The Gospel of Jesus's Husband 
-After Morgan Parker

I'll tell you what I remember
because there is no written
language that wants to hold onto
my name. I'll tell you about how

when pressing your hands together
the space in between is a kind
of tomb, where a man can exist
if you loved him more than 

anyone else. This is about his
skin, the color and softness
of clay. I left my hand prints
in him on cool nights, when alone

we pressed into each other.
The angular shape of men touching
men, no where to put shoulders,
holding him afterwards and him

telling me that he was scared.
That he could imagine a life 
for us. That he wanted to save
us both for a different time

where we might have lived
peacefully by some river. 
Laying naked together, he told me to
touch his hands, callous from

his father's work with wood. 
Pointed to the center and said
that was where there would be
a hole. I touched, could feel

his skin give way into nothing.
Empty, my finger through his hand.
I did not cry then, but asked
if anyone would ever know of us.

I opened my palm for him
to touch as he said, 
"No, no, I don't think
they can." His light touch,

finger at the center of my hand
where the skin didn't part.
I wanted it to, wanted holes
in my hands. Wanted to share 

whatever horror would 
take his beautiful skin apart.
But I lived and told no one.
On nights like this I 

lay down in the empty tomb
and imagine us here. Bodies
against stone, bodies molding
together in the orange dusk.

reptile show

i keep details about 
the reptiles 
my secret
i won't tell you how many i have
because this is my house
with its glossy scales 
you are just visiting 
when you go home
i have them to talk to
if you don't ask about my reptiles
i won't ask about yours 
that's how this works
but to tell you the truth 
you seem like gila monster 
kind of man
& i love you for that
do you ever shed your skin
like they i do?
i wish i could see it
bunched up in the corners
of your house 
like stockings 
when i was younger my dad  
took me to a reptile show
a whole hall full of people
showing off their reptile-ness 
pulling up sleeves, 
their scales underneath
opening mouths to reveal 
thin fangs
blue tongues
i knew then i would
grow up to be like them 
my snakes sun themselves
mid-day on the windowsills
so sometimes i lay out with them
i lay long
tongue flicking at the air
they crawl under 
the bed at night
at be near the heater 
that's where they are right now
do you hear them? 
don't bother them
just focus on me
did your father ever
take you to a reptile show?
everyone's father should
that's a shame you didn't
you would have liked it
you would look good with scales
would you touch them?
you can touch me
you can feel my scales
& i can feel yours
we can lay near the heater
with the snakes in the dark
but i won't tell 
you how many i have
that's the whole fun of it
has anyone told you that
you have four fingers?
i noticed
climb me 
call me tree branch 
call me your terrarium
walk me like a glass wall
blue tongue on my ceiling 
we reptile houses
have to love each other
because we understand
what it's like to
not know how many we have
men who love men with scales
i have to tell you 
another secret though
i want more 
i need more
more snakes
& lizards & maybe frogs 
& salamanders too
i want more
if you fuck me again
we can 
count them

hot air balloon

in the city 
no one else seems to notice
the hot air balloons
on clear days they gather
like a flock of strange animals
oscillating patterns of color
yellow  navy  maroon  orange
they must land somewhere
maybe the top of a building
to picking someone up
where do the balloon take them?

the sky was wider 
where i grew up
the bell of a french horn 
the wide eye of a pin
the hot air balloons were rare
all of us standing at the edge
of the park
sand box toys in hand
as we watched a hot air balloon
drifting towards the farmland
did those balloons have people inside
or were they just searching
from one to keep
in there nest?

i know for sure 
that one will land to take me
maybe not this year or the next
but i think of that woven basket
i think of the expanding
colorful membrane
like head of an octopus 

i want a hot air balloon 
to take me
to land on the roof 
of my apartment sometime near dusk
when the sky is orange  grey
to hold me high above everything
tell me stories about 
what the earth looks like
just below clouds
knitted scarf fields 
thumb tack houses 
rat snake road

never come down
pass back over the city
some years later to remember
what the sidewalk 
sounds like under flip flops 
or what texture wind against
a skyscraper makes

bodies i loved 
all moving spider-like below 
some of them stopping
to stare up

36 hours

the corpse flower blooms
for only 24-36 hours
resembles a human turned inside out 
all frill & green lipped
gigantic
a pot in the living room
where the television used to be
i bring you 
& we sit to watch
the corpse flower come alive
arms around each other
braced for the unfurling
the seed
i tell you
has to have been someone's
skull 
us watching
what happens when 
memories are covered in dirt
& told about humidity
the green house we've made
of our living room 
sweat glossy on our foreheads 
waiting for the corpse flower
praying to the corpse flower
you tell me that when you 
die you want to be planted
in this same pot
like a television 
in the living room
where all your loved ones 
can come wait for you to bloom
monster tongue flower
mammoth inverted iris
the corpse flower begins
crawling up from the soil
prickly neck
i think
this is what i look like
turned inside out
horrifying & 
full of yellow
pollen tendrils 
we hold each other tighter
afraid of the corpse flower
but we have to keep watching
a vigil until 
it slowly folds itself
back into the dirt
staring all day
the sound of static
as it declines
all that bloom for
only 36 hours
is that what we look?
little pink buds turned 
green fringed florescence
tucking knees
into chests
laying down in the earth
where the television 
once was 

