mirror zoo

to get a ticket you just have
to give a secret. i tell the person
at the window, "i usually have
to trick myself into being in love."
he laughs & says, "that's not a secret."
i become unsure of what might count
& so i offer more, "i lie sometimes
to get myself out of becoming a giraffe." 
that satisfies him so i get to enter
the mirror zoo. another rule
with the zoo is that you are not allowed
to enter with anyone else. that might
contaminate your experience.
the mirrors are roaming. grazing.
tiny mirrors. huge mirrors. a mirror
with a sign around its neck
that reads, "mirror in under care of a veterinarian."
i consider how i have never taken
my own mirror to see a doctor. 
what would they be able to do any way?
my favorite spot is the pond of mirrors.
there are tiny machines along the edges
where you can buy trinkets 
to feed to them. i spend a quarter
& receive a tiny monopoly shoe.
gift it to the closest & most eager mirror.
the secret that i did not give the teller
was that i do not know if i have ever
seen myself. i have purchased up-close mirrors 
& spent the night with men who had
mirrors for eyes. they liked to look 
at themselves while they turned 
into soup bones. i go to the zoo in the hopes
that one day a mirror will give me something
fresh & brilliant. a vision of my skeleton 
without all the drums & the pyres. 
instead, i see my father's face. my mother's hair.
my grandmother's eyes like soft brown rocks
sinking in a river. the mirror swims away
with my gift in her mouth.

headless place

once i went out into the woods
with nothing but my hands.
my lungs were full of burs 
& the night came with thousands 
of shoes. every creature got headless
in the deep & the dark. deer running,
all legs & hooves & guts. heads
elsewhere without wind. i do not know
where mine went. this is a common 
occurrence when i am trying to survive.
i will have to hunt for my head.
this night though, i decided to just
go without it. we have all heard that
chickens can live a minute or so
without their head. this is a myth. 
we can all live much longer.
the guillotine does not work because
of biology but because of other forces
in which i am not well versed. 
somehow we were still hungry though
even without our teeth or our tongues. 
all of us with nowhere to shove
handfuls of shadow berries & holly leaves. 
if i have learned anything
from being always the wildest one
in my family, it is that you can
dismember yourself as much 
as you want, you will still wake up
ravenous for an escape. i like to imagine
the opposite place. the head place
maybe as a museum. rows & rows
of our heads where there is nothing
to do but think. the hunger doing 
her running. grabbing handfuls
& bringing them to a wound. 
when i finally got home with
my head in a paper bag, i sat on the porch
of my apartment building. 
the moon vibrated in the sky,
severed in two like a great broken wafer. 
in the headless place we sang 
though i am not sure how. 

a new definition of gender

sometimes i eat a dictionary to feel
like i have control over language 
& that it doesn't control me.
once i saw a stop sign blooming.
it came the size of a clover. a little
whisper, "stop." my brother texts me
in the middle of the night when neither
of us have genders. i still remember when
i came out to him over the phone
on a drive home from somewhere 
made of glass. if someone gave me a pen
& told me to write a new definition
of gender i would probably start with
sound. cucumber & corn hush.
there seem to always be another flock
of geese passing over my house & leaving
love letters to the chickens. i had a partner
once say that i sounded like a bucket
of plums spilling out on tot he ground.
when i was born a doctor gave me 
a gender in a little envelop like you might
receive a bill. i did not open
the envelop. instead there are spotlights.
bleachers. a microphone. no one is
using any of them. maybe a gender is
a place you go & cover your face. the stocks. 
no one is unashamed of being seen
in full color. i miss the old instagram filters.
i miss the way my gender curled up
like a caterpillar. soon the ground will freeze
& all the frogs will go to sleep. i put my gender
in a takeout container (the horrible 
plastic kind) & tuck it into the vegetable death
drawer of the refrigerator. 
i am everything i say that i am. 

