making real

there was a man playing guitar
with an open case on the corner by
the court house where two feet away
a woman with red hair argued with a 
cop while eating handfuls of sour cream &
onion chips. the court house has marble
teeth & a paper tongue & sirens on east airy st. 
have legs; they rush by, kicking down stop
lights & a fruit cart full of mangoes. 
walking up the street i passed a corner store 
named after our lady of Guadalupe &
i prayed to her out of habit. she kicked the
moon like a c antelope rind.
they metal-detect me & pull the scissors 
out from underneath my skin. i lie & say that
i use them for arts & crafts. the police
bite the edges of their badges like oatmeal
cookies-- chew plastic gold. i was sneaking 
in the scissors to cut holes in the foundation, to preen
the buttons from the elevator walls. 
all tuesday morning keep wondering around & i don't want to
ask for directions because i'm convinced 
that this is what it's like being born. i'm wondering
what it is about this building that can make
us real-- some sort of a talisman buried deep
in the foundation? the court rooms changes places 
& sometimes suck you inside. on trial they ask me 
now why would you want to get rid of
such a pretty name & 
they call me only by my finger prints--
speaking the language printed into my thumbs
that only judges & stairways can speak. 
the atm in the basement only gives out 20s.
how much do you cost to make-real. three times
i pass a conference room where a family 
is talking to a lawyer & i make up a story
that they're also all changing their names--
trading with each other-- they're playing poker.
i take the elevator to the 9th floor,
the one above the building where god makes 
the sign of the cross on your forehead &
quarrels with you for being arrogant enough
to not think your baptism name was good enough.
i get back inside & my grandmother leans by the
buttons. she asks me 
up or down?
& i tell her i'm sorry for getting rid of
her name-- she just repeats
up or down?
i say down & i stumble out of the court house.
i had wanted you to come with me but i
wanted to make myself real. outside a woman 
takes off her heels & holds them by her side--
a man carries three brief cases & hands me one.
i ask him what the court house is doing for him
today & before i can finish he's getting chewed up
by the marble teeth. 
the man is still playing guitar & he closes
his eyes & tells me
i never go inside, no. that place is
not for me. 
he takes out his name & drops it
in the open case like a dollar bill. 
i have no name so i drop in my thumb prints
& tell him to call me no-one

chlorine 

amphibial & face up:
i'm laying in my father's pool,
waiting for him to fish me out with
the green-mesh net. this is at the house
before he lived with mom, with guitars
hung on the basement walls. chlorine
soaking in to skin-- the filter coughs
up mouthfuls of leaves. my grandmother 
is sitting on the porch & tapping off 
the end of a cigarette, she coughs too
until the world shatters & i'm sitting
in the shower as the pool-smell washes off
my body. i sit criss-cross on the 
tub's floor as my mother washes
her face at the sink. i sit on the water
edge with my feet dangling in, pop out
my eyes like pearls & plop them in the water
one by one until my vision is warped
& blurry from chemicals. my father doesn't
notice the frog, face-up & drifting in
the artificial tidal pull. above ground,
a coffee mug placed on the edge table, my mother
measures spoonfuls of sugar into the water
until it turns brews brown & hot, leaning
down to drink. you bring me back my eyes no
matter how many times i toss them. 
you are a good brother & i am the bad one.
later that evening when the water is dark 
& the pool no longer has a bottom, i slip inside
to see how far sinking will take me. my hair flails;
grows long-- water pressure pulling more &
more from my scalp. deep down there i find myself
as a little girl-boy pretending to be an anchor--
blowing bubbles from my nose to empty myself
of air. i have the impulse to pull lovers under water
to kiss them. is this siren in me?
the chlorine in my blood stream? my father 
looming at the edge of pool, not plucking me out,
watching the frog's body thrash. the boy told me 
he pulled girls underwater
to kiss them by surprise & i never want to be 
like him, but here i am with someone on the hem of
the pool, kissing their neck & moving aside the 
dead bugs on the surface of the water. when i get
home tonight & i'm myself again away from 
the threat of water i will have the urge, i know 
i start digging in the carpet of my second-floor
apartment. i will have to make a pool. i will
have to fill it with chlorine-water. i will
wait for you to come sit with me, you the frog 
with the chemical skin, you the drown
jupiter beetle, you the blue tiles at the bottom.

