profile pics

the room we made where no one
had a tongue. i page through 
my window as if it were a book.
give your selfhood a name. a hopscotch.
kiss the frogs you keep in your sink.
when i look at how the shape of my face
turns from a cantaloupe into 
a pomegranate over time i am frightened. 
did you know people have funerals
for themselves? gather their friends
& bury everything in the yard.
i watch a video about assisted death.
take a shovel to the wall & go at it until
you stop me. tie me up into a knot of pears. 
we are all the longest stop motion films.
pose & move & pose & move. i have 
cut off all my hair & watched
as each strand slithered away. became 
centipedes & bows. i page all the way back
until i was thirteen. my hair in front
of my face. my fat like mountains.
come & get me, is what my face says.
living inside the space where a story
used to be. do you remember when
you were on a postage stamp? 
all the rooms you traveled to? 
loose teeth. uneven black winged liner. 
measuring steps between each picture.
miles between my town & the town
where i was born & the planet 
where everyone has birds living 
in their eye sockets. don't get me wrong.
i love to turn back time. just not 
when it's me. just not when each 
little ghost is still there in a room
too small for her teeth. chewing 
on the sentence she said before 
she was a footprint & the blue mud. 

juniper

there is nothing really left to burn.
in my dream a juniper tree grows
inside the closet. i do not tell you
about my secret ghost. i arrive there
only when you are in the yard or
when you are washing your face
in the bathroom. i tell the tree
everything i am too afraid to tell you.
once, a teacher told me that 
when you write a story no two characters
should love each other the same.
one should always love the other more.
i have never been able to make peace
with this reality. i find branches
to burn. i pluck an eyelash out 
& use it as the wick in a candle.
i am unsure what is the dream
& what are my night worlds.
the juniper tree talks in the baby voice
of a kite. air beneath her tongue.
she says that if i leave the closet door open
she would be happy to take over our bedroom.
fill the floor with berries & needles.
so much smoke to be made. so much ash.
i know very little about cleansing
though once i spit up a dove
after eating the largest meal 
of my life. i am always trying 
to rid myself of something. does anyone
live whole? when i see a stained glass window
i always want to live there. fragments
glued in place & legible. 
i burn the juniper in the morning
when no one else is awake but the cats.
they asked me if my tongue
is also made of wood. they laugh.
it is a joke i do not understand. 
the dream ends & there is nothing 
left to burn. i chop off my tongue
& find it is true. it is made of wood.
you return. you ask me where 
i have been. i pull my eyes out like drain stoppers.
spill onto the floor. you say,
"where are you?" but i am right here. 

leather jacket

i open the closet to find a cow standing there.
she has eyes like stop lights. chews on the red leather jacket
we got from the family thrift on mcauthur road. 
she doesn't like excuses. she asks,
"have you ever been a drum?"
i often think about the lives my clothes lived
before i've worn them. there are the three sweaters
from a dead man. the dress worn by
a girl now on fire. the teeth from a squirrel 
who is now nothing but ribs. i love 
to be my own little frankenstein. the resurrection
of everyone's gender trouble.  
i take a walk with the cow. she talks about 
wanting so badly to wear a suit & look dapper.
i tell her we all want to wear a suit 
but none of them fit. she remembers 
the cow the leather was made from. the days
he would spend eating dandelions 
& learning their stories of the times
of glass & green. the leather jacket is your favorite.
i try to think of how when i get home
i will explain to you, my lover, where
your jacket went & how it is not my fault.
sometimes you wear my clothes & 
at first i felt a twinge of greed. "that is mine."
now, i think of it like sharing skin. like stepping
into each other's breath. once
i saw someone walking around in a dress
i used to own. i had dropped it off
at the goodwill just one day before.
i thought "that is me." i'm not sure
if i was talking about the dress or the girl.
the cow disappears back into the closet.
there's no more jacket. just a zipper. 
i hang the zipper on its coat hanger. 
the closet smells like damp grass. 
i take off all my clothes. including my skin.
become a cow in the shower. 
then, feeling daring or lonely, i put on one of 
your dresses only for a minute before changing. 

