good men

pulling the seeds off 
feather reed grass, strand by strand.

i opened my hands & watched them
disperse like falling jet planes,

me, the parachute 

you, the sky pulling me open

i was walking down by the empty ball fields
& conjuring a bat to smack 
at the dirt, 

letting the wind 
escort a few men's ghosts around
the diamonds-- 

glistening in the earth

i find the stains growing back
on the knees of my pants,
green & smudged maroon clay

do you scabs sometimes form
continents-- ports & harbors 
on the elbows 

i find a need to write a definition
for what a good man is
if i'm going to be one--

is it something to do with 
sturdiness?

i break the bleachers into
popsicle sticks 

i take a bite out of the 
neon green soft ball my father
is harvesting from the bucket 
in the garage

i un-screw light bulbs all over
the house to put them back in
again, 

i want to be useful,

i'm thinking of the basement 
with his wall of wrenches & hammers

i want to fix us,

lay us out on the model train table 
& bury us in ball field dirt

i'm starting over from scratch

no box mix blood & screw drivers

no knuckles, this time

no cassocks or lawn mowers

i'm taking pollen & smudging
it under my eyes like war paint

this is where we take apart 
ourselves & tell no one 

no tell everyone

pocket knife the tears
from under finger nails

this is where i draw a god
in the mud with sticks 

he asks me what business
i have here making
a body 

i syringe 

i peel

i fold

i want a smaller 
& gentler world

just big enough

the size of hotel shampoo
bottles

where the ground trusts me
no to leave scars

where my own mouth 
lets me eat stars, burning

holes in my gums,

drinking rain & collecting
on the sidewalks

i kick at the sand again,
this time near the pitcher's mound 

i see my father

he crouches in the outfield 

& takes a pairing
knife to his callous fingers
like apricots

tell me, is there
something to make-good 
with us?

lust is the big cruise ship pulling
into harbor, the one we're all going
to get inside when the time comes.
when the gods get bored & flip
the poles like a light switch,
when we realize that the stars are 
microscope eye-pieces, staring at us,  
the specimen's floor is white hot lava.
what an ocean the asphalt can make when you pound
on it till it ripples. the heat reverberating 
from the pavement is the ghost of 
my night shift father, lilting in &
out of sleep under the sun. the sun; 
bored of roofs & newspaper gift-wrap 
rips the darkness from beneath his
eyelids until he turns spectral. 
there's still an iteration of his soul
walking on the ceiling of the battery factory 
at midnight. that's when i meet
you deep in the ship's hull. i tell you
i lust you & it feels like a need to
pick up all the seashells off the beach
for myself, making necklaces under desk lamp,
hanging them from the rear view mirrors
of abandoned rust snickering cars
along the sides of highways. i tell you
i want to tapestry your body & we find
the wrong blankets to sleep under.
what's your room number? is there 
a spare key to this cock-
pit. you tell me there's no laws on the
ocean. the albatross is my father &
he's already sunk, sweeping sand
with a blue-handle broom. he's day bound now,
shooing away the dark like a swarm of gnats.
i'm making a night shift of us, a ghost
to board the big boat. the ink-stamper mattress
so that tomorrow, when we've both
fallen off opposite sides of the ship, there
will still be finger prints to wash off,
i want to remember each point of contact,
thumbtacks in the globe, cartographer-skinned 
children. we say "you're so young"
"so young" to each other. what is the queer body on
an empty vessel? hallway after hallway,
the sun rolls like a bowling ball,
for now, my love, we have this

end of season 

the strawberries are humming,
insect angry as i lift up leaves.
green skirts, knees & necks
shy from hands rooting through them
all day in the pin-pong sun. they're holy 
from the mouths of caterpillars. 
i imagine myself letting the bugs 
come to take bites out of me,
poke my finger through the holes like
a mouth chewed sweater-- like stocking runs.
pluck me apart a little more.
i like this idea of coming apart while
feeding another creature. i might
want to be buried in a strawberry field,
just maybe. crouched between rows of tired 
berry plants i think about Ontelaunee orchards
where we went picking as children.
strawberries for jam. boiling in our hands.
we were too eager. i ate them as i went,
one for the bucket & one for the mouth.
kneeling, fingers gory, wiped on my thighs.
my freckles turn into the little red bugs,
start scurrying over my body.
today it's late in the season 
& i'm finding the mashed red elegies 
of too-late strawberries. a proper
burial will come with the rain. i found
a few to eat, bit down on them right there,
the juice turning metallic in my mouth,
turning salt & blood. turning blister &
barefoot. i can hear you telling me
to wash them off. i smile smug & chew 
despite the dirt. the sweetness comes
back into focus. i find one to take back
with me-- it's shaped like a furious nose,
pricking with tiny seeds. i think 
how brave the strawberry is to wear
it's freckles like that, unafraid 
of them turning into clover mites.
i gnaw the last one from the drivers seat of
my car. the sun has a lazy eye & 
the bar doors are open, spilling with 
bok choy & ruffle-skirt lettuce.
it's late in the season for strawberries.

