hamburger there's an Andy Warhol piece where he just eats a Big Mac. he looks past the camera; a bottle of ketchup & the white burger king bag sit on the table. i watch it over & over again. i become aware of the crinkling of the wax paper as he unwraps the sandwich, of the quiet clink of the ketchup bottle lid. it's old noise, held in a thirty-year-old video, a fraction of the sound that's been gone for decades. i sit down & pretend to eat along with him. i don't eat hamburgers so i pantomime. i want to keep him company even if it's only a moving image. Andy's been dead for just as a long as his sounds but here he is, his mouth moving, his fingers touching the food. i wonder what it is that makes someone really dead & whether or not Andy is really dead. i crawl into the video & ask him questions while he eats what does it taste like? can i have a bite? i lean in closer but he doesn't notice, eyes fixed forward towards the camera. the video ends & everything goes black so i start it over again from the beginning. he unwraps again. i go to a burger king alone. i don't eat hamburger but i want to get food for Andy. i pick up several dozen bags of hamburgers. i stack them in the passenger seat & bring them home where the video has been playing on loop for days. passing him burger after burger, Andy eat more each time. i feed him & he thanks me for breaking the cycle. as he chews he cries asking am i dead am i dead am i dead?
12/04
applesauce we saw a rat crawling below, between the subway tracks & you said "look at him he's not ashamed." thick coarse brown fur & glossy black eyes, he scurried off into the darkness where the trains make their mischief. i want to be fed to the rat, go along with him & walk the hot underbelly of the city. help me come apart as gently. i want to be a palm of apple sauce for the rat to eat our of your hand. soft & topped with cinnamon so he won't forget me while he walks. dipping plastic spoon in a little cup, a little girl sits under the city, eating apple sauce & talking to the rats. she got lost on our preschool trip & now she lives there. the rat, with me inside, returns to her & she speaks the language the trains do, clicking her tongue to mimic the tracks. she's me, six-years-old & feeding the rat her apple sauce & telling him a story about darkness. she lays down when the train comes & it passes over us like the angel of death. the rat is kind & take me back to the platform where you have been worried. skin still moist, freckles made of cinnamon, i get my body back together & sit on the bench. i can't tell you about her, not yet. she had white eyes & malleable skin. she was not me but also was.
12/03
lavender disaster after Andy Warhol elect-trick me daddy & i'll repeat my name twelve times across a plane. your color's a cliche you say but i'm dying for some release, a chess board a dollar bill. bow my tongue, it's a present. they do needles know you know? fill a vein with euthanasia; there's youth in asia & i'm here your purple-paralytic prize & prop me up. how cruel is that? to go without a show or some god damn repetition? the o-c-d in me loves the symmetry. if you're going to use capital punishment it ought to be even, saved for the really mauve people. the chair sit overs & over again in my living room, gone lavender with waiting. it's angry color, really, i think. the straps hold me upright & the electrodes tongue at my brain through my ears. we're made of shocks & standing at a distance from things we don't like. i watch myself get into the chair eighteen times, one for every year i was a girl. yes, kill her off. what better way to go? a lavender disaster just like me. every hair stands on end, the body crashes onto plasma globe. hurt me, yes hurt me. i want the tingle & the burn, the flesh gone poultry white & pork peeling. becoming wall paper, i climb across the electric chairs, find one that suits me & the light switch is the lever. come home come home come home.
12/02
hip bone they took photographs of my bones with a polaroid camera, the doctor took a moment waving the picture so that it would develop. caution radiation. he showed the image to me: a view of a glacier melting. we watched, white rock cracking, dropping bone into the black ocean are my bones made of ice? i asked even though i already knew they were. i don't want to know how much time i have left, that is an answer only for salt. the process of melting involves pocket knives stuck in thighs & elegies to each fragment. will you stay with me as a witness? the sea levels rise in me & i spit out salt water on the street with bits of ice or teeth. at home you keep me company & we look up projection images of Long Island when the whole planet is 4 degrees warmer. we point to all the streets that will be underwater, but, at least our street will still be safe, possibly a waterfront. we'll put our fishing poles out the windows & catch ice burgs. now, i pin the photograph above my desk & there's only an image of a bone: black background. the ear of a monster a broken sculpture a mound of salt. sea water comes into our bedroom, soaking the wood floor. you're asleep so i don't tell you, i wade in deeper, amble down the street, water up to my waist.
