snow country machine

now you can buy the winter
& ship it to your house.
i see my neighbor with a snow country
machine & he is skiing in july.
he is taking a picture of his children
all dressed for the blizzard. all the birds
are asking each other, "where should
we go?" i explain to them that this is
just a new human horror & they sigh
& continue their elegizing in the dark.
the neighbor invites other neighbors 
& then everyone is winter. did snow
feel different on your face when you
were a kid or am i just nostalia-ing where
i don't need to? it felt softer or maybe
more real. like the raspberries that 
are born in one night. dark & almost red.
i remember one dusk my sibling & i laid
in the front yard while the world
was swallowed by snow. the sky,
a brown-black that only comes 
when the blizzard is deep & un-ending.
i thought of both of us becoming snow.
plummeting gently from a breath 
of a cloud man. i find myself jealous of
my neighbor's snow country machine
even though i do not even really want it.
i want to know if when he closes his eyes
that sometimes the snow feels red 
on his flesh like it used to for me.
if when he opens his mouth to catch
the cool crystals, they taste bright.
a see an ad for the snow country machine that says 
one day everyone will have their own device 
to give them everything they desire.
i doubt that because desire is always moving. 
i buy the machine. i do not even remember
doing it. the box is smooth. my neighbor,
still skiing sees the delivery ghost.
he points to the box & gives me a thumbs up. 

cereal aisle 

anything you can dream
can become a box of cereal. anything
you nightmare too. i have found myself
with a spoonful of roaches in the old apartment
where chairs flew out the windows. five more boxes & then
we will be the domino house. shoulder 
to shoulder with a coming catastrophe.
i knock a hole in the aluminum bag & all the pops
come singing. the kellogg man sits
on a pile of corn above my little perfect
sanitarium. in college i used to go to the grocery store
to feel human. i harvested cereal. carts full. 
more than i could ever eat. i think i wanted
to live like a prize inside. i stacked the boxes beneath
my bed. made my own cereal aisle. warplanes
flew overhead. a spoon sleeping in the grain.
i learned the names like doorbells. here is where
the raisins go clutching their sun. if i could
i would have a whole house of cereal. retro cereal
still in the boxes, the morsels turning to dust.
an attempt at eternity in their bonemeal. 
the kellogg man prescribes me a bowl
of everything. sends the crows to 
observe my progress. i eat in front of a television
that does not remember my name. the shopping carts
know where i live. they arrive in the yard.
graze on cardboard & the moon juice.
i try my best to not fill my lack with sugar
& worry but it is all i have ever known. 
if you hold a cheerio up to your eye you can
use it like a hagstone. it'll show you the future. 
when i look i always see bathtubs of milk. 
the shopping carts come inside & browse my aisles.
i lock the door so they can't leave. they whimper
& i feed them handfuls of froot loops. 

poem in which i am an activist 

i don't consider myself an activist.
i do like the idea of glory & revolution
but i was built for aftermaths. my lungs
are spore sewers. i come from a long line
of antique talkers. in my childhood home
a telephone from the early 1900s hung on 
the wall. i would sometimes listen to
the earpiece & hear the ghosts arguing
about the same hungers we have. in the backyard, my father
plants tomatoes & lets them grow wild
& untended. each fruit, a red giant.
when they all yield, we will be picking for days. 
i am so tired of wrestling with
the finger-eating machine. instead, i want
to build gills like mushroom folds. 
i see government buildings & i dream
of making them greenhouses. all laws are outlived
by the soil. if i was an activist, i wouldn't
last very long. i was burn bright. maybe wrap
a senator's house in a takeout bag & carry it
to the burning town in the mountains. 
i would not be bold enough to throw a shoe
at a governor but if i did, i would choose
my old stripper heels. maybe, if there were
enough of us, we would turn into horses
& trample all of their genocide stations. i do not want
to spend any more of our precious sun
trying to convince that which was designed 
to kill me, to keep me. so often i feel like
a throat lozenge in the mouth of another 
evil man digging holes for fence posts.
i buy a pocketknife & discover it is useful
as a garden spade. in the front yard, the ferns
are unfurling their fists. i wonder what it is
that they reach for. i should probably open
my hands too. catch something. not a star,
maybe just a petal from the peach tree who might,
if the world is real enough this year, bear fruit. 
 