motion sickness

i want to be a body in motion. 
as a child i would turn inside out
each year on the way to the photo album. 
my parents would try & try
to turn me right-ways. some years they left me
in the dark on the side of the road.
frustrated, they said, "find your own way
to the button jar." i did. i always did.
hitchhiking with vampires & sometimes 
scooped up by a red tail hawk.
once i was there, i would put on my 
opera glasses to try to see everyone 
from as far away as i was. distance is 
sometimes not a matter of physical bodies
but how far your words are from one another.
i still keep a megaphone in case
i want to tell them "i love you." i always
prefer to drive the car if there is a choice.
if not, i am likely to become a potted violet
by the time we arrive to the shovel 
in the earth. the only real way to calm it
is to stare out the window. leave it
open a crack. i picture myself
like jonah in the mouth of the whale
except i don't let my self be swallowed.
take pride in the ways i am not a man
& fear in all the ways i am. bent over
as cars rush by on the highway.
i spit up every moon i've ever seen.
"we should leave you at home," my dad
or my mom or maybe just a wandering
cruel angel say to me. even at home though
there are days i get sick. i imagine stillness
as a state in which nothing gets set on fire.
i want to be still like bread 
or like bone. tell me though, what do you do
with your inside skin? i like to feel
the water. lay down in a creek. it is always
christmas eve in my stomach. 
tomorrow everyone's tongues 
come with a bow. 

stray melon moon

one summer we tried to grow planets
in the yard behind the garage.
they all got sick with cow spots.
i would wake up to the sounds
of them moo-ing long into the night.
their calls would shift & begin
to sound like men. i had a trowel 
& a pair of gardening gloves.
i went out to stroke them. tell them
to go to sleep. they never listened
& we stayed up together.
told stories of our old bodies.
there, sleepless, i could feel a life
when i once had feathers & another
where i walked with heavy hooves.
only one planet survived & i was small.
just the size of my fist. a melon moon.
green & full of humming birds.
i told no one about it. i let my family think
all the crops had died. cradled 
the little secret. it pleaded with me.
"let me go sit with the stars." i was selfish.
i didn't want to be alone. so, instead,
i took a cleaver & severed the moon in half.
let the nectar spill. inside there stood
a tiny cow. one with rubies for eyes.
i panicked at such a discovery. no one
else could know. i licked my fingers.
the juice had tasted sweet & floral. 
i buried the cow beneath a crooked field tree
between rows of stitched corn. 
i am still afraid to go out at night. i'm afriad
the cow has grown old & vengeful.
i am afraid i will look up in the sky
& see the melon anyway. i would be
so jealous. i would want to climb up there,
knife in my mouth, searching for 
just one more taste. 

straw into gold

in the back seat of my car i kept a sheep.
she would ask, "are you proud of me?"
i held her & said, "i am so proud of you."
when it rained i went to wendies 
without her & bought a cup of coffee
using whatever parking lot change
i could find. that summer was 
full of bugs. the carpet beetles 
on the floor of the car & the bugs 
that landed on the windshield 
& heckled us. "let me taste your blood."
i did not believe in god but
i used to pray. i think maybe praying came
before god. a need to turn elsewhere
& ask, "what have i done wrong?" & for
the space spoken to answer back
"the world is a sea of beautiful hungers."
sometimes, when the weather was right
i would walk with the sheep 
at the memorial park. it was a memorial
for dead soldiers. we read names 
& knew not what to do with them. 
we would talk about gold because i believed 
i would one day wake up & be able 
to shear her & spin her wool into gold.
in several fairy tales the captured princess
is told to turn straw into gold. 
i sometimes harvested grass as makeshift straw.
it never took. never gleamed. instead,
we lived from soda can to soda can.
on the day i got an apartment again
i woke up to find her gone. i wept.
i searched the streets for her.
i told her, "i will stay here if it means
i can keep you." she did not return. 
maybe she was god or maybe she was just 
another sheep with too much wool.
when i could not sleep in the new place
i would count the window. one 
through eight. eight whole windows. 
it was like they grew tomato-like & wild. 
what i don't tell people is i still try
in the late candle wax night
to turn fibers to gold. my hair. my eye lashes.
fingernails. i am trying to understand
how & why i survived. a sheep stands 
on the ceiling. i reach for her & then she is gone. 

