green

i tell the mailbox to kneel,
it's prayer time. a mouthful of 
grass & dirt. the peonies. 
my right thigh is a perforated 
surface where needles trip
in & out like trows. the big
rusted shovel leaned up against
the garage door. the burial
of chicken bones & bottle caps,
making ancient. who will
be the time capsule & who 
the gardener. i crouch down
to talk to my eight-year-old self 
with her rusted knees. she's digging
in my parents 1/2 acre backyard,
sandwiched by corn & soybean fields.
i explain that i've grown up to have
a backyard the size of a postage
stamp i would have how killed her.
she builds an apple orchard
out of push-pins. i steal her,
wrap her up like a sapling from
the nursery off 222 where my father
& i would pick out flowers for
the church garden, three springs
in a row. am i a perennial? 
do i grow up? we set to work.
i listen to her because she knows
better. there's a chorus
of shovels that fall from the
grey cloud, driveway-clang. 
a car alarm from inside the garage.
hush, we're digging. first,
the edges: the quilt undone one
square at a time-- all fray & 
foliage, earth bursting into 
onion grass, wild & tall, up to 
my neck. oh cicada do you
live in new york city or 
are you waiting another 17
years to prick the air
with your legs again? she takes
the tape measure as i explain
that i'm a boy now so i should
do it. she disagrees & measures
the corners of green. from
there we pull the earth like a 
roll of wrapping paper. 
first into a hill & then a turn
in a gravel road: the path 
where at night the foxes
come to eat honeydew, where 
the soybeans speak into headphones.
i walk, alone. october a brother
who's too far away. have i ever
told you how much i want to plant
a garden? i see us laying
in the small-square backyard.
i show you my eight-year-old
self but i introduce her as my sister.
you know i'm lying but you go
along with it. all up us, staring
up at a hazy grey sky that's supposed
to have more stars. she plants
them. i say
add a hydrangea bush for my mother.
you as for a rhododendron.  
a tree that blooms with syringes
takes root by the garage. 
the tree is a boy.

 

Wisteria 

alarm clock angel of death who
ate my pillows. this is what to
do with lamb's blood when it's only 
diet soda. mark your door,
the white whisteria whose petals
were never sturdy. hang down
from the doorways, the garage
where my father's blue jeep digs
a grave to crawl down into. 
do you trust barriers 
& boarders? i craved
your body next to mine last night.
i wrote a poem about
your under the covers. it's gone
now. i curled into myself like 
a snail shell-- fist
of calcium carbonate. bone. 
used myself as a chalice to hold
a plague in. we agree that
i'm a morning person. we agree
that the sun doesn't know
my name & is as startled by
me as i am of myself.
in elementary school
i tried to justify the existence
of god to other 4th graders by
explaining the angel of death,
took a red sharpie & marked
an X on the classroom door, called it blood.
i wish i could sleep more. 
i wish you could see the sleep 
left in me. the stones. the stones.
i wish that my heart didn't 
ring with locusts. 
what have i done? water into
blood. the frogs dropping
from the ceiling. the hail &
fire. wake up early enough.
i check my door 10 times for
the marking. i want to hold
onto your body longer. as if 
bone returns to skin. as if
the shells of snails unfurl
into petals. every waterfall 
becoming wisteria, we smell
good. we smell like thunderstorms,
fire, & sugar.
this will not pass, you know?
this is the morning on
this side of the world. 
i wait, cross-legged. 
unlock the deadbolt. you're
asleep. i invite the angel in,
we drink tea. we briefly 
turn into steam & back again.
we do not find words
for each other, only blood. 

 

Two nights ago, I told you that I have been raped three times in my life (or more). The first time I said the phrase “he raped me,” was in senior year of high school. I have the notebook paper where I wrote it down in the top drawer next to my mis-matched ceramic bowls.

I told you that “Me Too” never meant much to me. I spoke very little about it because my basic assumption has been that all women/female/femme/queer people have been raped at one point or another.

Two nights ago, you said, “Our bodies can’t take this much violence.” And I wanted to know what you were thinking about exactly, what violence surfaced beneath your skin. What guilt?

I was thinking of a murder that happened two cities over. Is it related?

Related to what?

The first summer after Trump was elected I had dinner at my Creative Writing professor’s house. He was inviting all his honors students. We sat out on his porch & he spent a time musing about Ulysses’ which I’ve read but haven’t actually read. Something switched & Alex starting talking, an unraveling:

It was 3am in Hong Kong when I learned that Trump was elected president. I laid down on a bench & cried & cried & I had no one to call. All my friends where asleep. I wondered if they knew. I wondered if they knew.

I don’t want to write about this.

Talking about the violence feels pornographic. I feel like in some way as a writer I’m benefiting from the pain of others & myself.