Nocturne

my neighbor walks so loud upstairs
i know it's purposeful
he knocks on the floor in threes
he walks on his hands upstairs
a perfect handstand  
my head is upstairs
just my head, heavy with my neighbor's shoes
my neighbor walks in my head,
taking steps only in threes
i remember my uncle who told
me that one summer he decided 
he would stay up for as many days
as possible
he last three
i see my uncle as a boy who walks 
in my head and also walks upstairs
i see my uncle who stands
in the corner of my room for three days 
all the days in one night
and tells me to stay up with him
tells me to keep him company
i never asked him what happened
past three days 
i stand on my bed which 
makes me feel tall
i walk on my bed, back and forth
and there are no neighbors below
me but i wish there were
so they could hear me
so that i could be like
my neighbor walking upstairs 
in my head 
my head walks upstairs
with shoes on 
dressy shoes that i don't own
they sound leather brown
they sound heavy like hooves
my neighbor has hooves
and walks upstairs in my head 
and i have hooves 
but i just stand up
and decide that at nigh there
is nothing else in the world
other than neighbors
and i walk on the ceiling
of my head so that he can
know what it feels like
to feel so full of heads 
and full of walking
and full of not sleep
my uncle puts his hands over
his eyes
shakes his head 
i tell him that it's time
for the both of us 
to get some rest but
he says he needs to keep going
says that his neighbors
are living right behind
his eyes 
and he opens them
and i see their silhouettes
men with heavy shoes 
maybe they're my neighbors too
maybe i made him stay up
all those days
and i tell him that i don't
want to try to sleep anymore tonight
that i'm scared to try 
because that just makes everything louder
my head stomping in my neighbor 
my neighbor rolling back and forth
like a bowling ball
his body gone heavy and smooth 
across someone else's hardwood floor
i tell my uncle he should
sleep and he tells me that he won't
not until i do
and i say not until my neighbor does
so we make him stand with us
on my bed where the mattress 
muffles his heavy shoes  
and he can walk in my head 
without so much noise

Need

i know i need to break something
& it reminds me that
i'm here in the soil with all 
the other animals,
with our impulses to hurt
anything we can. 
what kind of frustration 
calls this out of us?

you tell me to take a plate 
& throw it down
on the tile kitchen floor 
& i remember all the times 
i broke plates by accident
at my parent's house, 
all the dishes 
with the blue & yellow flower designs
the shards of plate: 
prehistoric teeth
jagged on the ground,
picking the fragments up with
my bare fingers & wondering if 
it could be worth it to try &
piece the plates back together.
instead we'd slide the pieces
carefully into the trash.

when no one
is here 
i do give in & open the cupboard
& i do throw just one
plate onto the floor,
one of the thick clay-colored plates,
it breaks nice & clean,
& i do love the sound it makes
the sound of impact
& i do love how it shatters
no tiny slivers just triangular hunks
of ceramic
& i do need to break more 

taking all the plates down 
i move onto glasses & mugs
i don't pause to think of you
& whether or not 
you might tell
me to stop, whether or not
you might tell my that 
i've done enough
this is the issue with watching 
objects break, it's never
quite enough

until all 
the dishes are broken
every bowl & glass &
tea cup, a glorious pile of bone.
i walk through in bare feet
because i can, because all 
of it was mine,
because it was my house
& because i am an animal too
of the soil 
with teeth 
made of broken plate. 

until the violet lost its voice

you said you wanted our apartment 
to be full of house plants. 
we started with three potted jade
in the windowsill and a thumb-sized african violet
set right behind the neck of the sink.
in the morning i would use a glass
to water each of them, pushing two fingers
into the dirt to check how much they needed.
i would talk to them, tell them that i loved 
you and that you could have as many plants 
as you wanted. the jade talked back sometimes,
telling me i should be quieter in the morning
and that african violet would say that i was 
a selfish lover, that i didn't deserve someone
like you. i'd walk away, sometimes putting
a glass over the plant so i couldn't hear 
it talking. you brought more home:
the spider plants, 
the devil's ivy and the fiddle-leaf fig,
all of them with new voices,
chatting to me about you. i liked 
the ivy who only spoke in rhymes.
i stopped watering the violet
as it became more cruel, telling me
that you didn't love me and that you
wanted to fill our place with plants
because i leave a chasm in everyone i love.
the violet would scream all morning
till it lost its voice. 
you never heard the plants or
at least you never told if you did.
you changed too, your complexion 
turning green and leafs peering
out from the back of your throat.
when i asked if something was wrong 
you'd say you just needed more plants
more plant more plant
so we both brought them 
ferns and peacock plants and
rubber trees and vines and vines
and vine, the vines and ivy mixing
and digging into the walls,
pulling up the tiles in the kitchen.
all the plants talked over each other
and i gave them each a glass to drink,
nearly an hour it took all morning
and all the while the plants hated me,
even the ones that started off kind,
they told me i was never living 
in the present, that i would never 
make a home with someone.
i went to go find you to wake
you up for work and where you
had been in bed was a mess of
spider plants and ivy 
and rubber tree leaves, outlining your body,
a violet where your head 
had been, all them talking in your
voice, except for the violet
who was still screaming.
i watered you with the glass 
and laid down, touched the dirt of
each of your plants, two fingers 
in the damp soil. i said 
i was sorry over and over
until the violet lost its voice.

