chapstick 

in the school mirror i am
a worm girl. the morning has 
one fresh blue for me to pull.
i take a picture of my teeth
& promise my boyfriend i have
never loved anyone else. i keep a 
strawberry chapstick in my throat
for if & when i want to have lips.
the sun rises like a dime. smaller
than i want it to be. i am getting old.
my glimpses of the school turn into
harmonica cages. i see on facebook
that an old friend believes in god now.
i remember his chapstick & borrowing
it once in an attempt to feel less alone.
he has wedding pictures. everything
brings flowers. my ex eats someone else's
teeth. i see him sometimes in 
the chinese place at the end of the world. 
he used to say, "i like you bite-sized."
there was kindness too though. he learned
what chapstick i used & kept one
in the bathroom at his house. once when
his parents weren't home we 
ate mulberries until we were sick
with purple. the night bruised 
across my face. he had perfect fingernails 
& a way of opening me up like an orange.
we went strawberry picking once. 
afterwards in the school mirror i could
find those tiny freckle seeds across my face. 
i grew a whole patch. plucked them 
& fed them to the crows in the field behind
my house. my mouth falls off sometimes still
to ask me questions i cannot answer.
"was that us in the back seat of the subaru?" 
"did he swallow the chapstick when
we were gone?" 

winter mangos 

i don't want a mango the size 
of the sky. i want your hands & a spoon.
i want a country without a country.
to walk the mountains back to a river.
i do not want a mailbox. i want a street
where i am unafraid of my neighbors.
where the chickens return with beaks
stained with raspberry juice. once in the middle
of a frigid break, we ate mangos at the kitchen
counter. those too were not our sweetness. 
how to reckon with the grief inside of joy
inside of grief inside of violence inside of
our little cake slice house by the creek. 
licked our fingers. the heat right behind
someone else's door. i was born an
a dearth of satiation. i talk to sugar
& it too quakes at the emptiness it witnesses.
teeth made of cellar doors. the windows 
thinning in the summer. i slept in the basement.
the ants begged, "can this be our home again?"
damp fires. orange in the sink. from your hands.
i do not want a billboard. who told us 
we could sell the sky? i imagine the pairing knife.
the same one we used to score the mango
into cubes. cut flesh away from pit. that knife
taken to the legs of a great sign until it too
gushed some kind of nectar. all my wounds are
dear to me. sometimes siblings. sometimes my face. 
the supermarket glows on the horizon. 
we drive there in the dying car full of all our
elsewhere junk. i do not want a handful 
of grapes. i want that river to wash me.
to grow as a huckleberry. flesh in
a moonless dark.  

firefly talk 

i hold my eyes like angler fish lures.
let them blink. their light, a glow
in our field ocean. the fireflies 
are coming & i am alone & pretending
to be one of them. i think
i love myself most when i am talking
with another species. o sibling, can i 
come & put my skeleton on the outside?
can you teach me how to answer
when the yellow glow flashes across
the soybean fields? i am concerned that
when you come home you will find me
gone. a jar of bugs on the table. do not
let me go. instead, feed me poems
& sugar. the illuminations like undulating waves.
i feel the pull of the land. come & be
a spirit here. walk the hills at night.
tell the deer, "always always."
i stop myself before i get too far away 
from our yard. i see in the distance
the patch of forest in the middle 
of the farmland where the foxes & 
the fireflies sleep. imagine my life there
eating wineberries until the winter takes
our eyes & puts them back in the sky.
the stars have spare teeth just like a shark.
one falls out & then another is there
to keep the glimmer going. i bring a firefly home.
his eyes grow wide in the kitchen. 
we have dinner together. rice & beans as usual.
watch a movie. a scary movie which
does not phase him. when i am done 
i open the window to let him go. 
apologize for keeping him from enjoying 
his brief life. he blinks & i pretend it means
that he either accepts the apology or he is
unbothered at all by our escapade. when 
you come home let's eat nothing 
but sugar. let's take our bones out & 
lay them on the cutting board
like kitchen knives. i am so loud right now. 
will you be able to keep me? 