The recipe

I.
back of the knife across the measuring cup.
the wobbly knee butter on the counter. three 
tablespoons. four tablespoons. the Pam spray 
from the cupboard above the oven. the wooden rolling
pin from the top drawer. i take handfuls of flours 
& pat them all over my body so i don't stick. 
i imagine pouring the three cups of sugar down
my own throat to stop the earthquakes in my chest.
i let you mix the dry ingredients with a fork. 
it's nighttime & outside the world is kept warm
only by an oven. thousands of people to the back porch,
laying down like thumb-print cookies. we pick them
up & lay them side by side on the tray, one inch apart.
you get on the tray & tell me you trust me. i fill
your chest with apricot jam. 

II.
the bottoms of my feet burn on the kitchen floor.
what happens when the baker loses his compulsions?
when he no longer imagines the egg shells biting &
bursting blood vessels on his neck? lately, every time
i try to bake something the recipe changes half-way through.
two eggs instead of four. the oven preheating to 
the temperature of the basement, each step sprayed down
with oil. i hear your voice from the ceiling tiles 
saying "he's such a good baker, such a good baker." 
the tray of thumb print cookies bake into each other:
people with their arms & legs fused, one big
sheet of bubbling skin, raspberry jam measured one
tablespoon at a time. i ask god what could be wrong
with me & he laughs & sticks a finger in the bowl 
to lick the batter. you stick to the tray. 

the short distance ahead 

dear alan turing, forgive me
for re-making your machine, the first
approximation of a computer with its 
stripe of paper & 0/1 number making.
i won't pretend to know what it's for 
but i'm told that it answers questions.
i ask myself if i write poetry for
the same reasons you took up a love
of numbers. in a video about your life
they claim you sought out truth 
& i laughed because people always assume
the numbers will be sturdy for us-- that we
can trust them to hold us. take the number 6:
the number of war-years & the number of men
who left their thumb prints on your neck. 
i want to meet you out on the front green
at cambridge, a notebook in your lap
as you write equations like love poetry.
what is the number bigger than all numbers?
i ask your machine & it writes a sonnet
about the end of the second world war 
& your code breaking calculations. 
oh we all know that heroes are stalwart like
numbers. are impermeable. the backroom
where you promised not to attempt making
truth out of his body-- you told him
that no one could ever ever know. i called
my brother last night & told him about
you. i asked him if he knew that the man
who made the computer was gay & then i said
that it's not fair to put the weight of our
words on people long passed.
my brother listened & the machine 
kept on going, trying to make sense of 
words between brothers. i wrote your
quote on the top of my notebook
we can only see a short distance ahead,
but we can see plenty there that needs to
be done &
i see you staring hard at the floor
of the doctor's office as they give you
your first shot of estrogen, the homosexual cure.
i told my brother how this was what they did
to gay men in england, the feminine 
hormone to make malleable bodies, to make
antidote of a heart. i feel guilty because
when i take hormones they arrange a man
out of me. i'm thinking of my own short 
distance ahead & the machine on
the counter top. until i met you i 
distrusted the numbers, always,
i saw them as a false sense of absolute--
the inarguable marble gods: the 14, the 15,
the 16 the years i spent raging inside skin.
why do we fight our bodies like this?
why do they fight our bodies for us?
the spot on the wall you look at as your 
body takes in the estrogen each week.
weeping on the end of the bed, numbers
written all across your body as if they
could right the wrongs inflicted on you.
the machine is giving me 0s which
means no no no no no
everytime i eat an apple i think
of the one you bit full of your own cyanide.
i tell my brother that i read history 
no because i think i can ever right a wrong
but maybe i can resurrect it, cut it open
give it numbers.

sparklers

II.
it was a week ago when i told myself
i was going to write about sparklers. they've
sat on the windowsill, still in their blue & white TNT package. 
i wrote the narrative of me going out in the parking lot,
blue lighter in hand, unlit stick in the other,
my shadow stretching giant across the lawn. magic is partially 
a matter of will. i, of course, meant them for us. 
for me holding a flame steady while you extend your arm, 
waiting for the impending aluminum-magnesium ballet-- 
the metal in your bones catching too. 
oh rebellious light. iron-induced. 
watch, i'll bite them in my teeth. white titanium mouth.
all celestial in us is brief.
I.
early grey dusk asks for scars, i'm tracing circle after circle.
here is where light was so loud it remembered us.
the red-iron pocket knife to my soft fruit-bowl belly. 
we came apart, my brother & i. box by box of sparklers beneath the deck.
my uncle had a lighter for a thumb. the last few seconds 
were always desperate. what to do with the temporary 
nature of the sun? god cupping his hand around the 
head of a candle & pursing his lips to exhale. i meant
to write this part first, i cut myself swallow-able. this time:
great hunks of watermelon & cantaloupe. this is messy.
mosquito bites behind the knees. light the last one.
i'll wait. we have boxes & boxes. 