tree funeral(s)

there were vultures playing video games
in the fields. the morning dew soaked
my feet & i got to school without a face.
i had slathered myself in vanishing cream 
in an attempt at gender sleeping.
out the classroom window they 
put caution tape around the hips of one
of the trees who knew my name. they started
with the arms. i had seen this before or maybe not
i am never sure what was a memory
& what was a fire escape. all day i heard saws.
limb by limb they took the tree apart.
she talked the whole way through it.
i felt useless. how did she come to be so calm
while coming undone? i was almost envious.
i keep falling apar. a collar bone. a hammer.
all the pictures on my bedroom wall falling down
like hail storm or remote controls. 
by the time the school day was over the work
was done. the tree lay in clean-cut logs
in the fields between my house
& the school building. the tree was still talking
somehow even though it was a funeral
& even though my face was coming back
in patches. greasy hair in the cool october wind. 
i brough the tree dandelion leaves & a snipping
of my hair. the tree said, "it is not as bad
as you think it will be." i did not believe her.
now, i am less certain about what she meant.
surely she did not mean to tell me that
it is not that bad when men come & tear you
limb from limb for no reason known to you
or the soil. maybe she meant the whole thing.
the rings & the moons & the vultures still
filling their throats with internet noise. 
i wanted to never go back to school. i kept
asking each tree i knew, "are they coming?"
the trees would not respond as trees do not
usually respond. they mull things over.
the leaves fell. soon, the earth was bare. 

propagation 

sometimes i cut off a hand 
& grow it like a spider plant child.
there you go little hunger. paint
a wall of the house. punch a hole
in the old moon to let 
the snakes out. when my lover
was courting me, he would cut off
one of his fingers at a time. let them
sprout roots & then gift them to me 
for my windowsill. i never remembered
to water them & so they died 
one by one. the ants came like
infinite rosaries to underworld 
each of the limbs. i was not made 
to care for vegetation but i know
i need to learn. everything worthwhile 
is seed started. knees tucked into chest. i wait
for water. i wait for you by the door. 
i still feel guilty about all the arms i've
wasted on my own running.
nothing ever returns the same. 
a ferris wheel in the refrigerator 
turns, empty & waiting for tarantulas.
once i fell from a ladder. i was a girl.
i crashed on the living room floor
& came apart into thousands of genders.
i am now just what was left after
chasing the sun. i am not interested 
in living intact. instead, i am looking 
for pots in the parking lot. i am 
watering my eyes. your dried thumb,
the abandoned carrot. in the apartment
without walls, i planted a potato
not knowing it would rot beneath 
the soil. what a spleen. what a liver.
leaves reaching up for dusty handfuls of light. 

recruitment 

a big solider comes with
a money face into the television.
i sometimes wake up in camouflage
& not in the lesbian way.
there is an ad on my youtube 
brain empty machine that asks,
"do you want to have purpose?"
it is followed by a clean missile 
cutting through the dark. this country
is a wound. it always asks for more.
but the thing about a nation
is that it cannot receive. not like
a mouth. not like a hole. instead,
this country works like a boiler room. 
blood in the stomach. the sky goes 
rust thumb red. i touch the ad by accident
& my life is a pen clicked 
in an empty room. on my way home 
from a tree, i saw military vehicles 
stuck in traffic. they were mean & green.
one of them as a tank. there is the way
over there & the war here & the war
between flesh & soldier. i dated 
a girl once who was in the marines.
she told me she never wanted 
to talk about it but once 
she got drunk & told me they took
an x-ray of her lungs. inside were
helicopters. inside were guns, loaded.
that details was important. if the guns
were empty they would have let her stay.
instead she went home. stood on 
the back porch & smoked until
she couldn't feel her throat.
take every uniform i find into the trees.
the trees say, "that is not a god."
i ask, "can you take it back?" 
they explain, "no, that is not a god."
i try to say, "i know it is not"
but they do not believe me. it is probably best
that they do not believe me. 
i hang the camo in the branches.
i expect skeletons when i return. instead,
there is nothing but hair. 

sweet feed

i want to be a baby girl
in the window kind of way.
the honey of a ghost train
through the milk-white woods.
god if we could be the sweet
peach soft of a new stomach.
let me be pussy willow until we are
nothing but cattail burst & blush.
round as we are melon. stars 
climbing down their ladders
to paint our eyelashes. i want
my mouth to only hold plums.
even their pits giving in to my marshmallow. 
the blossoms are brief & real.
we smell like the pink beneath fingernails.
headlights turn into fresh moons.
a tongue full of brown sugar. 
tell me there is a tree with all our hair
growing from the top. i hide behind
the big drum. pound the door
to win another palm. there is nothing
that doesn't open for me. the fruit swell
eager to dissolve in me. blood 
like velvet. velvet like lamb's ear
or mullein. i leave the ground hungry
for my footfalls. all the corn,
every single color, knows my name. 