I wrote several poems about violence in Syria & never showed anyone. How could I write about that? How could I ever know?

Baking brownies in the kitchen of our dorm room I alternated between reading the recipe & scrolling through an article attempting to explain the conflicts there to an American audience. A 3 minute read.

I’ve become in articulate.

This is an attempt to write the numbness out of me.

Two summers ago, I still cut myself. I used a pie server because of it’s serrated & despite wanting to hurt myself I’m not especially good at it. We’ve never talked about the scars.

Sometimes I like them. I like how they look on my body.

We lit electric candles in November on the Trans Day of remembrance. The first two years I attended the event I sobbed but this last year nothing came when I wanted to cry. There was five of us in a basement room of the college. We read each name aloud, many that we couldn’t pronounce right because they were Portuguese.

What could I know/ not know of their bodies?

I cut out the strips of paper on which the names were written. The website that tracks their deaths includes the cause of death. I cut that part out.

In the trash, a pile of fire & knives & dismemberment & water & oil & fuel & rope & gun shot.

They were all trans-feminine people, or at least that’s what their names suggested. What sunk in me most was a feeling of disgust for myself. For my bound chest & butch hair.

What is a man good for if not to save?

What can a boy outside of Philadelphia do when the roof is leaking & it’s a Tuesday night & his friends live one house over & there are brownies in the oven that drench the walls in chocolate.

What oh what oh what oh what oh what.

I asked my mom what she thought of “Me Too” and she said “What of it?” I thought it could be a moment to bond. A moment to gain some deeper understanding of each other. I recalled the only night we ever cried together. I was sixteen & on the phone with a friend who had told me they wanted to kill themselves. It was the only time I saw her break down. She said:

“This is hard for  me—I have to hold everything together.”

& I didn’t know what to say.

It was past midnight. The floor of my room. The nightlight. The bookcase.

I will always wonder about my mother as we all do, but I want to say that no one owes you their trauma.

As a sophomore in college I worked as a sexual assault peer advocate. I learned the definition for rape:

the action or process of making a way through or into something.

“the plant grows in clear, still waters where there is strong sunlight penetration”

synonyms:       perforation, piercing, puncturing, puncture, stabbing, pricking

“skin penetration by infective larvae”

Women can rape too. They said for the sake of inclusivity.

What sun has penetrated you? What hands?

I don’t know why we’ve gone through all these things. I disagree firmly in the idea of karma. What goes around has not not not not come around.

for me.

My mother was best friends with a man at her work. His name was Frank. He was Catholic. He gave use these saint night lights because he heard we couldn’t sleep at night. When we’d say prayers my mother would ask if we’d pray for his white blood cells—that they would increase—that the treatments would work.

I think it’s cliché to pin-point a moment where you stopped believing in God.

He died. I buried God in the front lawn between the two pine tree stumps.

I’m thinking of the phone call where I told my father I hated him &  I would always hate him for voting for Donald Trump. I was by the creek outside my college. I tried to tell him that I was raped but the words never worked—the words couldn’t have worked. I said:

“Do you love any women—do you love anyone?”

It’s worth noting that very little of this has to do with Donald Trump but all of it does. I hate that it does. For me he’s axis from which the violence turns in me.

The morning after he won I took a walk down the main street & saw the came signs & I felt raped again. again.

again.

That night the black student union & the feminist group & the GSA gathered in the classroom space. My boyfriend who I’d broken up with in October offered me a hug & I took it. I felt thin. I felt like snapping.

Widen your definitions. Again.

This isn’t about any of this & I don’t want to be writing it.

Every year on the trans day of remembrance I feel like we’re mis-counting.

How do you explain that suicides are part of that number? How suicide can be homicidal? How the emptiness inside you can grow teeth & find the knives in the kitchen drawers.

I never told my parents of any of my suicide attempts after high school.

Will you hold me know & turn over the tarot cards. For the last three years every reading I’ve always gotten the death card & always known why.

This is about how I scrolled past the story of 9-year-old boy in Denver who killed himself after being bullied. He came out as gay this past summer. I didn’t read the story. I went past it. I took inventory.

I have adapted to seeing death like a tally mark. Violence like a gas gauge.

How many more miles? What is left?

We’re dying & I am a boy who grew up between two corn fields.

& I am a boy.

This isn’t a thank you, but a prayer book & a promise to make human the violence again. If we have to live within it I want to know it’s name. Know it’s body. Know it’s mother’s & fathers & scars.

Could I have loved hard enough to reach a boy in Denver if I had known. I know the answer & melt beneath it.

Robert Frost said

“Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.”

I wrote the quote on my arm in ball point pen.

This is not a question & it also is.