animation

in the flickering dark 
outside the subway car window 
a piece of graffiti frolicked. 
an image animated, frame by frame:
a purple body against a white background,
springy legs, rubber ball head, pulsating creature 
the drawing danced outside our car for several
seconds, then receded into long hollow of the tunnels.

i have spent the last few days
imagining the kind of person who would
make a piece like that, climbing down 
into the subway's damp mouth,
a backpack full of color, deciding
to make a film reel out of the rushing trains.
listening to their approach, hiding
in between each line made on stone.

i think of my uncle taking a sticky note book 
and showing my how to draw 
a little rubber ball at the bottom
of each yellow square so that it would bounce
when you flipped through the whole pad.
we bought dozens of notepads,
repeating the same little animation game,
all the while thinking, 
look we can make drawings alive. 

then of course there's all those movies,
the ones where people drew every single frame, 
i see all the hands filling in cinderella's dresses
over and over, blue and blue and blue 
and all the hands making birds to flit 
around snow white.

are there hands inside me like that?
making me body move like i do?
maybe a single being sneaks down into 
the night's damp hull to animate me, me: a purple man,
flickering out a subway window, dancing,
for fractions of a second  

handstands

i should be honest more often.
we walk through Washington Square Park
and dusk is blue today. i say 
that i'm glad i didn't go here for
college, that i would be so caught
up in the city. we watch three people
tossing a frisbee in a triangle.
the grass is scraggly, recovering 
from winter. i don't meant that though,
i wish i had moved to the city earlier.
i remember being eighteen and telling
an old boyfriend that i needed to go,
that i just needed to go and that we
would make the distance between us work.
we pulled up Google maps and saw the three
hours between us. i picked a closer 
school to home because of him.
i've tried several times to teach
myself how to do a handstand and 
none of them have worked out.
i get close, posed against a wall,
hands gripping at the carpet.
i might change my life if i could,
not because i don't like my life now, 
but because i'm prone to regret and nostalgia.
we stand there in front of the arch
at Washington Square Park and i imagine
a person big enough to stand in it:
a great big doorway. i think 
of all the people who we watched 
stepping out of their houses and
you saying, "look they're leaving
their houses! they here here!"
all the different types of doors:
white painted and brass door knobs,
rusted edges and silver hinged, and
the glass door lobbies with doormen 
i imagine trying to do a handstand
in the archway of a door to our 
apartment in the village. i imagine
trying to do a handstand in the 
Arch at Washington Square Park.
maybe i would be in the background
of some passing tourist's photograph.
they might assume i'm a local
because of the unabashed strangeness 
of my handstand, pointing to me
years later, my body clear against
the blue dusk, and wondering, "what kind
of life do you think he has?"

X-Ray Fitting

Dad says that when he was little
they used to X-Ray your feet 
at the shoe store to check if 
your new shoes fit right. Peering down 

through the microscope-like eye piece,
he'd see the bones, moving them up &
down, two wriggling rainbow trout.
His bones glowing back at him, smiling

toe knuckles. The nails, white petaled
flowers grinning up at him, saying
this is what you are inside, luminous bone,
rocks under skin walking across rocks

outside of skin. The meeting of stone.
I am probably heavier than I think.
When I look down at my feet I see 
Dad's bones. I see a rock collection:

quartz and calcite. I put on shoes
and pace the hallway in my house, trying
to step back into the X-Ray machine, this time 
with my whole body. Laying down inside it, 

a clerk checking my whole skeleton to see
if it fits, if my whole skeleton fits.
It always feels tight, like my skin wanted 
to stretch across a smaller collection of gravel,

like someone tried to fit mountain ranges
in me. My feet turn into the bones 
of rainbow trout, so I let them sit 
in the bath tub practicing their gills.

I imagine Dad, a little boy in the backseat
on the car ride home with his new shoes. 
Does he cross his legs? No, he doesn't. 
He stares at his shoes, leather church shoes.

They're a little tight, he thinks and considers
taking them off, considers sitting there barefoot,
considers that his bones would be closer to being free. 
Glances down at his fingers, remembers they have bones too.