candle forest

we walk without any legs
in the clearing. i have a face 
in my backpack i use just for you.
you woke me up without
any words. your fingers like
fiddleheads. 
they say in the candle forest
that everything is brought out
into the light. all around are
the shadows. they hold
all the parts of me that you
cannot see. sometimes when
we argue i picture a house
on fire. it is a relief. the animals
in the forest are all on fire
& so are their ancestors. 
in the candle forest there are 
wick trimmers who cut more
than waxed string. i stick out
my tongue to have it trimmed.
just a little off the top. the end
that's severed holds everything
i will never say. what a beautiful
newt. he runs into the shadows
to become whatever monster 
i cannot. the ends of our hair 
gets singed. smoke makes clouds.
the clouds peer down in galaxy spirals.
you are the wick cutter or you
are the birds who light up the sky
like stray stars. i used to think
i wanted to be loved. i used to think
i asked for you. did you make
the candle forest or did? i when
i was sleep walking. when my face
was on & bright? all i know is
i am one of the commas who
scurry away when you lift the rock
under which i was trying to hide.
i ask you which candle you want
for me to carry home 
& you tell me, "all of them." 

bank account seance 

last winter when only the rats were talking
i would refresh my bank account app
in the hopes that there would be
enough. i started to see money in the wild.
pennies on the sidewalk & birds made
of dollar bills. they make it so hard to believe
in abundance. a man without a face
shouting at headless people. the tv died
& then the heater. the trees were bare. i turned
one of my credit cards into a dragonfly 
to keep it away from me. it was so angry. ate a hole
through the roof. we patched it with
nothing but our hands, holding them 
like a tiny umbrella all afternoon through a late snow.
in the dark of the upstairs when you were
already asleep, i set up candles. i sat by myself
with the stinky bugs, experiencing their
furnace mirages. i closed my eyes. held out 
my hands. i asked the bank account to 
give me a sign it was there. that we were
going to keep going. that we were going
to make it. the creature stirred, feathers & all. 
stood briefly above me. a looming god 
of dimes & numbers. i wanted to meet
the version of myself who has enough.
instead, the moon melted in the night's mouth. 
the being left. took nothing with it. 
i opened the app to find the account
still just as vacant as before. i wanted 
to crawl into. tell the numbers to dance.
here is a bag of carrots & a gallon of milk. 
the dragonfly returning through the throat.
the house not a house but a latched room
in the basement of a story. what if we had
enough. what if we had enough. 

dog celebrity 

i follow a dog celebrity on tiktok who has
decided to start a religion. i figure at least
this god is soft. at least he eats from
the ground. when i say "i was raised catholic"
i always smell the wood of the sacristy.
once i saw a dog in there. i follow him into
a closet full of gold. he was gone. my favorite parts
about church were outside of it. the field
& the old limestone kiln. i think the dog
in the church was the celebrity dog. i feed him
tokens on a live stream. he radiates light.
becomes more powerful. invents holidays.
the holidays are glossy & i weep. i take a year
off work & end up inside a candle. i am the oil
feeding the flame. the screen is a lake. 
we fish & the celebrity dog walks on water.
it is late & i stay up to stay on the live as long
as i can. i do not want to miss a fleck of wisdom.
when i was a child, i believed god could hear
my every thought. i pictured him crouched 
in the corner not touched by my night light.
the dog celebrity dies. it is sudden. i refresh
his page as if there will be more. the way our bodies
make a sky & then leave a hole. the feed
like a ribbon of prayers, each one, a way of asking,
"how am i going to--" i don't let videos finish
anymore. i am looking for him. digging
in some kind of glow. the legs running
through each other. there is a light in the church
that never goes out. a little red flame. 
it's supposed to be god. it goes out & nothing
happens. i upload a video of myself inside
the candle. it gets three videos. those people
eat off the ground. it is night & no one else
is awake but me & the dog celebrity, wherever
he is. i pray to him even though he is gone. i ask, 
"can you give me a fresh place to spill my teeth?" 

tick 

i have perfected the art
of extractions. i use the silver tweezers
& grab each little god by the head.
ticks, like flecks of red planet. one on
my chest & another on my thigh. 
you tell me i never talk about anything
& i know it's true. i treat my emotions
like boats without drivers. they glide
just above my head & do not stop. 
the grass has grown tall this year. 
i become more & more against the notion 
of blades. i imagine the yard as wild 
as can be. letting it eat the house. 
the ticks, knocking at the windows
like fathers. the first tick i ever got
bit just behind my knee. my father
painted it with nail polish until it fell off.
a fresh gem. i wanted to keep it.
instead we buried it like treasure. i have
for a long time been convinced that
if i said everything i meant that 
i would end up alone. my father told me
that his father would search his scalp
for ticks each night. he didn't use tweezers
to remove them; instead, he grasped
the drinkers with his hard fingernails.
held them in the bathroom light before 
burning them in a candle flame. fireworks
over a taken city. i imagine each tick
taking with it an emotion or memory.
something i did not want anyway.
pocketbooks in the dark. i usually
tear them apart but once i found one
in the morning. i assume it drank all night.
we had argued in the dark & i had gone
to sleep feeling like a twig. i tore
the creature apart. my blood on my hands.
i wiped them on my pants. rinsed
the pieces down the drain. i looked
in the mirror & saw my father for a second
& then i just saw myself. 

