i.
a message from a boy i don’t know
that begins with, “i’m J’s cousin, i’m trying to locate her, can you....”
i don’t know how to deal with those
who promise death,
so i don’t finish reading it,
bile mixed with guilt building in my throat.
last night J told me her body was falling apart.
i didn’t know how to respond.
i know bodies without bones too well
but i don’t know how to talk about them.
i don’t know how to parse away
the skin from the bone of a pig
when i’m standing in the middle of a cold barn,
more naked than i was when i was born.
ii.
i am naked with boys who i don’t know,
but who fold me in half anyway, then fold me apart,
then spit me out like i am
the bitter taste of a dead dog.
iii.
keeseville, ny is upstate is a place
for stained dresses & burnt milk & spoiled prayers,
where i spent every summer in a body
made for somebody smaller.
i’m realizing now that i’m not small,
everyday i’m the opposite of small,
but these boys still look at me
with frightening scrutiny like i’m a goat who belongs in a bed
& if i’m not pet, not fed, i will give out.
iv.
sun hangs across the sky
like blood across my underwear.
yours or mine?
from which part of the body?
Apr 21, 2015
Apr 21, 2015 at 8:07 PM UTC
1.
a dream about a boy & his bicycle,
which is red, & coated in winter
& in frost. a dream about a boy
with freckles trailing his hands like layers
of bad teeth. a dream about a boy
whose bones match mine,
but i can’t love him.
2.
more than anything mother
likes to sleep. second to that she likes
having a body that is much, much smaller
than mine is. still there are times
when i pretend that our sleeping is the same.
her nightmares creep into her graveled skin
the same way they creep into mine.
she will keep sleeping,
her bones will keep shrinking.
what does she know about boys,
about a boy?
3.
this is the story of the family of deer
that once lined the lawn
of the house down the street
from where mother & i live without anybody but walls
white as the faces of monks.
they lined the lawn for ten minutes, then were shot.
this is the story of a boy & his bicycle,
& bicycle tracks that line the bodies of dead deer.
a boy who doesn’t know how to cry unless
there’s been a fire.
a dream about a boy & his bike
burning like penances, like ancient worlds.
forest fires line my dreams. forest fires
do not make me love people. battered dogs
do not make me love people. there is a boy
& a bike & he has a dog & the dog too
has been bruised by flame.
4.
how to cure: a dry mouth?
how to cure: what has been lived in?
how to cure: a fire?
if only my mother could step out of her bed
now. she would see me shivering with the skin
of somebody who should never look like me.
Apr 16, 2015
Apr 16, 2015 at 10:35 PM UTC
boys **** me & then tell me
all about the bible classes they’re taking.
boys' breaths usually smell
of how they're thinking about
the girl with short brown hair & bangs
as no more than a girl
with short brown hair & bangs.
i am not angry with them.
this is not me angry.
i am not angry at any boy.
this is me trying to forget about boys
with hands like the teeth of fake gods.
Apr 8, 2015
Apr 8, 2015 at 11:25 AM UTC
*(when the first bird crashes & dies into a fainting sun
a second bird comes to take over the first bird’s place.)*
(songs about mountains are the most important)
i wonder if birds listen to mountains, if they think
about mountains. do you think
about mountains?
in the dead of summer
(death of july)
the two of us climbed a mountain
& you saw a snake
& i vomited.
it was then, after i vomited,
that you started to become
less & less the boy
with a face like sweet fabric,
there was this way
in which we tied ourselves together
dangerously to your bedpost
for an entire year.
you were good for something
but don’t ask me exactly what.
i want to make a friend soon, who also
has trouble with missing
& very much not missing
a boy:
hello, friend!
if you ever want to ride a carousel,
you can!
come with me.
we’ll claim two horses as our own,
forget that they ever belonged
to those who touched our bodies unapologetically.
Apr 5, 2015
Apr 5, 2015 at 3:20 PM UTC
My flesh is freshly skinned, because of my father’s
nails. My father is brushing out the tangles in my
hair. He is used to the brushing, he says, because he
used to have a sister. I don’t think to ask him where
his sister is now, although I picture her with hair
perfectly tangled, like an extended family, like ancestry.
