i don't want to write a poem without you

they split the moon to make 
your feet. hoof prints in the dark. 
i have to do robot things today
& the sun doesn't have any fur. i was standing
in front of the hummus at the supermarket
after you died thinking, "why am i here?"
everything seemed strange. the neon 
& the carts & the day moving on. at home,
i pick leaves for you. separate out your favorite
& feed them to the others. they tell me
they miss your eyes. the moon is cleaved.
drips nectar. forms pools in the mud. 
she is a ripe melon. i would feed you
all the airplanes caught from between the stars.
i would stay up until the days turned over
& over. i still remember carrying you 
through a crowded farm festival. 
you cried until you got home. the yard.
your bleating in the morning before i brought hay.
i do not know how anyone could say 
"just animals" when talking about
the other bodies who hold up the sky with us.
i feel all of them. the deer whose body sleeps
beneath the cedar. the quail who left 
one by one like ellipses. i wish only that 
the last night was better. that we all slept in a pile
beside one another. that i became a goat too
& we spoke finally in a shared language.
your breath & my hair. hoof prints
leading up to the moon where we rest 
& nothing is loud. in the car, parked beside
an ugly gas station, i could smell 
the soil-laden must of your fur. the lights
washed out the stars so i drove home.
parked & wept. fed the others again. 
carrots. watermelon. grapes. i told them 
to eat extra tonight for you. 

teeth jail

throw away the key. i will eat
with my eyes. pay an application fee
to look at the moon. they say it is withering
with each poet's glance. that we must conserve it. 
soon we will run out of metaphors
& we will have to start screaming.
i had a past lover, who, when in grief,
would walk out to the gnarled woods
at the edge of campus & shout
into the trees. you would imagine that
the animals would run but instead 
they shouted with him until everything
was raw & red. in fifth grade they removed
six of my teeth. i wanted to swallow them.
let them turn into steps inside my chest.
i am building a staircase to see you. i am
opening the windows & letting the ghosts out.
i am so glad we got rid of the curtains. i used
to love them. now everything is bright.
my teeth were too crowded. they still are.
it is mostly because i lost a retainer
when i was little & then i refused 
to get my wisdom teeth out. if they 
are going to be shackled i want to be 
the one. one day they will have all fallen out
& i can plant them in the yard. grow a teeth tree
& no one will ever be in prison again.
a laugh from the sun. i will spend the rest
of my life trying to convince my beloveds
that we can be free. i feed the windowsill.
i sweep hay from the floor. slip the turnstile. 
this is my snake garden. this is our moon.

perpetual stew

i add garlic to the noise.
five fingers. your pocket acorns
from a walk without the moon.
we drive again through the corn fields.
i want someone to call on the phone.
for them to crawl through 
the receiver & hold me like
a worry stone. you come home late
& the room is dark. i hear you move
through the guts of the house.
wonder if you are not you
but some intruder. i would have
no method of resource. i go back asleep.
online there are people making
perpetual stews which are just 
simmering pots of meat & onions & worry.
i have enough stew to deal with 
but i do not mind watching theirs.
thick brown broth poured from a ladle.
every once & awhile it will look delicious.
of course it is dangerous. a breeding ground
for all kinds of bacteria or whatever 
but i don't like to think about that.
i like to witness what the online people
who i guess are also real people somewhere
are doing with their hands. 
we all need a vessel to tend & 
our own is also a hazard. stew of my heart.
stew of my dreams. i pick wild onion.
a pocketful of sage from the bush
by the well. swallow it all & weep. 
it is you in the dark & i know by
your soft voice. you empty your pocket
on the nightstand & join me 
in the night's broth.  

bad history 

i used to be able to list all the presidents
of the united states.
we memorized it for 
ap us history class. my memory was not
in order. instead, it was 
a patchwork. dipping back & forth
until the march was complete.
the names became hopscotch squares.
pebbles cast into their mouths.
a man with hair like a dead bird.
another one with pickled eyes. set jaw.
dull skin & tombstone teeth. 
in the classroom their portraits 
looked down on us disapprovingly. 
high schoolers with lots of big ugly dreams. 
horrible men are almost never depicted 
with their hands where you can see them.
instead, they wiggle their fingers in the dark.
i lost my memory of the president's names
one by one. first the 1800s presidents 
& then on into the now. i do not forget 
what they did though. their wars & their hungers
& their genocides & their blazing white house.
when my grandmother
was dying they asked her often
if she knew who the president was
as a way to test how much she still remembered.
she always got it right up until
the last weeks. i hope to one day too
be emptied of their names. to say,
"i do not know but there is a valley 
full of bones to tend." when i was finished the list,
i would look at it & marvel at my work. 
the outline of a knife museum. & still somehow
none of them are dead. 