12/01
your order every friday night someone rings our doorbell & leaves a white takeout box: the little metal handle poised up the red writing on the sides may or may not say something in another language. neither of us order takeout but it comes anyway & the box always feels heavy but when we open it in the kitchen there's never been anything inside. we're don't feel disappointed because we're used to it, in fact the emptiness is thrilling, like the empty Easter tomb. lining the takeout boxes on the book shelf, we check on them from time to time to see if anything has arrived in them. occasionally they will all smell like rice or sweet & sour chicken or lo mein so i go to check on them & i feel tempted to climb into, to sit all night in the clean white vacant box. maybe it would make me into fried rice; eyes falling out as green peas & limbs spoonfuls of grain. & maybe you would smell food & come out to find one of the takeout boxes full, eager you'd plate me & eat. when they opened jesus's empty tomb i wonder if rice poured out, warm soft white rice. i think the man with the empty takeout boxes is god, who else would it be? who plays with uninhabited spaces like him? it takes will to not crawl inside one. i think about it just about every night. i think about your fork in my fried egg, your spoon scraping the last bits from the walls of the takeout box.
11/30
doors they stole the doors off my car while i was sleeping. i walked all over town that day trying to see where someone might have taken them, peering down driveways & alleyways. i posted pictures of the doors of my car on the telephone poles. my signs read IF FOUND PLEASE CALL [inset my number here]. there are so many uses for a car doors; wings, planes, plates. i entertain the thought that they could have left on their own, joined a flock of car doors headed south for the winter. i wouldn't blame them, it's cold here. whenever i hear geese i rush to the window in case it's them. (i don't often hear geese but i do hear airplanes, none of which are the doors of the car). driving is an encounter with wind now without the doors. i try to be thankful for it. doors off: i pretend i'm flying to Buenos Aires (or some other beautiful place i've only encountered in Spanish textbook photos). at least there's nothing to lock anymore. my car lays open in the parking lot & i tell her to not be afraid. the wind moves through her & the seat belt clinks against the door frame.
11/29
peeling in the winter, prickly pears grow all over my body, mistaking me for a cactus. they're plump & full of purple-maroon juice. bumpy & smooth, their surfaces are like the bodies of some unknown fish. i pluck them off when i come home but they re-grow more vigorously. fruit is most most wild at night. contagious, they sprout all over the house. they love desserts & deserts. the fruit crawling up the archways of doors & up the bed posts. they assemble to form a chandelier hanging from the ceiling of the living room. they don't get you though, they leave you alone. is it because you're not like a cactus? the heater makes the house into a dry yellow cake & the skin on my finger nails frays like sand, but that's not why this is a desert. it's a dessert because the sand has always been sugar, brown rich richer. you tell me again about the Sonoran desert as i work, picking the pears, you talk about the alien creatures that scurry across it & they come into my living room, sidewinders & javelinas, eating prickly pears off the coffee table. i remove the fruit from my body as i stand at the sink, peeling the purple-green skin off each one, digging my fingers into the grainy flesh inside. it hurts my own muscles, but only vaguely, & i eat the insides of each fruit. this is routine now as december walks into the house & lays on the welcome mat, a fallen cactus. i look down & the skin on my legs is bumpy & purple-green. i dig in with my nails, peeling it off gentle so as to keep the sweet purple flesh intact. it tastes like watermelon & gravel. we share it & wash off our bloody mouths in the sink, peel off the cactus skin on the bed & crawl inside to become sand or sugar.