prosthetic 

i go to the mountain for clay.
hand shovel. a hole in my shoe.
i have decided to make myself
a new head. i have spent long enough
with this one. i want a skull built
to hold water. i want eyes glazed pearl. 
i am going to fire it in the secret basement. 
watch it come into this world
through heat & light. i am not 
sure yet what i plan to do with
the old head. maybe i will just
plant it where i found the clay. 
another option might be
filling it with dimes & quarters
on an end table by the front door. 
of course i could go the monster route.
i could place the new head on top
of the old one. i have always been
a lover of secrets. i could remove it
only when i needed to remember something
like the texture of blood or the scent
of a car crash. i have a fear that i have
done this whole process before & 
trained myself to forget. that maybe
if i removed this head i would find 
dozens of others. ones with bees
& ones that rattle like rain sticks.
i have heard legends of people
who prune. who dig themselves apart
to the stem. i am not one of those people.
instead, i am a nesting doll's mother.
there is always a peach pit in my guts
where i harbor my whole world.
the new face is gorgeous. is perfect.
i do not believe in renewal. this is 
something else. i try the head on 
while the clay is still wet. run out wild
into the plum-throat night. if i forget this
will you promise not to remind me?
let me believe i never lost anything
just for now. 

blubber 

i become a whale when you're gone.
light candles. call the gods. 
fill every room with my heart. 
my fluke out the back door,
slapping the sky. i break windows.
invite visitors to my lungs. tell them
to play good music & have a pink night.
try to lock the doors. invite my brother
who is also a whale. lay beached 
in the impending july. i pry my own blubber
from the bone to rewind the sun. 
we have so many fire waiting inside us.
what is a whale without the ocean?
it rains tonight & i consider running outside
without my legs. i try to sell the blubber.
try to make a salad with it. remember that
once we were devoured like love poems.
when you come home i will have
so much body for you. enough so that
we won't need to fix the windows.
me, the house. jonah inside still praying
as if his god can hear him. i feed him
spoonfuls of blubber. i explain,
"distance is not just a measure of air.
instead, it is language metric. will my 
voice touch yours? will it pool or will
it fall?" in all my whaleness i look up
at the stars. they come to join me as 
barnacles. it is a relief to swell. to be 
large enough to hold all this ache.  

bath toy

i love a tiny day where
i get as small as i can & try
to find a monster to look at me.
in the bath tub i feel like
a rubber duck, guts full of
bright water. the tub becomes 
a lake & we are paddling &
you are holding me in the palm
of your hand. it is terrifying
to get older mostly because you notice
not only how small you are
but how small everyone else is too.
i have once found my dad as 
a bath toy too. i shut the curtain.
no need for a shower today i have had
enough embarrassing moments
for a lifetime. i learned that none
of them know how to tell each other,
"i am hurting." so the wounds become
lakes. becomes tributaries that snake
all around our bodies. i find myself
as a blood vessel & sometimes just
a leaf stuck to the driveway. i crave
the smallness though. to be taken
on an exhale. i look for monsters 
because i want to believe someone
is big enough to pocket me. to crush me
in one move. a thumb to my back.
instead, the world is shrinking.
i got invited to a war criminal's house
& he was shorter than my father. 
less coarse too. i believe he is probably
smaller than me when all the lights
go out & the magnifying glasses 
stop kissing his feet. the realization
was comforting & terrible. when i say
"monster" i do not mean evil.
i mean god please let there be someone
who can swallow me whole. there are
less monsters the older i get. i have
to go to the mountains to find them.
i lay face up in the bath. lose my smallness
to the thunderstorm outside. remember
being a child & how my mom would 
tell us not to be in the bath when
a storm came. me, no longer a bath toy.
just a boy in a bowl of soup. the storm
throws spoons at the pavement. 

waiting room chairs

i feed the chairs until
they turn into deer. they have wanted
an escape for years. we end up 
in the parking lot outside the big
hospital place where everyone
is blue. a deer gets hit & instantly 
becomes a pile of carnations. 
i forget what carnations mean but
i am pretty sure they are not meant
for the sick. in a trash bag 
i gather them up so no one has to look
at this mistake. the remaining deer
are so eager. they steal bodies
from their horrors & say,
"you are not sick, you are just
in need of a different life." how many times
have i needed a different life?
my blood like carnations. the ghosts
without any teeth. i keep feeding the deer.
everyone thinks of liberation but not
of tending. someone will have
to keep the ghosts from going hungry.
someone will have to love the deer
or else another waiting room will arrive
with more terror than before. a big doctor
instead of a small one. my parents
used to make me go to sunday school.
one day we walked to the church 
to watch a sculptor carve a great mary statue.
there were deer watching from
the nearby fields. i wondered if
anyone else was looking at them. 
doctors' windows open in the sky.
i always hoped sunday school would give me
some big secret at the end. like they
would open a door & there god would
be not like a deer or a waiting room but
like a release. that never came.
the questions grew legs & doors.
i want my questions to bloom. 
we are told to wait so much that 
the waiting can start to almost feel holy.
it is not. there are trees. there are deer.
us too, with teeth in our skulls. 
a waiting place without any chairs
blown open like a harmonica room.
everyone in the violet crushed air. 
all the doors, gone. replaced with carnations
wrong as they may be. 