recreational arguments before & after the sunrise

you talk to me in grubs.
i love you even when the walls rot
& peel like old cattails mucky from rot. 
we are driving & the windows are covered
with butter. i am crying & the sky rain
is so warm that i mistake it for a shower.
buy a bottle of shampoo & lather us wild.
everything about the body could
also be used to talk about clouds.
cloud teeth. cloud religion. cloud envy. 
once you bit me & said it was because
i made you do it. the bite got infected.
i become a werewolf but i do not show you.
argue instead with my reflection in
a bottle of sparkling beaks. 
i prefer to keep my monstrosity to myself 
these days. there is not enough storage
on my phone to hold the pictures of the life
i thought i wanted. tied down like a runaway tree,
we watch a movie & it plays backwards. neither 
of us stop it. instead, practice our new tongue. 
i learn to make shrines to my words.
to take bites out of the inside 
of fruit, leaving the flesh intact. 
we are sitting in a parking lot when 
one of my birds falls out. you help me 
put it back into place. i tell you i am sorry.
that that wasn't me. i am left though wondering
who we are outside of our open mouths. 
when you fall asleep before me, i take myself
to the gas station to argue with 
the color of the neon. pink. too pink
for a world as heavy as this. 



 

nail in the coffin

i have an obsession with 
headstone makers. how they spent
all their days etching the names
of the dead. one in 1700s new england
whose name i can't remember
crafted a skull that then got passed down
to his apprentice. all the stones have them.
the dead on top of the dead. i wish there were
still apprentices. still little morsels
to suck on. old nails are square. new nails
are round. in the backyard of my parents house
i searched for square nails. i never found any
but i did discover shards of glass. the glass
was not old. instead, they were probably
my grandfather's bottles. he died & turned
into a nail. life is a treasure hunt. no map. the dead rising
from the sea. i think i would have done well
as an artisan. i don't have the patience these days
because my brain is a bowl of cauliflower
but back then in the dead people times i think
i could have carved every day. could have
become intimate with the tools. i am trying
to think of what my downfall was. where i went
so wrong. why my spirit decided that i should
arrive at the time of drones & plastic wrappers.
i reject the idea that any of us are here 
for some heroic reason. i think at most i was put here
by the soil to be a headstone carver. to find the skull 
& perfect it. there is always a need for
more dead inside the dead. no ending is complete.
even the headstones are licked by rain. fade until
the name are whispered in the stone. 
i take the nails out of coffins. all of them square.
i build a house at the end of this world
with one foot in the next. 

tour guide

i meet a tour guide in the middle 
of the night. she has eyes made of blackberries.
i pick them & the moon shrinks 
to the size of a dime. the dime does not have
a colonizer on it. instead, there are
abundant crows. the crows say, "never spend us."
my partner has been playing on the stock market. 
i don't believe there is a way out. he says,
"this is our savings." i have not been able
to save money for years. instead, i scramble
on all fours away from catastrophes. 
sometimes i understand why there are billboards.
other times i think, "the world could be anything,
why do we have this?" the tour guide 
is gentle. her eyes grow back. i do not tell
anyone else about her. it is not romantic.
it is divine. i want a god so bad. i want a savings
so bad. not the money but the ability to 
stand up & become another country. to kiss
the feet of mountains. there's a thin white lady
who makes fairly good yoga videos 
so i watch them. she travels the world. 
in one video she is on a mountain in peru
which i will probably never make it to. the tour guide
says, "the world holds you." i am trying
to believe that. there is a bird 
who visit me out my windows while i type 
hungers into little digital boxes. i imagine them
like shoe boxes in a huge mismanaged closet. 
the bird has a heart the size of one blackberry bead.
i bead her earrings. she does not come back.
i hope she tells stories about me. the tour guide 
tells me i could easily be a tour guide if 
i really wanted to. i don't know if i believe her.
when i open my mouth, needles spill out.
i sew myself into bad dreams. my partner invests
in bmw. invests in a medical company trying
to craft electronic lungs. the dime crows leave
to forage elsewhere. sometimes, on a moonless night,
i will hold the coin up just to hear the wind
blow through it. 