grass fed

i ate with my hands. got the good fork
& stuck it into the lawn. they say
some animals eat better than others. 
a spoonful of powered milk. boiled onions
from the cemetery in our yard. 
the fields around us grow feed corn. hard 
kernels like piano keys for a tiny god. 
once i bit into one. a stolen fruit. 
my father scolded me. he said, "we do not take
from the fields that are not ours." 
i watch a video of a farmer feeding his chickens' eggs
back to them. the farmer says, "this is so they don't go
to waste." i wish i could devour
the planets that rise from my body. 
instead, i sell them. coins & bobble heads.
sweet feed from a sky hand. i call my goats
back from their night of tree feasting. 
they tell me, "i have seen hunger & it is velvet."
a news article says, "the food pantry shelves
are empty." in the comments there are people
laughing with bellies full of shells & bones.
i have not looked at meat in supermarkets 
or butcher shops for years. today i do.
it is not out of reverence. i am curious.
how do we talk about bodies? grass-fed. 
ground beef. the mouth is the naming limb. 
i open mine. place grass seeds on my tongue.
the field begins to sprout. wildflowers too.
tonight, we pull down the stars like
cups of water. all creatures are designed
to fill that which is empty. 
i pour moths into my lungs. the chickens 
scratch the earth for keys. 

birdhouse in a birdhouse

i watch a video of a woman who lives
inside another woman's mouth. she has
all kinds of little gadgets to make 
this like possible. there is a window 
in the cheek from which she talks
to birds. the birds are not birds but 
dreams. as a child i was a keeper of empty 
birdhouses. i painted them & never hung them.
instead, they sat in the house as homes
for ghosts. sometimes i would put my eye
up to the opening to see the birds 
hard at work. they were making another house
& then another & another. i am well aware
of how small you can get & still find
a place to sleep. sometimes there feels
like there are too many wounds to attend to.
i pull the tick seed & ragweed from 
the yard. each extraction a little lost tooth.
the birds enter our house not through the chimney
but through the walls. they are not bound
by the boring physics we have. i tell my lover,
"i have a plan" by which i mean i am less certain
than ever. i start building a bird house 
inside our house. i wait for geese & ostriches 
to come. penguins & kiwi birds. i want 
the weird ghosts. the ones who no one thinks
to write stories about. soon i am a bird 
& we are working day & night. my lover asks me,
"when will this be over?" i do not tell him
the truth which is, "it will not be over."
instead we get takeout. a pizza with a bird house
right in the center. our world is such a mangled home.
no one knows where & how to sleep.
so we stay up. we carve another window.
one right through the roof. it begins to rain. 
it's raining birdhouses. raining ghosts. 
i collect as many as i can. my lover asks, 
"don't we have enough?" some of the houses
are the size of my pinky nail. i answer,
"i am not sure yet how small this life will make me."

bat box

we mistake them for night birds
but then we see veins in their wings 
through the moon's swollen light. 
a reminder that a silhouette is not a mirror. 
they swoop back & forth, eating other wings.
flight, no matter how integral, is always 
a process of falling. when i was small 
& we had just moved into the old house
i used to see bats all the time. once, sitting
in the living room, a sick one found her way
to my feet. i crouched down. did not 
touch her. instead, i talked softly.
i told her, "my father said he is going to build
a box bat for you." my father never did. 
they screamed when they saw me & the creature.
i do not think she survived. in her honor, i decided 
to become a bat. cut wings from trash bags.
tried to sleep upside down. none of it worked.
i made terrible unconvincing silhouettes.
above our house these days there are 
still bats who eat the sky. when i am really manic
& i need an escape hatch, i do join them
to varying degrees of success. i ask my father
in the middle of the night, when he is 
a ghost & so am i, "why did you never build
the bat box?" he says, "because i would lose you
to them." i do not think he is overprotective.
or, maybe he is but maybe he was right to be.
it is such a relief to discover your father is just as
frightfully human as you. a man who once lived
with the bats. once slept with his toes curled 
around a branch. for most of my life, if i could join
a new colony of creatures, i would do it.
practicing the taste of beetles. their crunch
in my mouth like the click of a keyboard. 
i lift my arms up to the bathroom's bold light.
see the veins beneath. most of the time
when i call my father he does not answer.
i know where he is. he is in a bat box, singing. 
 

