unalive in the midnight 

i want to survive the shift
in language. the tongue beneath
the pillow. i speak
the ugly kitchen words
into your ear. you tell me,
"smart yourself
or we'll never get to see
the kids." my favorite words
are outdated or forbidden ones like transexual 
or homophile or dyke because there
always feels like there is
something truer about them.
maybe we have
admitted too much. maybe
death is not a place we get to go
but an undoing that envelopes us here.
if that is the case then
i am already unalive. when the radio 
tower turns into a pizza hut
i'll still be talking. in the dead internet 
theory, i am the last one standing.
a handful of teeth 
in the zoo of gone words.
no one says that anymore.
i remember the extinction 
of the great cats. the end of elephants.
i keep it short when i say 
what became of us. we were graped
& not in the vineyard
but here i am transexual 
& impossible to eat.

green sheets 

the popcorn turned
into stars in their microwave bags.
a girl with too much beautiful
was now my roommate
& the windows filled with deer. 
i had wanted college
so badly but i arrived terrified
& empty. i had not thought
to pack a blanket & the green sheets
i'd bought at the thrift shop
were thin. i searched for warmth in them
like a hand beneath the ocean.
in the halls footfalls & laughter
peppered the night. 
my heart, a little parking lot seagull.
i wrapped myself up as snug
as i could. a piece of meat
in butcher paper. the room was frigid.
my air conditioner singing,
"halleluiah," in a voice
made of gravel & gods.
i got up in the middle of the night.
went down to the common room.
sat there. my little vigil.  
no one else was there
& it smelled like wood & water.
out the building's front door
i saw the fresh orange sun.
it tasted metal like blood 
& sweet like citrus. a yolk
waiting to be punctured. i looked 
at my phone. called every
dead end i had until 
one answered. it was a stray cat
that used to live in the garage.
he said, "do not 
come home." 

mailbox

sometimes i go to the mailbox
to have someone to talk to.
the junk mail might as well
be pigeons. i say, "i am looking
for a letter." the mailbox purses
his lips & says, "i have nothing
for you." he is always lying.
there is always something.
even if you know no one
& own nothing there will
be mail for you. a local plumber.
a politician's wax face. the mailbox
really likes to talk about black holes.
he says, "one could come at 
any moment." i don't want to know
more about physics so i don't
google whether or not this is true.
instead, i accept it. maybe a black hole
could keep me company too. could even
transport me a heart
from a creature in another dimension.
something for me to chew on
in the dark. i admit to the mailbox
on day, "i do not think 
anyone knows me." the mailbox
spits out a letter that i sent
to a friend years ago. it never
reached her. thank god. i have
this problem with thinking
i'm in love when really i'm just 
trying to catch my own ghost. 
i invite the mailbox inside for dinner
& he declines. he says, "it is busy
around here." no cars have passed 
since i've come out. the street is bare
& freckled with salt from the last
snowstorm. a therapist once told me,
"you should never assume what
someone thinks. ask them
or move on." but she didn't understand.
it is always safer not to know.
i do not ask the mailbox if 
he thinks we are friends or
if he doesn't like me enough
to have dinner with me. i just imagine
a circus behind the door. 
something that only he can keep running.
maybe a bird or a rat is coming
to lay inside his mouth tonight.
sometimes, i sleep with my mouth open
in the hopes that i will steal his job.
wake up with a mouth filled
with words. letters. paper cuts.
a package of shiny little beads. 

feast

i let the mosquito land
on my flesh. i tell him,
"give me pearls." he plants them
beneath skin. i want to follow
his drinking. swallow myself
until i am turned inside out. until
the sky is redder than red.
i see him work. his device,
his body & my body. the pearls
that will grow for days. turn hot
with fury of what was taken
& what was given. i do not know
why i permit this. i am disturbed
by my own inaction.
it is winter & i do not know
how a mosquito spawned 
& found his way into the bathroom.
he leaves me to talk to the light in the ceiling
like it is a god. the room is cold
& i cannot feel my feet.
i wonder if he feels cold too.
if when he landed on me,
he felt warmer.
quickly, i move to kill the creature.
his blood, my blood, a stain
on the white wall. i rub at it
but it won't go away. i think of
lady macbeth washing her hands.
i wash mine. already feel
the spot where the creature drank
throbbing on my arm.
the pearl growing. for me, beauty
is always like this. a buried
bloody thing. i wash my hands again.
look at the curtains of my cuticles.
cut my nails as short as i can.