This is a promise & a prayer book.

Am I melting enough to save anyone?

 

 

 

painted hills

oh neon sign god, shut me off.
drop me in the painted hills
of oregon where the screen saver
was born. oh water-color toilet bowl,
oh nothing-sky. grey as the undersides
of fingernails where sleep finds herself
obsolete. i amble. i oscillate
in between layers. the desert is a 
self-cleaning organ. the desert knows 
nothing of our body parts, attempts
to swallow both of my feet & succeeds.
me; an obelisk boy in the pixels.
me; afraid of sand, kick the earth
till it bleeds again, alive. i want
to feel more real. i ask what animal 
left these red bites on my calves.
scratch myself open like a clean of
peaches. what is there to eat out here?
what animal came to organize each
layer of earth? mudstone, silt-stone
shale. i count the layers like 
the throbbing heart of the red wood
we saw, cleaved open. 550 AD, she 
was thin & testing her mouth. 550 AD
i wore stockings & tore them on 
the climbing-trees in the schools yard,
hoisted myself so high that i could
look off & see all the screen-saver places,
the water; still in mid-wave-crash.
the mountain; tired & waiting to 
exhale. i knew i had to go there. 
i will never admit to laterite,
the red-scab soils that stripe 
each hill. ripple in my. inner thigh
where the blood makes rorschach tests.
what do you see? a butterfly,
a blood-clot butterfly. & so i stay 
there until the image fades. the great
american eclipse reliving itself
through a computer screen. when
you think of my body do you recognize
the volume of blood? the ability
to heal in coats. beneath are 
the bones of vertebrates. 
paleontologists flock, trow in hand,
leaning over my bed while i toss
& turn, pull the sand over myself.
the night is in oregon or so i assume.

 

Lock your car doors, you said, in black trash bags.

Count fingers. Suffocate ten. Ten trash bags.

 

She lived in a bowl of white-red-blue jewel.

Where the banana peels sleep in trash bags.

 

I tell you too much, the park in the Bronx.

cans go out on Sunday, two clear trash bags.

 

I find myself climbing inside; black air.

What does a body do between trash bags?

 

There’s too many girls. Always has been.

Turning inside out in twilight trash bag—

 

A kind of crow gone pig-skull & ageless.

Mundane, the street lamps fear every trash bag.

 

I should think less about shadow’s insides

Drown policeman prayer book, breathe through trash bag.

 

Her skin sold plastic, swallowing trash bags.

They found another body. Black trash bags.

six years

what have you done with the last six
years of the world being over?
i have purchased glasses of ice cubes.
i have kissed marbles/ been startled
by the urgency of a star.
i have road a bike backwards/ fallen.
i have eaten mulberries & undid
knotted coils of snakes in the stagnant pond
that is now in my throat, a pill.
of antidote will you tell me a better
story without a last page.
nothing's gotten softer yet. yes,
it takes time, the hard candy planet
tastes like strawberries laying
in sugar to die. how did we not notice? 
of course not with all the televisions 
this one was too loud-- the stock market 
becoming a moth tongue & our socks
un-sewing themselves carefully night
after night. i want to be the one
with the gorilla glue, the father
in the garage who picks up people
like stacks of nails/ blocks of wood.
are you a balsa body? the drill
in the chest, yes, yes this
will save us then. this will put
us back together. i go to work
on the clocks as well, the arms
bleeding, muscle wretched from bone--
socks strings pulling loose,
moths chewing wool. what time
are you setting your alarm in 
the morning? 
too early, yes too early. 
nails go from the box spring,
their roots, a following thing.
i am here running out of pine
needles. i am here pulling
the string to turn the orange
workshop light on, god in the corning
singing into a green bottle:
it's been a hard day's night
shooing away the moths that have
come for him. i ask how
he chose to end the world 
& he laughed & shook his head 
before nodding off to sleep again.
hand me the saw table, let's 
split the house right in half, 
right at the front door, sever door bell
sound. is six years too
long then? lay down & tell
me what your body has known in
the six years since
the world has ended. where were
you that night? how small &
how strawberry & how barefoot?

 

off with her-his head!

said the red queen as she painted

 

my white chest crimsons

 

a rose is a rose is a god damn rose

is a god damn rose

 

what you are

 

is yes not what i am yet

 

will you take the rose out of me?

 

was the rose born a rose or did

she paint you red?

 

do you know, really know

 

color?