despite all attempts,
i have learned that the skin
will not become stone no matter
what you try to etch into it. 
on my right forearm i have
Vonnegut's mantra "everything
was beautiful and nothing hurt"
chiseled into tombstone. i wore
the rose print dress & the artist 
held my thin arm to keep me steady.
we stopped half-way through 
after i felt the room lurch, fainting
starts like blowing dust off
top the book shelf, taking the finger prints
with it. tear needle from plastic.
i don't want to be sterile.
the fury of spiders opening mouths to scream.
his skin was courser than mine.
i read that tattoos aren't just 
ink plunged deep into skin, 
they're actually fought like infections, 
cells coming to rescue the dermis 
from our images. the human is a body
of symbology-- the hawk, the tiger,
the dragon. a man whose name i do not know
presses into me, this time with the needle.
he says i should "lean into the pain"
& i laugh because i hate to writhe for anyone.
when he asks what the scars on my forearm
are from i tell him "poison oak,"
when they were really hot heads of matches.
i think of my skin sedimentary. the layers
of scar, the wounds beneath ink colors. 
my newest one is still healing. it scabs--
coming off in flecks of dried blood & tissue. 
alone i watch it, expecting to see the
cells in action, arriving at the surface
of my skin, like humpback whales, breaking
the ocean for a gulp of air. 

fresh carrots on the cutting board 

doctor, give me the novocaine.
the needle to the ceiling, between
the overhead lights & the fan blades
becoming airplanes. take off
& the runway of a pale tongue.
they took out four of my teeth
& shoved my face full of gauze. 
now i have to find them again because
you have to be buried with all
parts of your body. if left alone
those parts will grow new humans,
roots growing from the tooth, the little
red veins twisted & popped. 
where did you put all my baby teeth?
you're supposed to keep them 
in a mason jar & watch them become seeds.
the fish rush onto the river banks 
& slap themselves hard enough into
the earth to become seeds. i want
to pull all this genealogy out
of my mouth by the leafy-parts, like 
fat orange carrot legs. feel the 
genus & species coming out, let's
weed the garden. the sigh the earth
makes when roots come out all together.
what happens then? do i get to come
undone? more numbness, more moon.
they stripped the sun down to 
a pin point & jammed it into the
ceiling-- oral surgery of a soul--
the novocaine-- more novocaine.
syringe to soil. up to my wrists in
dirt as i diffuse. the scattering
of cells without a dart-board. throw
me harder & faster towards the red 
spot-- the blushy mars with her 
teeth falling out on the operating
room floor. i will find the teeth
before they turn into raspberry jam 
or another human even if i've scattered  
to just a mass of wandering cells,
easily inhaled. consciousness; becoming
a piece of cellphane wrap pulled in
infinite directions, catching the weeds  
as they're plucked. examine the carrots
like baby teeth, their follicles & thighs, 
their insistence of abnormality.
peeling off tangerine skin in the trash can
like you asked. 
i drive to the dentist office
where they did the deed only to find
that it's now a laundry mat, coins
all rolling out of an open front door.
i dig in the soil outside, hoping that maybe
just maybe the surgeons had the sense
to bury my teeth before they got
any ideas about coming alive on their own. 
they must be destroyed. there is a garden
& a bloody strawberry patch & 
the carrots are skin-- fingers & toes,
other patients whose bodies
had already  become to regenerate.
you must kill the double, but only your
own. there's fights left under all
our dirty fingernails. the novocaine doctor--
the ceiling is caving in.
should i plant myself or keep searching?
the coins are tails up.

lemon zest & lesser gods

this is a love poem for
the gods hesitant to create.