firehouse simulation

i prepped for fire. i craved something
to survive. in fourth grade, the fire company
brought a fake house to fill with smoke.
we went two at a time, crawling on
our stomachs to wriggle out of the door.
the smoke smelled almost sweet. i was paired
with a boy i was afraid of. i got out & left him.
the fireman scolded me for leaving
him behind. at home i began to see fire everywhere.
i begged my mom to buy a ladder so that
i could crawl out my window. we bought
stickers that said, "two adults, two children inside."
i filled a bowl with water & carried it to my room.
a precaution in case fire found me. something
to put it out. the simulation house started
following me. would see it in the drive way.
i would wake up inside. the walls, smaller than
any house i'd ever been inside of. the world was
just starting to become more terrifying.
i became aware of my hands & my bones. my stomach
& the dirt under my fingernails. there were boys
who took to making a game of me. face flushed.
face on fire. i would wet my hair in the morning
to keep the flames from spreading. at church i saw
fire above all the apostles' heads. how did
they keep it contained? my uncle told me
an old story about how if you hear dogs barking
in the middle of the night that there will be
a fire. i would stay up, worried i might miss the harbinger.
i think i was always meant to be a herald. 
maybe that is thinking too much of myself. i try
my best to prepare. smoke under my skin. 
the fire in my core, burning like a swallowed house. 
up the street, the fire trucks opened their mouths
as wide as they could. i sometimes feared
they were coming for me. 

raffle ticket

i trade a tooth for a raffle ticket.
it is the year that the birds stop birding
& return to the ground to hide.
i get a shovel & dig, hoping to reunite
with the fairy people beneath the soil.
god they must have it so good down there
with so many centuries of quiet. 
i go to a party where the only food
is raffle tickets. someone whispers to me,
"i had a cousin who won." i do not know
anymore if i want to win. at night
on the red television, they call out a number
& someone weeps. someone hugs their loved ones.
i do not know what happens. no one knows
what happens. we are assured that it is not death
or even a rebirth. that it is some mythical
third dawn that is ready
to make us dazzling & white. sometimes i do not
even watch. somedays i do not even
have a raffle ticket. instead, if i am alone
i look at my palms & remember how
in elementary school my friend read my palm
not like a raffle ticket number but like
a book. he said i would have two great loves
& maybe a child. i did not. it was still 
comforting to have someone else
hold my hand. our warmth. the basketball hoops. 
i wish we still used raffle tickets for church fundraisers
& bingo halls. i want a cellophane veil.
i want a movie night in a box. instead, i have
the windows full like stained glass. the pictures
that come & freeze frame are always terrors.
mysteries grow. become religions. i took out
the tooth with my bare hands. a hunger
for a chance. my first boyfriend
buying lottery tickets & scratching them off
in the gas station parking lot. even that was
more dignified. i want a punch bowl to sleep in.
i want the earth to open & for the fairy to say,
"yes, come & sleep here." the party ends
& i do not go home. the host asks if i need
a place to go & i say i do not. i sit outside.
the streetlamps stare. the moon has an advertisement
projected across his face. it says,
"there is always a chance."  

conflict avoidance 101

if there is a hole in the sun,
close one eye. once when i was
a girl i found my uncle like a goldfish
belly-up on the stairs. i bathed him
because no one else was awake. he drinks
like a goldfish, aimless & light bulb-eyed. 
he does not remember. neither do i.
in my family we don't talk
about things like this. they become 
trapeze wires in the house. sometimes
i use them to dry my clothes. 
sometimes i write a poem & that is as close
as i get to telling anyone the truth.
my father chased me once with 
a rattlesnake or was it a knife or was it
just a toy? memories crunch under my feet
like dead leaves. i was taught that
to love is to forget what they did. 
in some ways this has been easier. if you
leave a memory alone long enough 
you will start to question if it was real.
until one day over coffee you & your brother
will remember a night when 
all the windows folded in & the house
was so dark. we found each other. 
turned on a night light. saw the ceiling
crawling & shut the light off. better to
pretend there was nothing wrong
& to stare. in the morning the windows
returned or did we cut them open?