 

thorn by thorn, snapped off

these my hip bones carved up

 

into dowering rods

 

where the well water is a woman

is a woman is a woman is

 

mutilation body mirror

 

where I tape my father’s 5^th grade

year book picture

 

& say I do believe

In boys, I do I do I do

 

 

manhood

on the wall of the museum of natural
history Teddy Roosevelt etched his 
words on Manhood. He came at night,
as all dead presidents do, propped
a ladder up against the wall & smacked
each capital letter into stone. i held
the ladder steady while he worked.
he read aloud

all daring & courage
all iron & endurance of misfortune 
make for a finer & nobler type of
manhood. 

i wanted to ask him what he thinks
of a man like me, but he was busy
& my father has already told me
at some point. in the mirror

i try to see if any of my bones
have gone iron yet, if the rust
will take action against me,

counting the scars on my forearms,
the wings of dead birds, the broken
strings of an electric guitar
propped up against the wall in 
the attic that my father no longer

plays. inspection by the tiger;
the yellow eyes & brows bent
from other creatures rib cages.

a man of the ching dynasty.

i dress in his wife's clothing 
& hide beneath & old song about 
girls that i am not.  

on the bench before his image 
i knew for certain that there
will always be men who will
not believe me

when i tell them about 
the garage door, about kicking
a soccer ball into it to 
make craters.

i let go of the ladder,
what is manhood but apprehension 
to be in the thick of things

Only those are fit to live
who do not fear to die

says Roosevelt to the apatosaurus 
& allosaurus bones, both still
as iron, both noble men.

there i am again. by chest bond
with iron, my vertebrae angry
with iron, the lion oh tiger

stepping out of the bamboo brush
painting to test me, paw to 
my chest, a crater, a landing

give me more corners, more
harsh boundaries.

give me the iron from my father's
rocking chair & the aluminum 
of his beer cans.

he put his foot on my
head, do you buckle inward like
this?

i tell our president that the
most consistent definition
of manhood i know is the ability
to swallow yourself so far.

i crush the cans into the walls
of the old museum, smell of
hops & highway,

an exhibit of our manhood.

the tiger will want something
in return.

the needles will have mouths
to not kiss with.

what left of the iron?

a finer & nobler kind of man.

 

i don't feel like i have to write
this poem because you saw it jotted 
on my notepad.

the poem happened
three decades ago but,

for the record, you were the one
who said to marry you tomorrow

& i would but we don't
have any china/

you haven't seen me in december  

have i told
you that you take the anonymity 
out of me? 

did you know that sandpipers 
collect stones to give
their partners,
cull the shoreline for the right one?

you see the stones in my pockets--
in my backpack, on my desk.

the bottom of the sink
& in the parking lot where 
god's been replaced with a red neon sign. 

not all stones can be poems,
but the best ones are.

i pulled up a map of
Tacoma Washington on google earth 
to try & remember 

where the stones in the bowl
on your counter are from.

dropped a pin & said it's where
we'll land when the hand rooting 
through the bowl of clouds picks us up.

will you set me down in a city 
neither of us can remember the name of?

will you write an address on your
forearm? 

will you cull the shore
with me?

teach the pacific ocean our names?

 

the mother of wands 

pruning sheer under pillow,
i cut the crab grass from around AM.
the snake in the sink, faucet
drip over forehead. two nights
ago we witnessed the moon 
in the sun room window. how she
took up all the space she could.
the yellow room with the green chairs 
& the muscle memory of passing by,
the piano neither of us play.
in the bedrooms i pass you a handsaw 
& we finally take apart the bunk beds,
it's been at least ten years coming,
the snake in the closet, the moon
drying with the other dishes.
bowls of vanilla bean ice cream. 
you moved away to college yesterday 
& i didn't call you. i found the elk
antlers & super glued them
to my skull. will this hold?
i'm asking you because you were
the one i would wake up in the middle
of the night when we were younger
when the dark of the room became too alive,
shaking your shoulder, your eyes: two 
christmas lights. you'd roll over
& let me have the top bunk. let's
take it down, mattress on floor,
in the sink. wet with apricot nectar.
in the bath tub where
the lady moth becomes two playing cards,
queen of spade & heart. completion 
of a cycle, i know you believe in
god & relinquish all need for a mother.
i'm still taking off lipstick 
from the first day i moved into a dorm 
& told that window who i was. did
you sleep well? i hope you didn't.
will the mass be in portuguese this week?
will the bicycle tires remember your name?
tell me, brother, what ever was 
the point of fathers anyway?
what use for a past/present/future
when they all sleep in the same bed
that smells like petrichor?
will you promise me? if you don't
i'll roll the eggs down the staircase,
back to the kitchen where the snake
is still in the sink. where there
are apples rotting in the fruit bowl
& flies like escaped obsidian 
pirouetting again. our father
sweating like a green beer bottle,
his bottle-caps on the floor.
mom un-doing a line of knitting,
taking the walls down. the storm
windows. the yellow & blue bowls.
don't miss it.
don't miss it.