i imagine that the christian
god is loud-- that his sketch boards
take up a lot of room in heaven

always leaving crumpled papers 
& his discarded ball point pens stuck
in the clouds like tulip stems

sometimes others clean up
after him, 

trash bags slung over shoulders 

unfurling his blue prints
on his thighs

some mutter "such brilliance"
"i could never generate like him"

a lesser god discovers the
designs for the lemon
on an afternoon where 
the christian god is busy 
with more than one rainbow

sitting on his folding chair,
knitting needles in hands, 
as he mutters to himself 
red, orange, yellow, green,
blue, indigo, violet--

sometimes he drops a color or two

humans seldom notice, but the
seagulls do & they'll laugh at him
for it

the lesser god turns the fruit 
over in his hands-- examining 
the bright yellow flesh

it reminds him of stop lights
& crossing guards

he feels terrified of
it's intricacies, not wanting
to even cut the lemon open, 

runs a finger nail across the rind
as if the fruit where a lover's shoulders

on days when he feels worthless
he'd often picture his body 
slowly dispersing in small flecks
of light

he'd tell himself that not all
gods have to make worlds to rule over

that some gods scatter themselves quietly

he thinks of the lemon like that:

creates tartness in the zest, taking
a metal grater to the fruit 

he feels wild & genius 

rubbing citrus follicles 
onto his desk, violin bow motion 

there's music, some sort of 
stinging music

collecting the shavings in his
palms he lets them go from
the high cloud 

they fall, broadcasting across
the earth

somewhere i'm sitting at 
a kitchen counter while my mother
asks me to zest the lemon 

over the metal bowl

we're making a bundt cake 
& the pages of the recipe book 
are an iridescent yellow

i keep going past the lemon 
through my hand & across
my bones

marrow & vein & sinew & all

there is no blood or sting 

just the rind of lemons 
& more subtle gods 
than ours

you would make a good glass-jar specimen--
i'll grown you a third & fourth eye
to open 
1) from the back  of your throat--
2) from your wrist where the watch left bite marks

we would never go on that date
a sunday in May with the rain 
threatening to make us sugar water
for the plants

i liked us better
in vials & glass eyes

you had suggested we take our
date to the Mütter Museum 
in Philadelphia: a museum 
of medical oddities 

the romance of oddity is salvaged 
in us-- in men talking
about wanting to make
speculums of each other

open wider, we'll weed 
our blood of the cysts & tumors 
1,500 from the 19th to 21st 
century, save them for 
exhibits, we don't know

when next we'll want to
make fury of cells-- fist
of blood & tissue

did you make wax pathology
of me & light me like
clean-linen candle? or
did you think of us as 

full skeletons in the basement
one after another after another
in drawers of skull & twisted spine

bodies performing their pain 
for causes of science &
rare-bird 

if we had met would we be have
held hands or linked by
the liver like the organs of
the conjoined twins 

haunting & inseparable even
in scalpel & decay

dare we stop the unfurling 
of our natures

let us be visitors then   

observe each other
make staircases of spines
re-purpose quiet hearts
& extra finger bones

tissue from the chest
cavity of john wilkes booth

a kind of chandelier
dangling overhead

i'm sorry i never called you back

what kind of bones?
what kind of bones?

pin-up 

i want to know what
it's like to be a body threaded
into someone else's skin--
red & black ink child with the 
sewing machine sounds of a mother.
what is birth then for us? 
taut irish drum flesh
& squirm of fingers gripping 
the electric chair.
at the tattoo place i go to
specializes in pin-up girls--
they're posing all over
the walls, on their knees,
bending over, in martini glasses
& straddling fighter planes leftover
from the second great war. 
they have breasts like wooden tops--
each spinning on their chest--
on someone else's skin. i imagine
them coming awake, blinking as 
their eyes are sewn open--
the buzz of hornets. they writhe,
feeling arm hairs or leg
follicles bristling around them--
they invent a childhood in tall grass
& creek water to cope with the sensation.
they scold themselves for
giving bodies away to men-- oh how
could we let this happen? i tell
the artist that that's what i want,
to be one of them as i amble, 
pointing to different
pin-up girls around the room,
a cow-girl, a sailor, 
the girl in garter belts & lingerie. 
i say
i want to be that & 
the man who was sitting this
whole time in the lobby 
offers up his calf muscles.
it has to be a man (as we known).
the inability to observe one's own
body is liberating, becoming
a two-dimensional, brief encounters
with the mirror or the shop window.
so we grow old then, yes?
enmeshed in someone else--
i love that, the idea of 
aging with another anatomy. maybe
i invented this because i'm 
scared of loving someone like that,
or maybe it's out of solidarity 
for all the pin-up girls 
cold on bare skin in january.
if you see me though, ask the man
if you can touch me/us. 
feel the divots made by the needle,
trace me, cox me 
back to my own frame.

