spray paint

the sky is feeling really sick. i get orders
from a political flyer to paint it blue
so no one notices. i can't tell if the flyer
is handwritten & meant just for me
or if it came from a little machine
with hands like my father's. i'm ready
to do anything if it would mean we were
happy again. we see crows on the fence
of one of the nearby farms & you tell me,
"those aren't actually crows, those are
blackbirds." the blackbirds are looking
for any wedding rings they can steal
to make portals out of this world. 
they slither through & end up somewhere
with candy in the water. i do a bad job
of painting the sky. i have a can of spray paint
& i write my name & my lover's name.
at least this way every time i look up
& i see my mistake i'll remember i love someone
enough to want to pretend i am okay.
the blue i picked is too bright. we are cartoon
living. we & sitting on the half-grin of 
the waning moon. soon we'll fall into
the ocean & have to watch daytime television
with the sharks. i tell the sky i am sorry
she is so sick. the politicians have a meeting
about how sorry they are. they are 
always so sorry. then, they dress in nice clothes
& kiss each other under the sky they
made sick. i don't want to talk about bills.
i don't want to be protected by my overlords
i want to be protected by the blackbirds
& the crows & even the sky. i want to paint
my body blue & crawl up there. let the clouds
lay down like big dogs around me. my lover with me, 
the sun tasting citrus & sweet on my tongue 
when i open my mouth to laugh. 

conditioning the thread

i find you in the beeswax model
of our house. soon it will melt in the sun's
devil belly but for now, the world
is sweet & gold. you tell me,
"i want you to love me like 
when we first met. like a wave
ready to swallow me whole."
can you forget how to beg? i run
my fingers through your hair. 
we pinch off handfuls of wax. pull
our thread through the soft tacky masses. 
i love to condition the thread. 
we can teach the strands not to fray 
just by showing them our bones. 
then, the soft scent of honey on
my fingers. honey on my skin. 
the bees in their coffins. the bees
in the walls. all autumn you begged me
to let you eat them. there was a nest.
their larva like quotations. words passed
between us in the dark. with the thread
we stitch beads to our fingers. i try to remember
what i used to say to you when our love
was fresh & un-wintered.  the figs 
i grew from my ears. i tell you,
"in another life we made the wax. we
found each other as bees on a flower.
escaped the hive. died full & rested 
in the mouth of a fat hydrangea's skull. 

eggs

i told you "do not worry"
when you asked why i took 
all the chicken eggs out to the edge
of the field. love is about what we bear
for one another in the dark. 
you tell me that is wrong.
that it is about what we share. i have never
known this. still, my father does not
look at the family bank account.
all my life i've overheard him
say, "please tell me there's money."
then, once, my father helped me
burry a rib i lost. we said nothing but i knew
he was promising not to tell mom.
i had cracked an egg in the pan
& a toy car had fallen out. sizzled in
the hot oil. i opened another & found
a tiny rubber chicken. another, a key.
none of them with the sweet golden yolks
we're used to. each a panic room.
i dispose of the eggs. i do not know
what i'll tell you happened to them.
i visit the chickens & ask what is wrong.
they stare at me as if i am the one
who laid a dozen knickknacks. 
i admit to them, "i have found myself 
doing the same." i don't want to give
the same little glowing pieces of my body
anymore. i want to be useless. 
i want to sleep for a year & wake up
inside one of the eggs. no egg tooth to help me.
waiting for the flick of a wrist. the side
of a bowl. of course, you ask me
"where did you go?" i tell you the truth
about the trinkets. about the flock. 
we go out to the field together. 
you see a pile of broken eggs. their yolks
sticky in the dead corn stalks, earth still waiting
for the spring till. you ask, "what was wrong
with them?" i search. no toy car. 
no mini rubber chicken. no key.  

ant number

why can't you just let me be crazy?
on the television a man is saying,
"soon virtual reality will be in every house.
they'll be like toasters." i stick my head
in the toaster & i see a virtual reality whale
who is trying to escape the land of make believe.
when i used to have math tests
sometimes all the numbers would turn
into ants. i would start squishing them
with my thumb until the time was up
& i hadn't answered any questions. the ants
returned stronger than before. they came
with their new numbers. ones we are
supposed to explain how much
more time we need to sleep. my alarm is
a little buzzard. she wears a bow she stole
from a road-side memorial. i want to go rogue.
i want to drive the car into the clouds.
park it there. see them try & give me a ticket then.
sometimes i believe if i could just
see an ant number again i might have
a solution to all my problems. my mirrors
spit me out. my blood is full of race cars.
the virtual reality whale tries to swallow me
but spits me out right away. i'm sadly not 
a little krill. i'm just a man who is not
really a man but sometimes might as well be.
gender is such a terrible thing to talk about.
no one likes it, don't believe what 
they tell you. i do one of those ridiculous
street interviews. i hold up a paint swatch
& ask everyone what color it is. no one knows.
some people get creative. "dried blood."
"broken finger." so so close. the worst is when
the ant number are inside your phone.
i try to brush them off the screen but they're
deep deep in the wild now. you tell me,
"i don't know what you mean" so i take
a needle & thread & sew a shoe to the wall.
there. i'm not going anywhere unless
the house goes belly-up again. the fish tank
has eyes. watches a television. i never finish 
the math test. sometimes i find it, still blank
waiting for me on the kitchen table. 