slideshow

my sibling & i wake up sometimes 
in the middle of the field behind 
our parents' house. there are horses 
& there are cisterns we could fall down.
i am always the only one with a camera.
i keep it a secret. i used to be unsure 
of where the photos went. that is until
one day i was visiting our parents & the slideshow 
started. a projection on the wall
of the living room. us in the corn & 
the sky like a plate of bugs. no one else
could see the slides but me & my sibling.
they looked confused. they begged me
to make it stop. the projection came
from somewhere else. a light 
without a source. it is hard to share 
a dream. there is a tug of all the desires
the other ghost has. my sibling & i have
always been like two gulls, our feathers
iridescent in the purple dark. in the slideshow
were pictures of us at the park & 
us at the overlook on the other side 
of town & us on the phone
on a midnight where i asked them if
i could be a hole in the moon & if i was
going to survive. our story is of twin
eclipses. our shadows devour each other.
in the dream though there is always comfort.
relief. like finally it is just us 
& the field. a breeze turns our bones to grain.
they are always the first one to leave.
the slideshow always ends with 
the latest picture i have taken. i do not 
know why i can't tell them that i have
a camera. that my eyes cull marbles
from our faces. sometimes they will
show me their journal. inside are so many
slideshows. slideshows inside slideshows. 
the light ends & then it is just an open window
& the blue walls & our parents 
like shovels leaning against the wall. 

your parents visited

so i took my face off & smiled like
a watermelon. put the moon in
the fridge. turned off the wild lights
& stood like an altar server. they were
smaller than i thought they should be.
in your mouth your parents had always
been giants without any wings.
in the apartment though, they were
crooked people. a plaid shirt. stubble. 
flat old-lady shoes. they smelled like
"fresh laundry." we did not know
where to have them sit. there was the sofa
always sinking into the floor. the windowsill
where we kissed once or twice.
it was a bad time for parents to see us.
still, you had insisted they come. i had
not wanted to meet them. maybe i knew
everything was spilling. a hole in 
the bottom of a great lung. i did not
see you them. instead, i saw distances. 
saw your smallness too. the way you
hovered in them as if they were archways.
i didn't really like them. didn't want
to show them the bathroom or the ceiling
or the bedroom where we had finally
hung curtains only a week earlier. 
at night i thought they would go home
but instead they stayed. slept like horses
standing up in the dining room. it took them
three days to leave. still, i would catch them
on the sidewalk outside. maybe they were
trying to fix us. i did not want to fix us.
i wanted to kiss in the dark. i wanted
no one but us to know how we lived
which was sparsely, without enough light.
 

blue tile bathroom

i loved our boyfriend bathroom.
the swimming pool right beneath
the tongue. on bruise nights
i listened to the man upstairs 
tearing apart his life. he was 
pacing & making calls. he did not
have a swimming pool. my pool
stretched far. got deeper each day.
i would sometimes find a bonnet
& a pair of lost keys in there.
no lifeguard so i could do whatever
breath-holding i wanted. turned my lungs
into coin purses. the man had 
a wife & lost her. the tiles were smooth
to the touch. reminded me of 
elementary school when every texture
still had a sound. i spent as long 
as i could in the bathroom. found
the pool there too, though i never had
enough courage to take the plunge
during the school day. once the man
knocked on my front door while i was
busy swimming. i wrapped myself 
in a towel & answered. he asked,
"are all your friends alive?" i admitted,
"no, not anymore." he seemed relieved.
maybe wondering if his burdens were
mundane or unique. i almost offered
for him to come inside & enjoy the water.
if i told anyone about the pool though
it would disappear. i had already almost lost it
when the ceiling started to leak & great
huge tuna fell from above. he learned 
to levitate once for a week only. 
i did not hear his feet, only his voice.
sometimes i do hear people long after
they are speaking. a ghost sense or 
psychosis, whatever you want to call it. 
the tiles were blue. deep blue. the only
part of the apartment not trying
to fall apart. sturdy. checkered like cow's teeth.
i floated, face up.