sewer crocodile love poem

i lift the manhole cover
like the lid of a garbanzo bean can.
i have an affinity for legends
& the creatures inside them.
the first time i heard a story
about sewer crocodiles i was small.
i developed a fear of being eaten
while i was sitting in the tub.
a monster crawling up through
the pipes & into the tiny room. 
i used to hope to be devoured
in one big bite. an instant darkness. instead, 
one day a terror came &
he did not have scales or eyes.
his hands made birds under my skin.
i still have to feed them seeds 
whenever i am lonely. when he was done
he left the door open & the steam
i had hide behind dissapeared.
after, i came to not fear a story animal. 
in fact, craved the crocodile. 
i sought him. crawling into the pipes
with pockets full of sunflower seeds.
an altar in every throat i could find.
i have still never met a sewer crocodile
but i have not given up.
still, when done feeding my birds,
i collect anything i think they might
enjoy & sneak away to a good entrance.
bring no flashlight or even my phone.
just my skeleton & my deepest hunger
to burrow inside a story. 
when i meet him i might just let him
swallow me whole. 

blue moon factory

i was born across the street
from the blue moon factory.
it was open all night & i remember
the workers coming & going.
chemicals from the factory 
made the carrots in our garden twisted
& iridescent. a miracle is difficult to make.
not because of the energy 
but the waiting. my father used to
work in the blue moon factory 
but he was let go a few months in
due to his lack of producing miracles. 
i asked him once what the place
was like & he described it as,
"a loud whisper." the hallways 
like throats. a hole in the ceiling
to track the white moon through
her slow blinking. only men were allowed
to work at the factory. something about
their nature made the blue moons
more likely to arrive in their syrup
& their feathers. the men acted strangely
when they left. my mother would find
my father standing on the ceiling
in the mud room & she would have 
to beg him to come down. sometimes
he will still talk about his time there.
he'll look at his hands & say,
"if wanting was enough." i have promised
myself i would never seek what he did.
i see how that place haunts him. 
i even once saw him on the roof
trying to paint the moon blue 
out of desperation. still, when i am alone
& have no one to hold me back
i will sometimes try for him. i will put on
my uniform. i will walk in the dark
through the corn fields toward the factory. 
pretend i am a regular. slip into 
the mechanism. i do not know if i try
for myself or for him. 

arcade token

let me borrow your teeth.
i need a neon way out of all
this gender. we used to go when
we had nothing else to say to each other.
there was a mirror to laser gun
until the tokens were huge & trophy.
on the television were videos
of our fathers punching each other
until it was just a football place
& not the european kind. i loved
that fake money. to gather it in my hands
without all the digital that has been
stealing our scarce whimsy. 
shooting dinosaurs. shooting a plane.
shooting in a hallway of dice.
there were kids too. their hands like birds.
we seldom played together, instead,
came there to chop up ourselves
into bigger pieces. a teleportation machine
gave us brief glimpses of a volcano place.
i wore makeup back then & my face
melted as the night went on. we ate candy 
in the parking lot behind the mall
waiting for an engine to take us.
all those lights like canaries
in my eyelashes. i never really won anything.
sometimes a plastic holy statue 
or banana taffy. i think we could all use some help
unraveling. a shrine to give in the glow &
the tunnel. i remember most the quiet
of the street outside. the purple & green 
shadows cast from our skeletons. 
i think you still loved me
or else we were making it work 
which is what everyone says when
the arcade keeps their fingernails.
a mouth is sometimes a window
but most often a purse full of tokens. 
did you hold my hand? did we win somewthing? 

drain

the summer i lived with the aunts
none of their drains worked.
we did not talk about the loud things
& instead we all had our own little conversations
with the ghost of aunt joan who died
just the year before. she refused
to hover. she was never a formal person
& she hated all expectations of being a ghost.
she liked to laugh & sometimes she switched
the television away from the phillies game
just to upset aunt flo. i got familiar
with a bucket. ferried bath water to
the overgrown yard where the pear tree
bore fruit for the last time. when we got lazy
the house would flood. each room 
a fish tank. i played the old electric organ
while holding my breath & aunt mary's
newspapers bleed until they were just 
blank paper. i always tried to get up before them
but it was hard because aunt flo sometimes
slept in the living room to avoid aunt joan.
i didn't blame her. we are not all ready
for the dead to come back. once & only once
i reached into the drain. i had had enough.
i just wanted to wash my face
without the world collecting in a murky pool.
i felt hair. not clumps like your typical 
nasty drain. instead, it was long & flowing hair.
dark & rich. the hair my aunts had 
when they were young. i pulled back,
terrified of discovering their whole selves
attached & alive. i come from a family
of questionable acceptance. a bucket by the door
still dripping from my aunt's bath. 
the smell of their soft rose soap. aunt joan
knocking the landline of the receiver again
as if to say, "why don't you talk to me?"
i stood in the yard, eating a pear & letting
the juice drip down my chin. 