aluminum earth 

i've noticed a steady increase
in gravity. don't give me the physics-- 
i want the truth.

you've felt it too

i've watched how you dig in the backyard
in a desperate search of time capsules:
shovel slung over shoulder, making welts 
in the earth-- 

the onion grass slipping between
our fingers & becoming eyes to be peeled
apart layer by layer. 

the earth's crust a kind of
18-rind clementine to unfurl & unfurl

the flesh is hot magma & tectonic 

there's the shorter days 
& shorter bed posts as evidence

this is the closest i will come to science

i don't mean time i mean the gravity pull-- 
i mean the way

the curtains have started opening themselves

the way the trees trunks have started to
push deeper in the soil like 
pencils hurled at the classroom ceiling

what will this mean for us?

i see it all aluminum

scrunched in god's callous fists 
as he makes a smaller & smaller planet

bone rubbing bone

sky scrapers kneeling-- 
this isn't all about height

i sit down at my desk & install 
a doll house window in my forehead

& all the people arrive like it's a 
drive-in theater

a memory of us with no gravity

in the bounce castle & afterwards 
in the forest behind the creek full
of ticks 

& mosquito bites like
pebbles skipped beneath the skin

keep skipping me stone &
record & sunday until there's 
no more pull 

until shoelaces untie themselves
& the final distancing occurs

before them we will be fantastically close

crushing alley & street

time square around everyone's corner
& machu picchu, a stepping stool to stand 
at while we wash out hands at the sink

i'm thinking about gravity because
i'm wondering if this will bring us
all close together 

i want to say "together again"

but distance is so so human

i have come to know 
love as an address & always 
a handful of miles away

i stand outside & let the GPS read me
how far gravity has to break the landscape 

like bread-- like manna

i've given up on the physics

you look in the window &
see a pile of barbie shoes/
un-used green & yellow thumb tacks

do you believe me about the gravity

the thumb on our chest as
we lie awake in separate beds

sunflower seeds to be 
pushed into earth

when each step sink you in soil to
your thighs 

you'll believe me

The Divine Law

1. 
i went looking for Sodom & found soot,
the floor of the world: my grandmother's ash tray.
as words for the wise, the angles always come
in disguise. their blue bodies & their bleached teeth. 
knocking on the bathroom stall doors 
at rest stops across arizona. the gas station:
the queer space takes over. paul echoing: men committing 
shameless acts with other men. what can't be purified 
with fire? what i love about the story of the Sodomites
is how god burned us down & here we are. as far as i remember
we never read this story in church. the angels knock
at my bed room door & i don't let them in because
i'm not hospitable. the unnatural children are often
born out of heat; cigarette buds growing legs to run.
2.
we make our own angels. we build the city back.
here is where the sun goes, tweezers to sit it
back into our eyes. the men who survived are blind
but we tell them it looks beautiful, they caress stone 
& weep. does it hurt when i touch you here?
the back seat of the car is a boulevard when you 
lay down like that. there's no angels there's no angels, 
only the sirens & Lot & his wife. They escaped the fire
& left us to our indulgence bodies. you burn me like brick,
like don't forgive me father. each time we find each other
i turn off the light, we became blind men to build Sodom
back from the dirt. i take handfuls of you. stone &
sand. eyes closed, my hands through your hair, a forest, 
all these skyscrapers. what a city, what a city. 
our angels: fine dust, grit in your teeth,
the neon ceiling of the gas station bathroom.

tossing stones in the perkiomen creek 

a pile of grey stones where my legs were,
knees, smooth & disk-like
with the gravel of my thighs

i disintegrate myself carefully,
limb by limb 

to be tossed,

the perkiomen creek makes a hungry mouth

tongue snake-flicking with
cool june water

your mouth, your teeth like 
store fonts or ivory 
piano keys 

we killed the elephants, me & you

& we found their remnants as
these rocks by shoulders of the water

shrug me into a parable about
falling into love

love, like the side of the cliff
you told me about, the one where
you're exposed & all the trees
laugh at you for being so 

vulnerable & human

each stone is a story i didn't
tell you

we talk about the bodies we've
been snowed in with 

& the trees start to shed their
ice crystals

the ones they've been holding
in for a summer-
day like us

i love it when you talk about
people the last person you loved

forgive me, but i find
myself loving them through you

i conjure their laugh & the curve
of their nose & their legs 
dangling off the side of the bed

morning sun striping skin

i want to thank them for being part 
of this yearning 

it all aches in me

the snap of stone on stone

the spark of water 

am i just a vessel then?