until the cows come home

i don't want to wait anymore for 
everything to be peanut butter. you get 
the blender out & pulverize a baby tooth.
it turns into a sweet spread for crackers.
the recipe book grandmother's herself. 
i see a picture of some ancestors on a history facebook group.
they are waiting for something to give. 
we have to start accepting facts. gender is dead.
now, it's just a word that means, "here is how
i'd like to own you." as its replacement, i am proposing 
we start to make a city beneath the earth.
shut the hatch tight. grow dark flowers 
& mushrooms the size of our heads. wait for 
the cows to find us. they will come in late spring
once the rain has stopped & before the world
steps into tongue fire. right there. a hoof
on a window. the cows, our twins, crying
for us. they want to be ground beings too. they're sick
of all the metal. they say, "i want 
to be held." they dream of being
the size of jelly beans. who hasn't? i would love
to be carried in my lover's pocket. 
i don't know what do to with distances between
arrival & now. i don't want to be another
waiting ritual. sitting for an ancestor picture.
home, getting farther & farther away. 
i want to dig. i want the cows here
right now. i want their hunger & their weight.
i want a field of cows, all of them eager
& coming towards my front door. pouring
into the house. trampling all the nonsense.
the picture frames & the empty vases. the cows
putting reality tv on. making their own 
dating shows. i climb up on one of their backs
& you do too. we laugh. get as ugly as we can. 
then, we escape. re-prometheus ourselves
with a piece of the sun in our pockets. so unholy
that we kill the last gender. dry it out in the sun.
make it into sweet & salty jerky & eat. 

cop car bonfire

we share the siren like a strawberry,
the sweet guts in our hands. ripened in the
wordy sun. we circle the carcass
of a star. all the streets have gone licorice 
in the fire. even the forest burns her brush. 
sighs & lays wide open in the ashes.
this is what i want for us. for the other side
to be something softer. all the metal 
turned to flesh. walking in the early hours 
on a vigil. we keep watch for the wire men.
tell them, "this is not a place for capture.
this is where we run away to." i know there
is no such thing as a utopia. i am not talking
about that. i'm talking about breathing. about
living inside a whale. i'm talking about
not trying to fix what has always been broken.
i'm talking about building a fresh mouth. an open
house. the old way to hold on to one another.
the tires we will use for swings. the headlights,
for the eyes of our mother statues. shoes in 
a heaven pile. feet like wings, beating towards
the sky's throw blanket. the heat from
the fire, like a pile of breast bones. he we always were.
all the guns drowned in a lake. the sea monsters 
swallowing the bullets to turn them into pearls.
i know i am telling you stories. let me please
just tell you stories. if we tell them to each other
for long enough, they will start to grow lungs.
start screaming at us from the nighttime trees
along with the other bugs hunger for summer. 
 

crow mountain 

i have started to point out potential hiding places.
we drive through the mountains. see the crows
playing video games in a parking lot of
a defunct pizza shop. yellowing plastic sign.
i tell you, "i think we could stay there
if we had to." i keep a running list
of apocalypses that i would want 
to survive & ones i would not. i have been
learning how to talk to the crows.
they have been thinking about the end times
long before we did. in their eggs they all
watch a video about keys. about trying to collect
all the fallen pieces of the sun. this is why
crows are always searching for shiny fragments.
we do not pull over. keep driving. see more & more
flocks of crows. you never respond
when i point out a hiding spot. instead,
you change the subject. you mention hunger 
or the scientists trying to make a wooly mammoth. 
we are both different disciples of resurrection.
the secrets we keep from one another
turn velvet in the dark. i have been letting
the crows in at night. they have been
telling me their doom parables. they say,
"if you do not find enough sun, you will
have to come back again & keep hunting."
i feed them brown sugar. the moon gets
so heavy that it cracks open & releases 
a thousand spiders. my favorite hiding spots
are the hollows i notice in the necks of old trees.
i ask the crows, "will we escape?"
they consult an oracle. the oracle is inconclusive.
spits out barbie shoes & a little toy spatula.
one crow lays an egg & buries it.
i ask him why he's done this. he says,
"the future is full of water." i think we could
fix the roof of the old pizza shop. open the windows
in the afternoon. let the ghosts place checkers.
when the big men come by, turn into crows.
burry our eggs in the silt & loam. 
 

