saw mill

i showed you my fingers
& asked
"which one
would you like
to eat?"
there is a dragon
in the supermarket.
i sometimes wake up
in a morgue 
& underneath
every sheet is my father.
he has eyes like dice.
how old were you
when you realized
no one had taught you
how to love?
i open my mouth
& spit thumb tacs
into the toilet.
split my lip open
on the way. for a year
i eat only pickles,
convinced there is 
a cleanse to be had.
online, i order
a new family.
they come wrapped
in plastic. they are
honey flavored.
the basement was where
my father went
to build his faces.
he had a table saw 
& sometimes he would joke
that it could lop
my fingers off.
i pictured the straight wound.
the stump on my hand.
he laughed like 
beer bottle caps in a pocket.
the worst part
is carrying the wooden spoon.
i tell people all the time,
"i am just like him."
an act of conjuring 
as if i could rewrite my life
with the unwinding of words.
laying face up in the yard
after jumping
from the roof. 
i thought i was
laying on the sawing table.
i screamed. 

no matter

you can finish the nightmare
when we're home &
there is no one watching.
a lemon is a place to be a seed.
sewing a lock of hair
into the hem of a pair of underwear.
there are not enough witches
in this town. the council meets
only when a tomato rots.
they have little notebooks. they have
coriander wigs. walk on coals
all the way to the plate of lady fingers.
i don't mean desserts i mean
ladies were harmed in the making
of this ritual. a television plays
a rerun of the 9/11 news.
i was at a birthday party. everyone
was eating with their fingers.
knuckle-deep in icing.
keep the scary story at arms-length 
& it won't have to be a funeral.
felled trees bleeding out 
with no one trained in this.
i had a lesson on packing a gun shot wound
at work. no matter what
someone is going to become
a monument & we don't want that.
sometimes obelisks grow 
in the basement of my parent's house.
my father grinds them down
& uses them as salt. he says,
"a bone a day keeps the stink bugs
away." it doesn't work. they craw 
along every windowsill in the house. 

orchard

i grew my face like a winesap.
pruned the feathers
from my hair. walked until
i found the planet
where all of our teeth 
are waiting in the dirt 
for us to be born. i was 
an adult blossom. i was a fruiting story.
i walk between the lines
of baby doll heads. arsenic seeds
that dazzle & wink. i have swallowed
enough forecasts to be
the harbinger. i wear gloves 
when i pluck a soul 
from its knot. they are always
inky & stain anything they touch.
brushing fur. soothing
our little beasts. do not worry
there will be other bodies.
a man will come to the tree 
& speak its language. wearing 
a moon on our head. wade into
water fountains. we each have
just one tree. the souls that come
every year no matter the frost
or the fire. they will have 
as much color as you need.
an octopus poet. a courier eagle. 
pocket knife in the throat
of our heavens. this is 
the returning phantom. do not say 
you have never been to paradise.

how to milk a cow

give over eight eyelashes.
forget the moon. fight a bull
in the dark of a bloodied photo booth. 
drink with you hands 
from a river of fleas.
kneel in the field of syringes
& pray for abalone. a pocket bible
can be held directly to
the cow's head. you can tell
the cow they are saved which is
to some, a speech act. a transformation.
unlike humans though
the cows do not believe 
in speech acts. they believe only in
what can be felt. their alchemy
is one of fire into gold.
they meet when the sun is dead.
circling up, they open their mouths
to release silk into the night sky.
stars winking as if to say,
"we all have a secret." the milk 
will taste like turnips & forest.
it will make you stronger. no one
will be able to take away your heart.
that little closet of orphaned gloves.
the cow will spit out
a spare pair of eyes. use them wisely
on a day where everything seems
to be made of funeral. you will
open your eyes & see butter. 

waiting

the centipede truth is
that there are too many people
who know the truth.
sometimes i walk
in the obelisk garden
carrying a sickle & a brown paper bag.
when i was a child 
a man the size of a truck
would come & steal my lunch box
every day. i thought of it
not as theft but as paying a toll.
are you paying rent
for living in your body?
i know that i am. i try to eat
as a guard dog does. just enough
to stay alive. in the garden 
you can harvest stone.
i do so with my bare hands.
blood knuckles. blood bones.
the truth is a place where birds hit windows.
where a father is not a father
but a burn pile of all your fingers.
a shower curtain turned 
into a stage curtain. i make 
a debut. i have a pile in the yard 
where i dump my teeth. i am a shark.
i am a windmill. there should be
a timer that lives above our heads
that tells us when it will be safe
to say everything. it will never
be safe to say everything. 
i put my tongue in a canary cage
& walk into a coal mine. 
the earth has a stomach 
of diamonds & rush.
a vein of water. the well in the yard
coughing up spiders. 
dear self, you are not waiting,
i release you from your elevator.
let's not be a pond singer.
put the bones in a backpack 
& throw it over the side 
of the bridge. tell the garden,
"i have never been here before,"
especially if you have. 