the woman's club

stage light body of a 17 year-old,
let's talk about who you
were 5 years ago. let's talk about
2 days before high school
graduation & my sand paper knuckles
& my novel printing tongue.
i'd wake up each day before school
to write a page of fiction, obelisk built
in front of my ikea desk, she believes
routines-- it's irish catholic prayer.
someone, someone please tell her that
she's not going to publish a book
tomorrow or drop out of college like
Salinger. tell her there's 
nothing heroic about the novel
other than the stubbornness of the
binding of old books at the library--
Dante's Inferno printed 1923 in her back pack,
refusing to let go of its pages despite 
fingernails yellowing, despite the tears of 
hell beneath the stage where i find her
sitting at kutztown high school's 
award ceremony. i expected to receive something
in literature, seeing as that was what
i prayed to. i sent angels 
to new york city to write the bodies 
of skyscrapes like all young girls must do. 
i made saints of dead men, plucking
rib bones & hope one would grow breasts.
i held seances in my bedroom: 
Fitzgerald & Hemingway drinking heavily in the corner
while i'd ask them for advice. they gave nothing,
laughed at all my inquires until they 
faded away, leaving bookmarks on the dresser.

the award i got that night was from 
the women's club of kutztown which surprised
me because i didn't know that we had one &
if we did there seemed no reason the award should
go to me. back then i wouldn't call myself
a feminist. there was something about
the word that scared me-- the inherent fire
of it. i would tell my mother that i'd
thought about it & she'd roll her eyes.
i avoided the term since. i googled 
"the women's club of kutztown" & found 
nothing. there's no remnant of
them to be found. it makes me think that
they're some secret organization, meeting
in basements & sneaking in the firehouse 
at night when the lion's club is done.
maybe they wear lavender cloaks & 
drink absinthe from crystal glasses. 
i imagine them, scouring the students of 
kutztown high school class of 2014. i have a hard time
imagining why or how they would choose 
young me other than a divine premonition--
their leader, with her long grey hair &
crystal ball consulted with the great ones,
with Gertrude Stein & Audre Lorde &
Simone de Beauvoir all of who were skeptical
of me, they suggested waiting for
someone more promising,
pointing to my lack of appreciation for
the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God as
a bad omen. it would be three more years until 
i took a class in feminist theory & only two
more years before i'd shake off my womanhood
entirely. 
one is not born but rather becomes
a man (forgive me). 
the award was just an envelope
with 500$ that i probably spent on 
the summer.
someday i'll find them though, i'll
robe myself in lavender & step out 
at dusk & known deep inside me
their meeting place.
when i arrive they'll scowl & shake their
heads & tell me that i'm somehow both 
too early & too late

martian 

like a rusted trestle or martian
earth i amble along the crease of
your scarred flesh-- 

the knife's careful work a kind
of geography

i stand in the mirror.
use a felt-tip pen to mark the lines 
where a surgeon will cut beneath 
each breast.

on nights like this i assume
we should be able to see mars

dislodged from a throne &
wanderlust between stars

iron oxide flesh--
the rusted bridge where the 
train used to pass over
the quarry

the god of war will work his 
blood in us

pray for steady hands
& for astronaut footprint 
in the red earth 

i've been searching google images 
of breast augmentation surgeries

a facebook group called 
"Top-surgery FTM/ Non binary"
lets me in & i sit & watch 
our bodies unfold into
one another

plural like the terrestrial 
mars who cannot hold onto water

there are inter-planetary 
reactions made across 
laptop screens

"mutilated"  is a word
my mother will probably use

the scar lines are 
purse lips

closed eyelids

i'm still looking for mars 
up there

like an earring dropped
onto the carpet

this time tracing myself 
fingers across skin 

i'm asking for a scarred body 
out of love for celestial ones

oh if i could use all our
scars like highways i could
walk mars bound & alien 

no one would ask me about 
what i do with my skin

why i do with my skin

what color is the ground
beneath you?

when they ask about my scars
i don't want to hesitate to tell
the truth but we will probably 
end up out here 

with low gravity & 
fourth planet abandonment

almost sustaining life 

but not quite

a jealous body
footprint bruised & aching with
the rovers tracks

they're trying to dig life
out of the craters &
valleys

like i try to unearth something
in a body