11/28
alphabetizing the spices i took all of the spices out of the wrack, lined them up on all the counters by the stove. the house was empty & i asked each noise in the walls if it was a ghost & if it wanted to keep my company tonight. the spices with their different colored heads; red, green, black. with their different heights; the shortest like children, i stacked them on each other's shoulders & that's when they started speaking all at once, all vying for my attention. their voices were muffled, coming from the inside of each container. i opened first the anise & told it to hush. it told me one of the stories my mother used to tell about baking cookies with her mother, it spoke fast & staccato & i put the lid back on, giving it a place on the spice wrack. the next i opened cardamom & cumin, both who were just humming different hymns; Ave Maria & Kum ba ya. i humored them, of course, singing along aimlessly. they grew impatient, louder now, all of them. i told them i would talk to all of them, that i would try & listen. they threw their head on the floor in protest, the plastic plunking against tile. that was when i realized that i also have a head & i could throw mine off as well. the three jars of turmeric (which i can't even think of a recipe to use that in) spoke only in words that people have yelled at me from car windows. i wondered how something so orange could know what the word dyke means & i told them to stop, that i wouldn't keep them if they talked to like that. pouring the spice out in the sink they only got louder & now it was in the bones of the house. i tipped myself too, i had to know what spice would come out & i dropped apart as cinnamon sticks, each a bone leaving my body, i bled paprika & pulled bay leaves from under my tongue & when i did the spices stopped talking. i put in headphones & finished alphabetizing them, ending with tarragon.
11/27
173 Sea Turtles scientists hauled the first body off the beach. a stone with ideas becomes sea turtle; all covered in cold green weed & muck, eyes half-open. do fossils die? they removed 173 sea turtles from the shores of Cape Cod, death makes souvenirs, hangs necklaces from their mouths. i read about them in bed from the quiet light of my phone & i want to be one of them, one of the dead sea turtles. i put on slippers & drove all the way to Cape Cod to stare at the dark blood water. the waves were angry & begging & i sat in the sand & tried to reason with the ocean. i told the Atlantic that it wasn't her fault, that she had done all she could. the tide limped back & the water frothed like meringue. they say the sea turtles froze to death, they can't usually swim so far north, but the water had been warmer in the summer. they were looking for food. i want to know what they thought about as they froze, i would think about the texture of my body in the water, the poetry i should have written if i had had hands the songs that existed only in my body, my eyes becoming pearl necklace beads. what did they regret? was it slow? did they hope to come back as another animal? i hope to come back as a sea turtle.
11/26
first aide on a shadow when i came back to my apartment all the shadows were awry. some of them were wrong colors, like the bookcases that glowed hot crimson on the floor & the ceiling fan bleeding mauve. i turned to look at my own on the hardwood floor & found it had come apart into thousands of pieces, fragments across the floor like a dropped plate. this had never happened to me before. i wanted to call my mom to ask what to do about wounded shadows but i didn't want her to think i had done something wrong to bring this upon them. i google searched first aide on shadows & found unhelpful Youtube tutorials of people getting on all fours & colors all the shadows in with sharpie marker. the shadow of the ceiling fan was kaleidoscope colors so i shifted me hands through it, the texture of a bowl of grapes. caressing gently the darkness started to come back into the shadow, so i continued, i whispered to it you're doing so well, you're a wonderful shadow & i love you. & it returned back to normal. i wanted to tell someone that i was going to fix everything but i was too embarrassed to have let my shadows so sick in the first place. as night fell i stepped out onto the porch to stand all in shadow, my own still fractured all over. kneeling down, i touched it with two fingers & apologized for not helping it sooner. i told it that i had been busy. each piece felt like slices of a cantaloupe or a melon, sweet & wet, i walked back inside to re-assemble my shadow by the kitchen light.
