. i did not have
many friends. my fingers were like hummingbirds.
my round face. my black hair. 
i used my own the perfect silver scissors to cut 
through each portal. i never bought 
a single pattern. sewed together roads.
knees to comets. returned for more
each week on my bike. somehow there would
always be a fabric i hadn't noticed before. 
 

diet root beer

i keep a list of culprits as my phone screen.
sometimes you have so good a day
you forget, even if only briefly,
that you're living in a capitalist hellscape. 
maybe a mushroom remembers your name
or maybe you are the lover you always wanted to be.
then, i always end up in the dorm room with
brown windows. amber blooded little newt.
the coughing room. a closet where
mice come to eat my homework. every day
i write a parable about shoeless girls 
& a milky pond. wash my face in the ceiling.
i caught an angel once. he screamed & it tore a hole
in my happiness. thank god for that. i don't think
i want to be happy. i want to be full. 
i collect diet root beer bottles & cans & i am
well aware this is not what i need. we become 
ant colonies in our grief. what can be built.
who is the queen. i wasted too many years
eating salads. never jumped off the right roof.
a coffin of bottle caps. carbonated night.
i stir my face with a wooden spoon. drink
the prehistoric broth. what kind of soup are you?
i am the folding chair tongue & the headlight prophet.
online i order something wonderful 
that i do not need at all. it will be here 
between blinks. catastrophic light. the dead cell phone 
& her tower where all our questions live.
i brought lovers over. we kissed so long
that we forgot the light. burnt caramel glow.
a face in the window. the unfinished god 
watching to see how we will survive. 

inflatable mattress lover

i can leave whenever you want.
i am always one breath away
from a suitcase lung.
an accumulation of shoes.
we laid until the floor met us again.
bags upon bags of party favors. 
a wedding inside a thimble. we loved
each other like raspberries. the urgent flock.
birds without eyes searching for a zipper.
i take off my hands in times like this.
i weep & pretend i cannot drive at night.
route 222 is backed up to our throats 
& so we walk the corn fields.
find ourselves asleep with the doll heads
in the schoolhouse garden. 
if i tell you i want to be kept it is a lie.
instead, i want the vessel to be full
whether it is with water-glassed eggs
or peppers or a two-headed boy. 
we did not have a pump so my soul emptied
into the tires. get me home. please get me
home. you split wood in the dark. 
missing, you slice the moon. now, just
a stump. i have been told you can
teach a tree to return. bring toys 
& family pictures. ask, "who were your ancestors?"
the fire walks on the roof. black walnuts 
come as guillotines. the drop. 
my stomach full of fish. i try to read
your lips by the ghost light of an orphaned star.
i am packing myself up. i am leaving 
& i do not know where i am. 
then, all the air is gone. replaced 
with aquarium pebbles. i did not want
to sleep in this room again. i wanted 
my childhood but everyone green.
an open window so the bats can return. 
the moon limps. you stroke my head. 
sacrifice an owl to feed to bed. it's enough
for us to float. you ask me,
"do you ever rest?"