porch toad

thank you for always coming back.
i am here to tell you the house
i used to live in is now a half-dead lawn
with a rusted pipe jutting from
the earth. yesterday i passed by
& remembered the concrete porch
where you would come
& eat flies with me. sometimes
my father would sit with us too
but my favorite nights
were the ones where it was just
you & my bare feet.
we are all no longer as soft
as we used to be. i am glad
that the backyard ghost trees
are still there & that hopefully maybe
you might go to the parking lot next door
to swallow enough bugs to keep you fed.
i remember the first night 
you returned. i saw the orange-brown
patterns behind your eyes
& i knew you were the same creature
from the night before. i named you
but i do not remember what.
it doesn't matter. i have a different name
now too. i read somewhere that toads
only travel about a mile
in their lifetime. i know that means
you will not come to the porch
of my new home. sometimes
i find other others in the yard.
they are nothing like you were.
more skittish & prone to hiding
in the rotting pile of stumps
beneath the cedar. i hope that when we left
you did not miss me too much.
i hope the soil is damp & rich. i hope
your children all have places
to feast. o my dear porch toad
if you do come back, let us not talk
about the time that has passed.
i will pretend i am a little girl
if you pretend it is still a humid night
in august where both of us are full. 

carrot limb

i braid my legs beneath the dirt.
you ask me, "why do you always 
run away?" i have learned 
to grow deep. to go where
bones still drum. 
remember, a root is not a dead thing.
thick like a low-hummed song.
this is how we are fed.
sometimes i will hear someone say,
"back to my roots" & i will think,
"how have we survived 
so unnourished?" you come with
the spade. you dig & i watch.
there, my legs. they go deeper
& deeper. you ask me, "when
do they stop?" i am weeping.
it begins to rain frogs. the frogs 
all have the faces of my grandfathers.
i say, "i don't know." the question
is one of origins. where & why
did you start drinking downpour?
we do not reach an ankle. we do not pull
me up. you say, "i just want
to hold you." i do not want
to be held but i also do. 
i also want it desperately.
i want to be swallowed 
& tucked behind the ear
of an ancient being. for them
to keep walking & to forget 
the taste of my breath. my green face.
sun mitosis. two eyes beating down
on our little blood. you lay down
with me. shave my head 
just how i like. i speak in 
the broken plate morning.
"i remember my knees." 
you say, "i remember mine too."

chicken nugget

get all the bird in your mouth.
feathers & weekends & fathers. 
i am a blender disciple. put the house
in the blade place. it is better
to not know the way the feet looked.
i am getting to the age now
where i don't remember 
who did what to me. i have a blender
i just use for hands & another
for fruit. sometimes instagram 
tells me i want to watch juice cleanse videos.
i watch them even though
this is not something i could ever complete.
i had a boyfriend once
who liked to play with his food.
sometimes he chased me around the house
with a gun. the gun was a water gun
or it was not. we went on a date to
mcdonalds & he was wearing a tuxedo. 
he put a ham sandwich 
in the blender & told me,
"if you're really hungry, you will
drink it." i did. sometimes in my memory
he is not my boyfriend he is my priest
or my father. at a certain point,
what does it matter? throw the whole
skeleton in. throw in the eyes
& the nerves & the veins. it is all going
to the same place, a mash of 
unmappable body. sometimes i look
in the mirror & i see a chicken nugget.
jurassic & dormant. foot prints
left on the ceiling, a face in the dark
peering above the fence. i turn on
all the blenders at once. hope that one
catches enough sweetness
to make a meal. a grape or a gourd.
almond milk. a flock of beakless chickens
roaming a body room. their hearts,
little white meat nuggets.