toads

that summer was the last time
my lungs filled with coins.
i walked early in the morning
with no teeth at all.
lied to my mom uselessly that
i was going to church.
i looked up nearby catholic churches.
saint olivia's. once, i walked there
in the middle of the night.
considered what i would want
for worship. i did not believe in god
but i wanted to. wanted his thumb
pressing down on the roof.
i walked to the crooked neck
of the gushing creek.
rows of homes touched the thin forest.
i tried to find a house to imagine 
a life inside. my favorite 
was the one with the windchime colony.
all those throats. by ripe july,
i went looking for a family.
my dad had just turned into 
a pile of stones. i picked 
the stones up & hurled them one 
by one at the moon.
in the dirt, i found a toad & then
another. two little sets of eyes. i asked them
"would you like to be my organs?"
they said, "no, we prefer it here."
"if you come with me, i will sing
to you every moment of every day,"
i promised, knowing i would not
be able to keep it. 
they agreed & i sung 
all the way back to my dorm.
i tried, i really did. fed them crickets 
& my eyelids. told them everything
about gender & how it was killing me.
they would demand, "sing"
& so i would try
until my voice turned to sand
& despite all the stones,
the moon was still as loud
as a car horn in the window. 
i took them back when i knew
i had nothing left for them.
their eyes rang, golden bells.
my face floated in the creek,
a murky portrait 
of a diminishing girl.

the only one awake in the world

i am confident in my ability
to find a seam in the night
where no one else's eyes are full
of beetles. you tell me,
"you need to sleep" & i hear,
"you need to bury yourself
in the yard." in high school
i used to set my alarm 
to one in the morning. i would wake up
& stick my hands in the inky sky.
purple stain. the smell of iron.
there i would sometimes find
boys & sometimes 
find teeth. my own teeth that 
wandered off while i was both 
trying to die & trying not to die.
in that way, i am an expert trapeze artist.
i can balance myself on the nose
of a father. i can steady my body
on a hitchhiker's thumb.
i hailed a ride to the city.
it was the oily time after midnight.
he fell asleep at the wheel 
& i drove for him. a grubby beard man
with grit under his fingernails.
we have all been so far from
rest that sleep feels supernatural.
i am convinced though that i have
found those sweet spots.
when the dark & the silence 
swallow each other ouroboros style. 
i'm not sure who is the head
& who is the tail but there i was.
the only person awake 
in the entire world. the silence
was soft like moss. i did not 
let myself close my eyes.
i drank in the aloneness. 
wrapped myself in it.
just as fast as it comes,
the moment always leaves 
in a blinking pair
of headlights. a bird sneaking in
through the back door to become
a little girl. the street lamp flickering 
& catching a boy on the roof. 

ant paths 

while you slept i traced 
the paths ants took through your dorm.
like a river of little hungers
from the windowsill
to a mug on your desk. then, a march
along the ceiling to reach
the keurig in the corner. 
they never bothered you the way they
haunted me. i would imagine
waking up entangled. maybe even
being taken away piecemeal
by their parade. we met in winter
when there weren't any ants.
a snowstorm is a perfect place
to love someone without knowing
very much about them.
&, after all, isn't that the easiest 
place to love someone?
sun in a box of tissue paper.
spring brought the ants. at first,
i would try to kill them. my thumb
a little massacre. they knew though
where the trail was already. 
they would return. you would say,
"why do you bother with them?"
my heart like a balloon drifting
on the ceiling. i did not have
a good answer for you. instead,
i just want to the bathroom
to wash my hands with the dorm's
pink sickly soap. washed my face
with water. what would the ants 
come to take first? my fingers?
my eyelashes? one by one.
i think we both knew that
there wasn't enough snow
to keep us together. there is always
a little silent ending before
the official breaking up. i think it came
in the dark of morning
when i watched the ants. 
a little shadow part of myself, thinking,
but if i followed them,
then they couldn't get me. 