directions

we stop & ask the doves for directions.
they are not reliable because they just
want us to end up in the sky.
at a gas station in your father's beard
the man tells us we have to keep driving.
his eyes are cue balls & they ricochet
off the walls. in the grime bathroom we write
our names with sharpie. i leave an ex's phone number
with the words, "call me when you're lonely"
written below it. we are all breadcrumb leavers
in one way or another. who doesn't want
to find their way back into the mountain?
you bought pajama sets for me from 
the department store. no one else was there,
not even at the counter but the place
was bright & pristine. i considered 
hiding in the wracks until i was old enough
to seem harmless. i'd rather be an old woman
than an old man. we wind up in basement train set
of someone i do not know. there are too many
bakeries & not enough payphones. in the last months
of being together i was trying to run from you.
i would pick up hitchhiking bears 
& feed them steaks from applebees just so
we could have some time to talk. they insisted
that i keep driving north 
until i could feel the cold through the walls
of the car. then it would be time to sleep.
there are very few people who want you
to find your way home. i ask the wrongs ones
on purpose. it is a way of controlling how
& where i will be lost. once i made it back
to the lot where our old house used to stand.
a pipe stuck from the earth. i peered inside
& saw a miniature of my childhood living room. 
boxy television with a scene from a the future.
you were standing there with a map 
burning in your hands. you always told me,
"keep your eyes open when you kiss me."
only when i shut them could i see a map of stars. 

philosopher's stone

i used to be (& still am) an alchemist.
a child by the creek. i would carry
beer bottles & rusted nails down
to the stone. it was nothing like
the old sorcerers thought it would look.
covered with graffiti & river muck. 
i turned them into gold. sold them 
for quarters. the gumball machine
by the cvs knew my name. sent me enough
planets to survive a summer. sugar 
on my tongue. between teeth. occasionally
i would transmute more wildly. 
i once brought my father's knife & watched
as it changed. a golden blade. i used it
to carve my name into the shoulders 
of a beech tree. it was cruel & ugly of me.
i have returned years later to find 
my old name twisted & healed by time.
my favorite creation was on a night
in november. i was considering 
if it would be too hard to run away & live
in the woods by the creek. i had seen
a man there before. he lived in a scheme
of blue tarps & bungee cords. 
i visited the stone. imagined lying my whole body
against the surface & watching as my skin
make a statue of me. i have tried to find
the stone again but it is not there. 
i don't know what stopped me. 
instead, i lifted a dead bird to the surface.
it did not turn into gold. instead, it burst
into a dozen dragonflies. i realized i was
the wrong kind of alchemist. too worried
about gold to remember that change
is often the art of survival. i never touched
the stone but if i did i think i would
have become a holy swarm. 
bees or maybe just fat pond flies. hungry
in all the ways i never let myself as a girl
without a gender. it took me years to do the same. 
every time i see a dragonfly i wonder if 
it is an offspring of that rupture. 
the stone is somewhere else now. i hope
it makes someone shine gold at dusk. 
i like to imagine the man by the creek had it.
that he made golden leaves & built 
a dazzling tree before leaving. 
maybe elsewhere, maybe gone.

patron saint of the trash 

i am unsure to whom the city makes
her offerings. i come by the highway's throat
to tend the garbage. i always bring
a plastic shopping bag to harvest. 
it would be a lie if it told you this was
anything but penance. i have made
the offerings too. the soda cup i left on a curb.
a pen i tossed in the parking lot. 
i see my funhouse face in the shine 
of wrappers' silver bellies.
strange fish in a waterless river. the cars
have can openers for eyes. a streetlight
dies & the darkness comes 
like a hole in the window screen. that is when
i am visited for the first & only time
by the patron saint of the trash. he has eyes
made of bottle caps & a black bag over
his head. in the u.s. it is common to not know
who you are worshipping. horror nesting dolls. 
we have mask shops on every corner. i put the news
through a sieve & there is never gold.  
i find finger bones & glass eyes. 
i ask the saint if he is who the people venerate
with their handfuls of firecracker dust
& chew tins. he is also unsure.
he eats as much trash as he can. he says
that one day he woke up & his house
had turned to cellophane. he could not breathe.
he still cannot breathe. he asks why i am
taking his offerings. i explain that they hurt
the land & us because we are part
of the land. he is confused. he asks,
"what land?" the street lamp's glow returns
& it is just me & the bruises on my knees
from when earlier i went to kneel & lost my balance. 
at a stoplight, a men taps his cigarette on the door
of his car. the ash is devoured by the saint.