gender graveyard 

i buried so many genders
in the backyard. i buried them like 
goldfish. wrapped in toilet paper.
marked them each with a little wooden tombstone,
their names written in sharpie.
here was my green gender & my teal gender.
my hawk gender & my hibiscus flower gender
& even the gender that smelled like clean linen. 
no one came with me. the death of a gender
is always such a private thing. 
there is so much cis people don't get
about trans people. they don't know 
that we live the same lives.
only, trans people grieve. cis people
pretend that no part of them has
ever died. that there is no such thing
as a graveyard. i still visit them sometimes.
i bring them tasty cakes & sometimes
a bouquet of dandelions. they are restless.
they beg to take a walk with me by the creek
& i always say yes. i am a push over.
once i looked at the costume jewelry gender
& considered bringing her back inside.
i said, "what if i really was a girl?" she fed me
a drug store box of chocolates. i felt golden.
only then did she say, "i am dead. you will
have to find another." genders are not
like fruit or even like skin. they are 
something else. maybe an archway &
on the worst nights, maybe a mask.
i have seen other people's genders die.
why do we almost always pretend we are
alright when we are not? i was driving
on a magma afternoon. the melted car tires.
i came home to you. you saw my halos.
took them off one by one. the graveyard 
loud as a secret television. i hope the cis people
let it happen by which i mean,
i hope everyone is trans. 

skin sleeping

i sleep with my wings on in case
the house catches fire & i have to leave
with the geese. adults always ask,
"if there's a fire, what would you bring
with you?" i answer, "my backpack"
& they slap a "wrong" buzzer & say,
"you are supposed to leave with nothing."
when i ran from the city, when the skeletons came,
i put all my life in my volvo & drove it into 
the hudson. underneath the water 
i learned to grow gills. i mermaided for years.
left voicemails at my ex's house.
we had broken up too soon & i missed her
more than i had the lungs for.
fish are great comedians. i laughs myself
full of dirty water. i met an eel who promised
he could take me to a place no one else
had ever gone. it was nothing special.
it was just a pile of rocks but it meant something
to him. i think a lot about the decision to
march on land. would it have been better
to remain aquatic. i think that one day
we will get to meet aliens. they will
think it's weird that we sleep. i used to sleep
completely nude as a kid. i called it "skin sleeping"
in my head, not to anyone else. then, once,
my grandmother woke me up. she said,
"what are you doing without clothes on?
what if there is a fire? than you would be 
indecent." i died a little. put on my jeans & t-shirt.
slept with my eyes open, hoping she would
not return to my room. she did not. 
i thought of fire though. flames licking
my bare heels. flesh turned into printer paper.
i made wings the very next morning.
my first ones were from the lids of lowfat yogurts.
i hid them. practiced flying in secret.
no one has ever caught me doing it but if 
they did i would treat them like the eel treated me.
i would show them the collar where the sunrise
makes the world orange cream velvet. 
i might beg them to stay with me. i might say,
"we can make this work. we can make this work."
the message on their voicemail. rusty car
crawling onto land from the primordial water. 

cockroach maker

it is the least popular angel's job
to make the cockroaches.
we opened the windows of the apartment.
let the spring teeth bite our faces.
the first cockroach we saw was in the bedroom.
it scurried like a dead dancer, lost 
in the holy daylight. the place
still smelled like fresh paint. the landlord special.
a layer to veil the lives of the other bodies
who had tried to call the place home. 
the angel was in the closet already, working
as fast as she could. her fingers aching
from pressing legs into bodies.
she built the colony all by herself.
i did not want to believe they were there
at first. i wanted to believe it was just
a stray roach from another room
in the building but then night came. 
our lives were still in boxes & from beneath
the fridge the bugs arrived to form rivers.
they feasted at the ankles of our few 
boxes of food. met their deaths in the freezer,
leaving little corpses in a line
right at the entrance. i looked for the angel.
did not find her for weeks. we learned
to put everything we cared about
into plastic bags. the bugs kept coming.
little disciples of a hollow god. 
i had thought the apartment would be
the start of something new & easier
after years of living inside a show. 
when i visited on a tour 
everything glowed. all the window blinds
were drawn & the sun spilled her face. 
when i found the angel she was weeping.
she said, "i'm sorry" instantly. i told her
not to worry. that at least once in 
all our lives, our job has been to haunt
someone else. i beg her to leave. to stop. 
cockroaches at her feet. i do not tell
my roommate. instead, i try to take care of her.
bring her teas & then bowls of cereal.
the cockroaches still marched around her
to make a kind of halo. i gave up.
bought all kinds of poison. cleaned the skeletons
up from the carpet & around the collars
of the apartment. one day she was just gone.
it felt confusing. who had sent her to me
& why did she stay. sometimes i still
mistake my own shadow for hers.
her fingers, working as fast as they could.