sweat bees

this is how i like to be eaten;
not with teeth or tearing flesh but
with a mouth the size of a blink.
my father was the one who told me
that the small striped bugs were
"sweat bees." they gave us 
two little moving crowns as we sat
on the park bench beneath 
the old oak trees. gold & obsidian.
they do not really 
feed on sweat but my father believed
they did. offered himself up
to their feast. taught me to do
the same. the creatures never bit
but they did tickle as they traversed 
our arms & our necks. 
i wondered what we were 
to the insects. were we kin?
i think we were. a part of me always hummed
in the hours after. the sweat bees
were not around long. usually just
a few weeks in the sticky summer.
when they left, i asked the trees
where they went & no one had an answer.
it is always best to leave like this.
a mouthful of salt. a thrumming ghost.
i have not been feasted on 
for years. i wonder if my father has.
does he go out to the park alone
to meet the bees? do the bees notice
that he is alone & used to bring
along with him another brethren? 
do they know i am hungry too?
also called to make a knit a coronation
where our hair meets the scalp. 

speckled carpet

the carpet in my parents' house
is the home of prophets.
i have laid there on my back
to listen to them. whenever i've been sick
my impulse is to crawl to the floor.
i remember when it was new & soft.
now it's worn away. you can see where
we've cut our deer paths. 
it always smells slightly
like stars & sugar & grass &
dandruff & black pepper. 
they chose the speckled pattern
so it would hide our spirits better.
little gods with their thumb-sized hats.
at my sickest i spent a day there
pretending my ribs
were gills & that i could breathe 
underwater. i was so hungry that
i ate clouds from the ceiling.
in the carpet there are hieroglyphs.
there are ancient words for,
"i am dying & i don't want 
to stop it." once, in the middle 
of the night, my mother 
woke me up. the house was
on fire but only we could see it.
i begged her, "we have to save
the carpet." i took a box cutter
& scrambled to the floor.
she said, "there is no time."
we stood in the yard until morning
while all the men slept soundlessly.
the house was still standing 
with the sun. i have never asked her,
"what was the point in escaping?"
 when i return the languages are older.
the tongues that the divine speaks in
come in spirals. staircases down.
i speak back into them
with my flimsy mouth. i say,
"i want to join you one day."
sleep beneath a carpet loop
like beneath a bridge. the water flows.
i have never asked anyone else
what they hear when they lay
on the floor. i did catch my brother once.
he was laying face down
like road kill. splayed out. 
convening with the speckled carpet. 
maybe one day i'll ask him,
"did you see us running 
from the house? did you see
the blaze like we did?"

monk names

the older i get the more interested i am
in becoming a river. i would like
to choose a fissure in the mountain
to fill with water.
i read somewhere that i can't remember
that in monasteries
they keep lists of all the previous monks' names.
long & unending. centuries 
of sounds used to call one another
in the darkness. stone walls.
i think a river & a name have
more in common than not.
last year i was thinking about renaming myself
for a second time. it felt too difficult though.
i have already had to once 
go around to every window 
& ask if they would never call me dead again.
i don't know how anyone 
keeps the same name for
their whole lives. i know i would 
not make a good monk but i would love
to be renamed like that. to find a place
on a spilling list. 
to hear my fresh word like a tunnel
into the soil & the rocks. i would
sing my new name. i would wake up
before the sun each day
to speak it into the cool air.
i am too wild for a monastery. 
too quiet for the city. too hungry for
our little house in the middle 
of the fields. sometimes, when i feeling
my most melancholy, i give up.
i walk barefoot on the wet earth.
tell the snow, who are just passing through,
"you can call me dead." 

rehoming

i am in a facebook group
for people trying to rehome 
their pets. it is a flock
of all kinds of hungers.
each post, somewhere between saint card
& elegy. one post is written
in the second person
to the dog. the women concludes,
"i'm so sorry we couldn't keep you."
how many times
i have lived inside those words.
too big for every mouth
i've ever stood in.
once, we considered posting
our dog in the group but decided
we couldn't do it. we told her
"we will not be perfect
but we will hold on." i am not sure
though if to be kept 
is to be loved. on tiktok
i watch a news segment fragment
about a new wave of people
rehoming their children. 
there are facebook groups for that too.
posts with children
in all kinds of poses just like
the dogs & the cats.
what kinds of searching
happen there? the horrible
& the terrified & the lost.
i wish facebook groups
were physical rooms. all the people
standing there, holding 
their pets & their children,
saying, "i do not want this heart."
the panic in their voices.
what if to be kept is not 
to be loved? then, what do we make
of the escape? i know how i felt
when our dog bit me.
the blood & the stiches. 
i told no one the truth. not the doctors 
or our friends. a secret between
us & her mouth. what if though
to be kept is to be loved?
then, how do i explain 
all the times i have been
rehomed? sometimes on my own
volition & other times because
the sky was raining knives 
& i needed somewhere to hid. 

