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. 

who we were in september

when i say "before times" i mean
when i still loved you in a way
that burned down train stations. 
i mean in the 3am friday night 
& aimless summer kind of way.
catching pigeons & pretending they were
our children. i named them
after moons. callisto & adrastea.
i mean as if there were a great fish net
cast over us to reap us from
our wild coral. the kinds of pink
i knew with you. the ardent fuchsia 
of every single sunday. i told you
we were going to wrestle a goose
to the ground. load all our urges
on her back & fly to the nearest mountain.
your car rattled awake. you kept
a pack of cigarettes you promised
not to smoke. watching halves 
of movies & finishing them inside 
a pillow case. i swear i have never lit
so many matches just to snuff them out
on the wall. my room had no window.
if the building is still there,
my room still has no window. 
once in the end times
you came in with a kitchen knife.
you hacked at the wall & said,
"i just want to give you your piece
of the sky." i begged you to stop.
this is how the world comes apart.
in little chambers of a horse heart. 
i was always terrified of you
though the reasons changed. 

chewing sound

why is everyone mouth? my brother asks
& it is a holiday where everyone has
a full of sky meat. don't worry about me
i say without any truth to the statement at all.
i have nothing to eat & i have resorted 
to turning each tooth into a tombstone.
underneath are buried goldfish or grandfather.
one in the same for the way they stare
& never speak enough. my brother is standing
on the roof & trying to grow gills. a species
of mixed metaphors. aren't you starving?
they ask & i shake my head. put a glove
in my mouth. the holiday is one about
killing because in the end aren't most holidays?
land turned into ice cream. i tell my brother
the best thing to do when you can't stand
the sound is to fill your ears with 
something brilliant. i show him how i do this
with a spool of indigo thread. he goes to town
using slinkies. the mouths form together
into one big mouth saying contradictory things.
we love you & don't breathe & hold still
& delicious delicious little wing. 
you can get to a point where you don't
trust yourself with noise. instead, move
as feather-like as possible until everyone 
else is so full they turn into piles of shoes.
i don't want to leave him there. i don't want
to pretend like there is not such thing 
as a hunger so deep you could not grow a mouth
that could ever hold it. but i do. i grin.
i kick down doors. i let the wasps' nests 
flourish on the throat of the pine tree outside.
he asks me if it's loud to me too. i am sorry
to say that i lie to him. i say that
if i keep moving it's almost like 
i don't hear the chewing at all. 

cranberry

the night was a flock of ancient lights.
ocean in my backpack. we met like
dimes. like the almost cost of water.
no one was on the radio. your foot
on the dashboard. oh how i believed
in jupiter & jump rope games. becoming a girl.
becoming a boy becoming a cranberry
on the end of my fork. they gave us 
a table at the edge of universe. candles
lit in the restaurant. cute bus boys 
with tattoos up their arms. we took out
our eyes to show all the times they'd broken
& we'd glued them back together.
you get to a point though where
you cannot see anything without seeing
kaleidoscope. your skin, a terrain
of stained glass. steam from a cup of tea. 
i chewed ever bright bruise on my plate
& so did you. by the time we were done
there was no one else in the restaurant.
your bedroom & the ceiling of bees.
island without shoulders. city made
of tombstones & teeth. but that night
i could feel all the fissures. where 
we could come apart like lobes of an orange.
did we go to the ocean? did we stand
on the roof of your apartment? 
i just remember standing alone
in the restaurant bathroom & looking
into the mirror knowing i would 
not be the same after knowing you. 
behind me in the mirror was a flock
of crows. incense burned on the end table.
patchouli & lavender. i bathed in the smoke. 

once upon a time 
                   after keith haring

i found my pleasure face
in a dumpster of swords. 
put on a paper machete mask
looked in the mirror & said, "this is my lover."
come with me, there is a room
no one else knows about where
all the gills go to drink air.
we can kneel. we can call each other
"cathedral" or "daddy" or "foxglove."
they say there was a time before
humans when everything was gay. 
there was no such thing as a 
right angel. instead, we curved.
spine. tongue. wing. mouth as a front door 
to a house of candles.
time was a place we stretched 
instead of spent. we said, "one more"
& "will you let me come again." 
is this my lungs or yours? a staircase
leading no where. we would climb it anyway
& take turns imagining heaven. 
field of strawberries. field of thumbs.
rejoicing in the shadow of limb
or a tree. this was where
i found my body. carved it from soap 
& bone. showered with the others
until i was as thin as glass. 
no one should have to remember
what it was like before they were gutted.
but, then again, where else 
would i be crawling back to 
but your lap of porcelain & windows.  

vacation bible school

let's go out to the fields again & play manhunt
where the angels feast on dew & rats.
when i was a girl i went 
to vacation bible school every summer.
there, i would talk to god about paradise. 
he would spit dice onto the ground
& the teachers would say,
"now let's find something to despise
about ourselves." the little pocket knives
& snack time pretzels. a television
that played VHS tapes of unkept promises & sainthood. 
sometimes, if we were good, we would
all gather in the main hall 
& get fed the tiniest slivers 
of heaven. it tasted like pear. closing
my eyes i dreamed of being an angel.
of stalking the corn & counting 
tails of animals i'd swallowed. 
once, we put on plays & i got to play jesus.
a white robe. i multiplied the fishes 
& the loaves of bread. i was surprised
at how easy a miracle can be when 
you're in a room without questions. 
then, there was a catastrophe. i was a girl
playing jesus. they burned the robe. 
they told me to eat the ashes which
somehow also tasted like heaven.
all the loaves & the fishes 
turned to bees in our stomachs.
from then on, i said as little as possible
except of course to the angels. 
to the angels i told everything.
i told them about the sacristy & about
how, as an altar child, the priest had us
dress & undress him. the angels replied,
"no one is holy" & "if you run away now
you can still be a sea gull."
i regret it. not running away
across the fields & to the highway.
hitching a ride to a parking lot
where i could sew feathers 
into my flesh. instead, i stayed
the whole week every year.
survived on those slivers of heaven
&, when no one was reading my thoughts,
memories of getting to briefly be jesus. 