a heart is a lonely canister 

let's be canopic if we must.
save the liver for a trip through
the mulberry woods.
place the stomach in a ziploc bag
& run as far away as you can.
i want to get as much use as i can
out of the sun while it's still
batting its eyes. i used to wake my mother up
in the middle of the night
& ask, "how long until the sun goes 
super nova." back then my heart
was a tadpole that lived off of
breadcrumbs & television. 
i had heard a priest say in his homily,
"we never know if we will wake up
the next day." instead of my own death
i took that to mean the end of the world.
filling pillow cases with stones
for safe keeping. what do you keep
from even those you love most?
i like to think i am an open jar
that once housed butterflies 
but i know i keep my lungs 
as far away from the window as possible.
they are prone to turning into wings
of a great swan that wants to confess
just how much she would love 
to have a baby made of light.
o my little alphabet. how i have purchased
every vessel to carry my heart
& none of them have contained 
that fury & that hunger. i wake up
to the sound of it thrashing in the attic,
teeth-bared. the sun has not even begun
to rise. i tell the animal. "you are not
supposed to be the water
you are supposed to be
the gun powder." a body 
can also be defined as a terrain
of rebellion. i trace the distance between
what i want to be & what i am.
name the canyon "heart." 
now how am i supposed to fill this? 

everything bagels are why i'm trans like this

my mom & used to go to the coffee shop
at the end of the world where only 
angels & college students ate each other's faces.
i would point to the wall & ask 
"what is that?" a crucifix made of hair.
she drank coffee the color of muted bark.
i ate an everything bagel with veggie cream cheese.
licked my fingers. a lesson in the perfect kind
of excess. poppy seeds under my nails.
the gardens that grew there in the days 
that followed. how i would taste the windows
each time a new little crimson face bloomed
my marrow. the urge to sleep every night
in a fresh layer of onion. my favorite part though
was the hansel & gretel of the afterward. the trail
of seed in the wild haunted wood. 
how i could always find my way back
to that brief communion. a plate. a mug of coffee.
the gossip of monsters & children. sesame seeds 
were once a currency in heaven you know?
an angel would come & tell me, "keep those
in case they're ever worth something"
gesturing to the stray ones on the glass table.
the thing is that being trans for me
has just about nothing to do with gender
& everything to do with everything bagels.
about what choices should be made
& which ones should be answered with,
"give us more." i knew even as a child
at the coffee shop with my mother
that I wanted to dust the stray seeds
from my palms each day. i wanted a trail
of flowers to burst in my wake. 

planet fitness @ 5am

out the tinted windows
i watch a crow eat a hot dog off the side walk.
all around people are
pretending to be little genders. lift the ghost
of a dead father. break faces
into fragments of breath. i have always
been a disciple of punishment.
call me a chronic catholic. i tell myself
i like it here. i wipe sweat from a machine
meant to teach men how to fly. 
move my arms like they are lead wings.
i dream of a day i walk into this place
& the ceiling bursts open from all the longing.
i cannot help but people watch. i want
to ask everyone "what do you crave 
in a body?" cis people are so fixated on 
transgender transformation but i think it is because
they are also yearners. they are also 
emptying themselves into mirrors 
& asking, "how can this be really my flesh?"
here we share a secret of discomfort.
the reality that the fact of becoming
suggests there could always be an unbecoming.
i do not believe in gender
in the same way i don't believe in muscles.
a man tenses his face
as he lifts a weight to his chin. a woman
sprints over & over on the treadmill next to me.
the crows feast on the guts
of the giant green parking lot dumpster.

side effects may include:

buying a trampoline 
& singing to a pond of dead goldfish. 
calling your father & expecting him
to be a doctor.
calling your doctor & expecting him
to be a father.
a desire to see the world burn.
what they took from me was glass
& i do not have a name for that organ.
an apparatus to filter out the grief.
seeing the ugly truth. 
kissing the ugly truth 
& calling it a future.
let's not pretend we have not
been fantastical. let's not pretend 
we've never bought a lottery ticker
& held it like a dog leash. pull me
onto my hands & knees. i used 
to pray in the pews. i used to carve
a statue of my arms from dead trees.
dancing without a partner.
wasting a night on trying
to reason with the news.
driving a car through
the window of a deli. 
i make a shrine for every catastrophe
& filling an offering bowl with eyelashes 
& empty lightning bugs.
i understand why people have
for centuries thought that the body
is a vessel. the desire to pour out.
knowing how breath becomes
dragonflies.
listening to your father's music.
mistaking someone else's music
for your fathers.
trying to salvage a sunken ship
from the bottom of a lake of fire.
getting your hands burnt.
calling your lover.
your lover saying, "i am not 
your lover."
memory loss. fatal mimicry.
telling a story that didn't happen
just to have it come true. 
becoming a prophet to dogs.
knowing all that you know
& still getting up & taking the pairing knife
to the sun's grapefruit sting.
spitting the seeds out into the sea.