my chest becoming more pebbles to 
throw, take a handful for me 

i crave the slow-motion sinking

the feel of grit under finger nails

the birds skim the surface
to pluck gnats 

they pick us up by our shirt
collars & dunk us under

deeper than we thought

air bubbles turning into 
fragments of speech

i kiss you like the boulders 
as they smack into each other
down the side of the cliff

blood-vessels becoming
firework 

becoming broken 

this is me throwing me
throwing you

tell me their name again

i'll tell you mine 

& we'll watch the words elephant amble

shaking the night

you've left me here

removing the stones from
my bed & dropping
them onto the bedroom floor 

the fall of the baobab tree

cavernous us, with the throat
that grew around the peach pit

i shouted upwards & watched my 
voice become a tree with green-yellow
fruit & a prehistoric body 

the oldest baobab trees are 
1,000-2,000 years old

their leather-wallet ears
still ringing with the first 
shocks of gunpowder from 
the battle of Wolf Mountain River 
in China 

wanting to crawl into themselves
as they watched the Norman Conquest 
in Europe from all across 
Sunland, 

linking arms & humming when 
they felt the earth soak with
blood 

you tell me that some of
the oldest baobab tree are dying 

they crack from the base

rot of rain & drought.

i arrive inside, counting 
the tree's rings as they wrap me 
up closer, 

scarves of wood & voice 

& i'm in the downstairs closet again
at my parent's house 

where none of the mittens have matches
& retired coats hang from hooks

only there's no doors this time,
the ceiling grows upwards &
the walls sprout white mold

caving in

i'm here with the baobab trees
asking why they have to 
leave now

what new life have they discovered
away from the girth of their bodies?

do giants prey themselves smaller?

i run my hands across all their bodies

skin becoming human & soft

skin becoming feathered & fawn

how many animals have you worn?

before you go, teach me how to
grow with your own scars

twisting & knotting, 

pockmarked from run-ins 
with elephants & sharp intentioned
will of humans

i came here to find a jacket

the IV, an old root looking for life

i imagine the baobab tree does
not resist death 

not after this long

i sit as it lets go slowly

as it peels apart like a sinew-less
tangerine, lobes dropping
like pillows

in my bed i hold onto you

i want to ask you to count my rings

i want to tell you that 
i felt the sting of gunpowder in
the fall

instead i pull the room shut like
a curtain

peel open my chest

& find a coat to wear 
for the open door

revel

sleep: the obsidian room,
fingernails clicking on ever surface.

when did i become insect? metal?

limbs as sewing needles, in & out of 
the shiny earth. 

repeated myself
like a wave, 

the spinning of the one-wing fly
 
sometimes you have to pull
sleep from your mouth.

unhinge your jaw like
how the adder consumes the deer,
hooves & all.

how typical is it of a us
to write poetry about 
not being able to fall asleep?

when i was younger i would
pluck out my eyes with the closest 
pen & set them on the laptop screen 

another version of
myself with tangled brown hair 
& long finger nails is 
crying in the corner

i sit up, obelisk me

tonight i want to revel 
in my restlessness

i want to reach out the window
like a cupboard till 
i find the spice jar you 
come from

cloves maybe or anise

i'm rooting in the bottom drawer
of the grass outside where
the ants whisper war plans

i tell you about the fields around
my parent's house

i don't tell you about
how sometimes when i drive at night
i'm so tired that the sides
of the road fold me in

i drip molten copper

i wax candle across your skin

i headlight into a tree.

i imagine you with me
awake & talking the room full 
of moths

every time someone says something 
i want to keep i see it growing
wings & ambling on the ceiling

i turn myself over 
like biscuit dough

i, i, i, i, i

outside the government 
is taking pictures, surely

finding all the children who
learn to not fear this awake.

the world last night was
the sound of four closing doors

of your foot steps under my eyelids,

my heart hammering floor boards
to thrum under.

i became small & crawled on
my knees beneath the pillow.

i met you there & there was a lake
& the water was cold chrome--

was neon diner ceiling.

what do you do with
your un-sleep?

do you count backwards?

i start at 99, 
98, 97,

& the walls shuffle like
a deck of cards

i think to myself 

if i stay up all night