guitar strings across a doorway

make me your instrument of sinew
& wood. i want to be where
your callouses come from. i used to play 
an out-of-tune guitar 
for an audience of teeth & boyfriends.
often i will walk through a door
& hear everything plucked.
i could never hold the pick just right
so instead i moved my fingers 
like little rats. every room is
the string belly of another time.
fill my hull with coins & tightening. 
what i crave is for the melody to fall down
& all of us to let out in the snap 
this is what we're waiting for. have you ever broken 
a guitar for an audience? which is 
to ask, have you ever had a room watch
while you turned yourself
into performance? there are doctors 
who have sugary drops of my life
beneath their tongues. boys 
who carried me like a bowl of oranges
to the river where everything
is made of strings. i tell the guitar
i am ready to be a house. to twist
the pegs & listen until we are all tuned
& ready. no one is ever ready though.
i ask the spiders to play me
a song about dead boys. ask the birds 
to gather plastic shopping bags 
& fill them with fingers that have
escaped from me over the years.
i try to remember how to hold your neck
& you try to remember how to grasp mine
so that i don't choke on the abalone. 

feeding an apple to the moon

you would not believe 
how much work it takes
to reach the teeth. i start from a seed 
in a field of glass. i start with my eyes 
on a golden plate just like saint lucy. the apple
perched right beside them in the dish. 
when you hear "apple"
in a poem it is never just an apple.
it is the skull of a grandmother or else
a pocket bible or else a dragon's ancient organ. 
i wait for all the chickens to return to their
dinosaur palace before i make my trek.
a journey for me is whenever i have to 
take off my skin. i am descended from selkies.
skilled at the art of breaking my face
like a dinner plate. there was night where
i hid beneath the bed. i saw apples grow 
& fall to the floor from the box spring. 
he crawled on top of the bed & the birds 
all screamed. the night field has nothing
to do with the day field. hushed wind.
my shaking hands. i have never been 
a steady human. it takes hours of 
trusting & untrusting shadows but
i always make it & the mouth is always
like a forgotten flower. fish hooks & steak knives
for teeth. i pet the knotted head of the moon.
say, "i know you have been craving this."
she chews & spits out a single ribbon
or sometimes a needle. i have yet to understand
what i should do with them. it is not about
repayment though. it is enough to know
the moon was hungry & i left 
my skin to feed her. better yet,
no one knew where i was. 

alternatives to lawns

we could pile eyelashes. 
rake the fallen birds & wait for their bones.
we live in a world of false greens.
here is where we told the earth
"grow for me" as if the ghosts could
just shed their hunger. we could 
fill the lawn with derelict cars
or broken glass. wear shoes when you
try to cross the threshold
or else your feet might become
lawns too. i remember when 
my parents planted theirs. our yard 
used to be fresh earth. a mud worship.
instead, we laid freckled seed. 
took out sprinklers & fed the lawn.
then we sacrificed a chicken 
on the cement slab of the porch.
let the blood turn to rain above.
hail. hawk storm. nothing comes easy
in a world of rung out sleep.
a field of eyes. a field of teeth.
there is so much we could be gathering.
i tried my best. i tell my brother,
"why didn't we pour feathers?"
there were always so many in the attic
from the visitations of ravenous angels.
i fed them angel food cake. 
sharp fangs grazing my palms.
in the end it will require getting 
on our knees. the roots of grass
drill down & hug the earth's
molten stomach. one by one though.
the lawn could become a plain 
of bottles & weeds. give me a clover
wide enough to land a plane on.
i am traveling from one gender's
little private screaming to another. 
tomorrow, the lawn will be swallowed.
so, for tonight, let's lay here
in the cool green. i will tell you
a secret. i do not know if i care
what is really green or not.  

i've been telling everyone "i'm sorry"

i've been saying "i'm sorry"
since i was a grub in the garden. since i was
a girl in a blender. i say it over & again 
as if it's going to patch the mouth wound
over & make words unnecessary again. 
as if it's my name. 
sometimes when i say "i'm sorry"
it is a ritual of knots. of trying to undo
the first tangle between two of my tongues.
who taught you to speak? what well
did they go to wash their knuckles?
i cut down a tree & found it full of teeth. 
spit my blood into an alphabet. 
here is how you write you name
exactly how they want you to spell it.
like a step off a cliff. like a goodbye.
i wrap my apologies in banana leaves.
put them in a ghost boat towards 
the older planet. the one covered in roots. 
have you ever taken a wrong turn
& ended up home? have you ever
spoken an apology you did not mean
in order to get away? in order to not
be chewed on like chicken bones?
i have given all my sidewalks 
to boys. i have cut off a finger 
& fed it to a dog. when i say, "i'm sorry"
i usually mean, "let's agree 
to be dead together." an airplane 
piloted by a jellyfish. drive me home.
drive me home wordlessly.
here is the way i conjure a broken world.
tell me, what do you know
about mending. when i say,
"here is the fault line i am sewing"
then you know i really mean it.
i do not want to need a cipher
but there are crickets awake now
& they are speeding up time.