patron saint of broken glass

hello i am the patron saint of broken glass.
my miracles are as follows:
once a girl was trying to breathe
& her windows all disappeared.
she turned into a bird & that was me.
i was the miracle & the girl.
once a boy drove his car
off a bridge & into a school of salmon.
the salmon said, "go home."
he did not know what they meant.
he did not have the same notions
of home as them. their home
was a promise buried deep.
he was a boy of cathedral faces.
pieces put together by heat. 
i was not the boy. i was the air around him
& he learned to swim. jumped damns.
found the ocean bluer than he remembered.
then, the last miracle. the miracle
of the mirror. a boy in the attic.
he place his hand on the mirror
& it shattered into so many shards
he could no longer see his face.
he picked up one of the pieces
& found it was a glass needle. 
me, the saint, i told him, "make
a pair of lips." he did. he sewed them
from his old comforter that smelled
like moths. he used those lips
to speak the truth. "i have tried
to die & lived." a miracle is always
a place of exhalation. of truth beyond truth.
when i put my ear to any given wall
i hear everyone praying to me.
they are saying, "break me into
so many fragments that no one will
recognize me." i ask in return,
"what kind of wind would you
like to be?" 

coffin making 

my brother & i talk about becoming
trapists, monks known 
for their handmade coffins.
i imagine what it would be like
to wake up to the round iowa sun.
bathe myself in a saw.
they cut down the trees themselves.
oak & pine & walnut & cherry.
to be a conduit of transitions. 
on their website they say
their work is part of their commitment
to acts of mercy. i have never thought
of coffins as mercy. 
they sell them
to survive. cash in boxes.
the body's ache from bending. 
i have never wanted to be buried in one.
it's too much like a tiny home.
too much like a bed. 
i do not know if i think death 
is rest. i used to think that 
but the older i get, the more it seems
like a lot of work. sorting out
where all the parts of a self
will go. to the dirt & to the water.
a muddy little raffle.
birds & bugs. a coffin feels like
a request, "let's stay a little longer." 
i would make the wood shine. 
sand the edges smooth.
do they ever joke with one another,
the trapists? do they lay down
in the coffins & close their eyes
with big smiles or do they only
climb inside in secret?
i do not think we would make good monks.
we are too loud & too sad.
i could go if he did though.
we could join together. hold each other's
nails in place. hammer to seam.
each coffin a little merciful boat.

goose egg

the flock comes to our yard
with their telephones. they call home
to a nest without any location.
i try to convince you to let them inside
but you say, "my love, they are geese.
they will move on soon."
i find their eggs in the mailbox 
& their eggs in the yard like easter hunting. 
i open them & they are all empty. 
some of them, theatrically, emit a puff
of smoke. others, the sound of the ocean.
in a dream once, i laid a goose egg.
i was so embarrassed & terrified.
i did not want anyone to know what kind
of emptiness i had made.
so, i never cracked it open. 
i always wish i could go back
& see what was inside. surely, not a goose.
probably a telephone, ringing & ringing.
my boyfriend in high school once called me
thirty-seven times before i picked up.
i remember feeling like the empty insides
of a goose egg. i finally picked up 
& he said nothing. his breath. the wind.
one egg i find is heavy. i shake it, 
hoping to get an idea of its contents. 
inside, is a perfect egg made of granite.
i burry it & do not tell you.
my hope is that this means the geese
will come back every year.
anymore, i am hungry for
reassurance that the world will keep turning.
will my country kill me? will the geese
never leave? will i always be the one
to open them? 
on the morning that they leave, i weep.
you celebrate. we harvest their feathers
like ripe fruit. i find one last egg
& inside is a little doll-sized hand mirror.
i see just a thumb's worth
of my fearful face.