oboe recital

despite how horrible i was at playing it
i loved the instrument. 
i craved the smooth keys & how they listened
to the softest touch. sometimes
on the floor of my bedroom i would
inspect each ligament. peer through
the vertebrae of my oboe like a telescope.
stars waved hello through my window. 
i was terrible mostly because
i was not fond of practicing. my tongue
was always too big for the double-reed
or maybe the reed was too small. 
when my teacher played i always thought
it sounded like ghosts trying to remember
how to talk. more often than i'm proud of 
i gave up all together in the middle of a concert.
i would hold the reed in my mouth.
poise my fingers, and play nothing
at all. move my hands as if the sound
of the whole fifth-grade band was coming
from the throat of my ghost. 
other kids shouted from their horns
& smacked the shoulders of their big drums.
i let my machine be the telescope. a hallway
without any fluorescent lights. my hands
getting bigger until they could carry
the moon. our songs were sluggish 
& strange. the work of a flock of geese 
misremembering all formations. 
after two years we gave my oboe back. 
it was just a rental. i missed it when it was gone
though i felt like maybe i had wrong it.
like maybe if i had wrestled with it longer
i could have gotten its voice & talked 
to the ghosts who emerged each night
from the corn fields around my house
in their own symphony of contours & dark. 

firefly dinner

i learned how to eat stars
from the fireflies who 
knit their own sky 
shoulder to shoulder
with gutters & the billboards. 
you cannot let the capitalism light
kick the glowstick out of you. 
there are berries & persimmons who grow
on the side of the big white knuckle highway. 
sometimes when i call a friend
it feels like weaving. i open my mouth
& there are all the galaxies i have
swallowed & who have swallowed me.
my one dog likes to kill stuffed animals 
& toss their cloud guts all over the bed.
she would make a good comet
& i see that for her one day. i refuse
to imagine us as stop signs or guns. 
sometimes i wonder if the planets
write poems about our smallness
just like we write poems about
their gigantic faces. when i came home
& the house did not have legs
i was relieved. the monsters who live
in the woods by the driveway 
demanded some kind of offering
in exchange for my absence. i brought
them an apple from the discount bin.
maybe those seeds will turn into a star.
a bright & wild glowing thing
right in my yard. right beside
where the fireflies used to talk 
before autumn came with a shovel.
i learned everything i know from
the fireflies. how to say goodbye without
saying goodbye. the last one at the end
of the august. a little high five voice.
i call you on the drive back. the early dark.
i wanted to make sure you were
still there. that you were coming home too.

moon garbage 

the moon pulls through
the kfc & i watch as she just orders
mashed potatoes & tosses the container 
in the parking lot for the rats.
you think there are 
coyotes everywhere. gods i wish
there were. i could use someone
to chase me into the underworld. 
instead we just get the neighborhood 
dogs who wish they were a pack.
on the right night they 
get together to pretend. one of them
is the leader & he gets really wild
with it. you tell me the coyotes 
would eat us & i explain that 
i have spent my life ready
to become part of something greater. 
i love cleaning up trash because 
it makes me feel less useless. 
the microplastics in my brain
tell me we should buy a boat
& ride it across the dark water 
until we reach the moon. there are
no supermarkets but there is 
a really sweet bodega which is
all anyone could ever need. 
a car loves there too & she is
the makeshift coyote. the divine 
is constant but always leaving. 
maybe i think that where i come from
cashing is holy. a language a lover.
you are always what is just out
of your reach. on tiktok late
at night someone dms me to ask,
“are you cleaning up after the moon?”
i lie & say, “of course not.”