night eating

i shovel coal into the moonlight 
until it is buried. my tongue
has centipede legs. my teeth,
each a sugar cube. you ask me
why i feast alone & i tell you
i have a snow globe city i need to keep alive.
they are counting on me.
the day has too many eyes.
eyes in every spoon. eyes in the cupboard
& the closet & the sidewalk.
at night everything shuts. lock
the front door. in my parents' house
i used to sneak downstairs.
wading through television static
there would be the fruit on the counter
& the last box of generic oreos
in the drawer. placing the angel's face
on my tongue. letting her feet melt there.
i do not want to be nocturnal
but i also know that i am. it is
part of my migration. a journey
from one bowl to the next. 
there is a dietician hiding behind
the shower curtain. i carry a knife 
of just-in-case. i am not violent
but i am violet. light 
of the fridge door. let's not
speak of this meeting. let's pretend 
we just came here to plant a cherry tree.
here is the seed. here is my throat.
come & pick a trowel. 
i will tell them you are helping me. 
there is always cake 
to make it a birthday. i'll be as old 
as you want me to be.  

pilot school

i used to want to fly an angel 
into the dish washer
so that i could be a chalice.
as children,
we would stand & count planes
as they crashed 
into the quarry. in flight
a body is turned into a private heaven.
do not let me land. teach me
what kind of skulls 
helium balloons carry.
my last girlfriend tried
to become an angel. she stood outside
every single day with a lighter
in her mouth & a sigil painted
on her back. she said,
"it's too expensive to become
a pilot." her goggles. 
the rushing winds. she stood there
all through a hurricane & a blizzard.
we do so much waiting 
for the stars to align. only,
the stars have never once aligned.
instead, they are the crooked tooth garden.
i do not have a solution
other than to remove any thoughts
of birds. i dig a neck-deep hole & stand in it.
there, i am flying. from the plane window
i drop little butterfly wings worth
of wishes. call the earth a well.
i put on my angel costume. 
throw the dishwasher in the yard 
with the other vortexes. 
feed the black hole a wedding ring
to keep it happy. 
against all odds,
i have not lost hope of aviation. 

dead cardinal 

i didn't know what to do with the red
so i made it into a kitchen knife
& walked it down to the old church.
there they use birds as hymnals.
an oak tree grows through the altar
& the altar boys are deer.
i stroked the red's face & remembered
what it was like to die. a searching
through azure pinwheel & then
a window. we bake pies until 
our fingers fall off. they are offerings 
for the red. apples & peaches & lemon.
the crusts golden brown. cracked earth.
my teeth as jupiter beetles & june bugs.
birch tree bark. broken bone.
the red used to sing from a sling shot.
used to hurl skulls at the attic.
whatever it used to do will have to be
taken up by the children.
we take notes on the backs of our hands 
but run out of space & thus
write the rest of the instructions
on our tongues. read the weather
for me. read the tea leaves. 
take the suite cases down
to the edge of the road. the red was 
a comfort or else maybe just a doorknob.
i would come & it would eat from
my hands. little folded beak. 
a moment between inverted gods.
feathers in my mouth. i make 
a thousand promises it wasn't me.
the red died of wanting a moon
to love & eat. don't we all? 

pet store

i looked for dead fish 
in the blue tanks at the back
of the pet store. counted them
on my fingers, holding
the digits up to report back
to my father.
we were there to buy crickets
to feed to our grandfather
who slept in a knot
in the basement. 
bubbling miniature oceans.
found myself 
inside the tanks unable to breathe.
the wall sucking fish
giving a good side-eye to the world.
i spat colorful pebbles
from my mouth. everything is about
containment. who has 
crafted the wall 
& who finds it beautiful &
who is terrified of it.
i always imagined being rich
& buying all the aquariums.
loading them all into the back
of my father's jeep 
& driving to the river
to let the fish free. i made the mistake
of telling this to my father once.
he said, "they would all die
from the shock of the new water."
i told him he was wrong.
after all i did not die 
from all the different plastic worlds
i ended up in. my father's hands.
my school full of neon talking.
the kitchen where every vessel
was full of butter. if i could live
then why wouldn't they? a lesson
in survival poetics. 
i always left the pet store
with the ghosts of the counted fish.
a little flock of betas. a herd
of minnows. soft goldfish shadows.
my own stomach in a fishbowl. 
ceramic treasure chest & 
fake seaweed sitting at the bottom. 
a few times we took one home.
named them like holidays. 
"goodbye" & "forever midnight."
i put my face to the glass 
& said, "i will find a way
for us to both be pigeons."
the fish would look away.

free stone peach

i was made to have my heart removed
without a fight.
my sinews like chickadee words 
gone into their tinsel.
not enough winter to make
the peach trees ring.
i put the stone in your mouth & walk
as far as your legs will carry you
into an archway of ribs.
i did not put up a fight. why did i
not wrestle the milk in the moon?
why did i not show my claws?
instead, i let him at my guts
like a feed trough. pigs with their 
wild blackberrying eyes. teeth
falling out as they feast. giving you
exactly what you asked for.
the men who stand at any butter dish
& count the flies as coins.
you took me for the bird feeder i was.
underneath the oak tree 
that's now just a ghost throat. 
i could have made you a necklace 
from all my fingerbones 
i lost to your can opener. let's not
blame everything on hunger. instead,
let's look at conquest. whose body
is named & orchard & what
the orchard trees call themselves.
i am the water worker. sugar's last name.
you were just a thumb pressed
through flesh, searching
for the amulet. for the heart.
there mine was. already loose.