every window

my mom tells me
that when she was first broken up with
she cleaned every window 
in her house for days.
i don't know if she's telling me
to do the same. i have been thinking a lot
about my relationship to light.
once i lived in a room with not windows.
when i felt particularly unfettered
i would take a pencil & draw on where
i would like to place them. 
one in the ceiling & one right next
to my bed.
growing up we were not dusting people
but every once in a while we would
get on our knees & try to be.
paper towels & velvet lungs.
i think about the yellow light
in my mom's windows of the apartment
i never saw. i wish i could sit with her there
to have coffee. stare out the clean windows
& watch a pair of robins harvest twigs
for a new skeleton.
in my apartment in the mountains
i swept every day. that was my form
of window-cleaning. there were
only three windows 
in that apartment.
all but one i kept the blinds shut.
the one was tucked in a weird notch
in the bedroom. i went there
to worship. it was too high
for cleaning but still held the sun.
watercolor painting. every gold
& every yellow. my mom has not visited
my houses often but i still come home
to ours. the windows
are full of spider webs, grit,
& grease. i do not know if she wants
them cleaned. we cannot talk about light
without witness. what would
we see if we cleaned our windows.
shadows with crisper edges. 
our skin, like bedsheets 
on a clothesline. i want to ask her
when she stopped her ritual
with the windows. 
does she miss it? should i try it myself
even though my grief has grown legs? 

dear stink bugs

i have always wanted to be you.
i never know where 
you come from & that is
part of your mystery. 
whenever there is a warm winter day
you seem to be born like living gems 
from the walls of the house. 
almost every spider web 
holds one of your silent machines.
inedible. your shield skin 
& leaf litter hearts. this morning
i find two of you crawling
on the paper lamp by my desk.
your silhouettes like ancient searchers.
scouts for the melon knife.
grinding the coriander 
between our bones. i am lying 
right now. there is only one of you
on the lamp. the other
is me if you would let me
set my skin aside 
for an exoskeleton. i apologize.
i know that it is not your doing
who is & isn't your species.
just like i do not decide
which trees get to be children
& which ones are ghosts.
let us go swallowing all night.
i know an apple tree
in the middle of the corn fields 
where no one will find us.
there we can drink sugar.
walk slowly as we please.
i envy your pace. the patience
of your legs. my partner tells me
i am always running. i know
this is true & yet in the moment
i just feel like i'm trying
to breathe. there is a crow 
in the branches for
all of us. i have to admit i have
smashed you before. smelled
your final reeking question 
lingering for hours after
i made you into an asterisk. 
i have my questions too. 
where would you return to
if you could? do you want to follow me
to the apple tree? i will bring
my spare legs & the antennae i grew
while i was waiting for the sun
to ripen. 

baseball game

you can play gender all by yourself
if you have saved up enough baseball
to get you through the dark.
i run my fingers along the stitches.
the sweet grin of a hip bone. 
when i took myself apart the doctor asked,
"would you like to play baseball?"
it was an operating room. we were
in america which is to say we were
no where & everywhere. if i can help it
i try to be in america as little as possible.
i am not talking about the soil
i am talking about the idea. we would go
to the minor league games. watch men
strike out. watch fathers eating their sons' heads
like candied apples. someone is paying
for the dollar hot dog. someone 
is paying for the special seats
close to the plate. watch the gender come
right through the strike zone.
i used to play by which i mean i used to
try to be part of this country.
used to be a pretending creature.
to be seen is not always to be loved.
the first time someone gendered me right
it was at a baseball game. i was in a skirt
& still an usher in the bleachers said,
"young man." thank you thank you
for reminding me that baseball has little to do
with us & everything to do with 
an ache. my father corrected him & 
i focused on trying to catch a foul ball.
i knew each one was a heart i could use.
the escaping skin monster. 
i never did. instead, i watched & waited.
the field got farther & farther away.
the stadium light came up. summer night.
no players left. just me & whatever
body i have left. i carry it
like a bat. swing at moths. four of
my shadow, each for the home team.
tell me we can be something else. 
the doctor where the umpire should be.
i know i am up to bat. i know the game
is already over. there is no home run.
there is no pitcher. there is no gender
but the houses we fall asleep in. 
i wake my father up. i was just his nightmares.
everything is gone. we sleep in a field
of berries where 
the pitcher's mound used to be.