sugar country 

we all have latent patriotism.
i am always trying to recover 
from this place & then there is
some other glorious wound. 
i get defensive when i hear people
talk about limiting sugar. 
not in the diabetes way (i get that) but in the,
"i am holier than you because i only eat
the hair of gods" way. i do not believe
in sugar addiction. i will call it worship. 
my father & i parked in the blue jeep
beneath a willow tree on a saturday morning outside
the farmer's market. syrup sun beams. we had gone
to the candy stand. a pound of gummy eggs
& a pound of spearmint leaves. 
bubble gum cigars, banana & green flavored.
sometimes, when we were feeling divine,
we would eat our whole stash right there
& not tell mom. 
teeth ringing. organ bell brothers.
our ages collapsed & summer stretched 
all taffy in the morning bloom. 
sugar is my steering wheel when 
a thunderstorm starts asking 
if we are still here. if you dig deep enough
in the chicken yard 
you will find veins of sugar. the first girl
i loved fed me chocolate & peach rings.
we laid on her roof. the older i get the more
sugar i require. my aunt mary actullay had
diabetes but she still snuck all the candy she could.
more & more as she aged. 
licorice & mints & m&m cookies. 
once i bit a boy in the dark. his body tasted
like a statue of sugar. i wondered then too
if i tasted the same. nothing but glass blowers 
in a bright dark. i am trying to stop loving sugar
because i know it is a hole. i do not love
this country or how we suck the soil white. 
i try to think of cane. of fields. 
a spoon in a jar. in a bag. the sound of 
light snowfall. dissolved on the tongue.
i am ready to leave. there is sweetness 
other than sugar. 

prayer to cardea, goddess of door hinges 

it has been a long time since i have considered praying.
i used to have a rosary that i followed like the stoplights
down main street. were you always a goddess or did
you have a mundane time where you tried
to find something to bow to? i am unschooled 
in the formation of gods. the closest i have come
to the divine in when i laid with an ex lover
beneath the blue whale at the museum of natural history.
but you don't want to hear about that. let me tell you
about the doorbell that died inside the walls 
of my parents home. you could press it & nothing
would ring or cry or laugh. in every house i've ever lived,
there is a forbidden door that i labor to open.
in the mountain apartment it was the basement. 
the door was nailed shut when i first moved in.
i could not resist. one night, in the middle of a snow storm
i caved. i did not have a hammer & so i used a fork
to pry the nails back. maybe this was our first meeting?
i did not find much. just wooden stairs going down
to a root cellar. cool dirt on the floor. there were
entrances to other apartments all around. 
i imagined a gathering of us in the basement. i did not
know most of their names. the gun salesman &
the white lady with matted hair & the man with
a worn walking stick. i quickly returned to my nest.
shut the door but considered what it would mean
to leave it open. i want to know what people
usually ask of you? do they ask for open doors because
i request the opposite. i love a shut door. both
to be inside & to be peering beneath the bottom
in an attempt to see feet shadows. i do not know
if this is your realm. are you interested in containing
or releasing? i could help with either. i buy keys
to locks that do not exist. i call my ex in the middle
of the night & hang up before she can answer.
i want to ask her if she remembers the house
in mineola with all the suitecases in the basement.
you were there too, standing on the ceiling.
i guess all i have to ask for is that the locks are useless.
that the doorways i walk through do not bite down
too hard. that when i go down to the crawlspace
that i am joined by your divinity. when you were told
you were the goddess of thresholds, did you feel joy
or fear? in the yard we have a door rotting into 
the earth. sometimes i hear a knocking. is that you? 

croning ceremony

i have yet to learn how to stop catching
on fire. i hope one day i can be 
a wisdom to someone. that they will say,
"teach me what the mailboxes taught you." 
i am less & less sure about the color of water. 
once a teacher told me in elementary school 
that the water is blue because the sky is blue which
prompted me to ask, "why is the sky blue?"
she moved on. the sky is blue because
it is worried & sometimes because it is furious.
i saw someone i know had a croning ceremony.
they gathered & knit her a crow of fingers.
she is old now & she is stunning & she is 
lighting fires instead of taking them. i feel
skeptical of the word "wisdom" but especially
in association to myself. most of my lessons are
un-lessons. i joke that in the village times i would
have been dead a long time ago from trying to eat
the poke berries that grow so bright in august. 
maybe i could have been the test creature.
the learning point where the other would find out
that not everything glowing is edible. that not
all bruises are on the surface. a stomach is
a resting place & sometimes a cage. i keep 
all the birds i can. i have to admit i do fantasize 
about being croned. about people coming to me
with their fears & their trials so that i can give them
haphazard advice. kiss the tree. climb the boy.
when you catch on fire, don't try to put it out.
instead, walk somewhere other people can see.
it is raining today in the spring so that means
the toads will be talking. i go outside to see if
any of them are interested in being my mother.
of course i have a mother but i am greedy.
none of my elders ever tried to give me wisdom.
instead, they fed me. pastrami. toll house cookies.
sitting on the shag carpet. their houses turning 
into trampolines. maybe wisdom is just a story 
between our skin & time. the toads sing. 
my hair falls out. my ancestors' bones, windchime.