My family tree is knotted and webbed, but every member
has a place, and if you’re lucky, a purpose. My mother’s
purpose is to cook soup for the Passover Seder. I picture
Passover as ****** as when the planets forget to flash
across the sky. This happens. I have seen it the way I’ve
seen a boy look at me from across a wooden table.
The boy feels like my cousin, even though he is not my
cousin. He just happens to have a gaze that calculates,
like the gazes of the old men that sit together in my town,
on the corner of the two streets whose names I can never
remember. When I walk by them I make sure to shuffle my
feet even quicker than I usually do, because I want to forget
about my body. I don’t look in mirrors anymore. I don’t even
look into my favorite lake anymore. The way it wrinkles together
hurts as much as my father’s nails do: my father’s nails against
my scalp and against my skin. My father picking me up out of the bath.
I am still wearing my organs. I don’t think I’m three years old anymore,
but I’m not quite sure. I can never remember what it is like to age.
Mar 31, 2015
Mar 31, 2015 at 3:10 AM UTC
i. do they exist
ii. do we know that they exist
iii. how do we know that they exist
iv. how do we see (our) bodies (properly)
how to write a manifesto for a body! for the body! bodies sink like the breaths of a baby when a baby is held by a tired mother whose face is gaunt and whose ribs are the sharpest leaves anybody has ever seen.
i want to walk through a body of woods. i want the woods to be full of leaves. i don’t want to have any limbs.
in my head i can taste the trees that are in this body of woods (and this body of woods is full of leaves). the trees stretch out the way your body does atop my bed. i still don’t know if you belong atop my bed. when we walk i’m jealous of your calves, of how puffed out they are. when we walk i want to pick you a cactus. i want to pick my body something. i want to pick it apart. i want to pick it lying in the grass.
i’m sorry but my mouth is too full of candles for it to touch yours;
i’m hoping that doing this will make me quick-witted, the way you are.
i’m sorry too that i’m not quick-witted already.
the way a body is: it’s a road, like this one that i’m on now, visiting you. i’m taking a bus again, like the last time i went to see you. the last time i saw you you had a bruise on your left cheek. i never asked why. you never told me why. whenever i picture you i picture you with the bruise on your left cheek (sometimes though i forget and instead it ends up on your right cheek). when i see you i think i will be disappointed because you will not have the bruise on either one of your cheeks. in an ideal world there would be one long bruise trailing all across your body. maybe this would make you mysterious.
i am trying to picture our bodies together again, trampled by our flesh in the rain. where you live there is so much rain.
Mar 23, 2015
Mar 23, 2015 at 1:14 AM UTC
[WE HAVE NICE BONES / YOU HAVE NICE BONES / I HAVE UGLY BONES BUT WITH YOU THEY FEEL NICER / OR AT LEAST LESS UGLY / DO GHOSTS HAVE BONES?]
1.
we don't love our bodies properly.
mostly we just listen to the sky
as it changes colors
over the river
outside of my bedroom window.
i don't like thinking about the way
my body looks like next
to yours. there is so much flesh on mine
that i'm not sure who it belongs to,
or where it is supposed to go.
the sun mixes with your face
to reveal just enough
of your tongue
and your teeth.
there are some nights when i picture
a wolf in my bed,
but tonight
is not one of those nights.
you are making me the wolf.
2.
in the morning
you cut yourself
trying to open up a bottle of wine.
there is blood.
we see it, for a second,
but cannot picture it ever coming
from either one of our bodies.
Mar 17, 2015
Mar 17, 2015 at 12:33 AM UTC
*(My fingers won’t stop growing like shells!
My fingers won’t stop growing,
but without water, just with food!)*
As I stand in this bathroom stall
in this congested church
I can’t stop thinking
about how much I hate my fingers, about how much larger
they suddenly seem. This stall is stained
in blood and *****
and graffiti that reads, “girls day 11/13/14.”
Nothing seems so sad and so dry as this stall does.
I think of you sitting in the pew
with your hand on the thigh of the girl
whose hair is sheared short as though
it were Judgment Day and she were an apple tree,
its branches cut into small, fragile pieces.
On Judgment Day
my grandfather died
and everybody in my family
and everybody in my town
went to the funeral
except for me
who cried
and cried and cried
and I’m still crying
for the way his skin used to fold over
like a moon violent in its softness:
1. he’s a dead man with a body like a fish
who has just ripped off its scales.
2. he’s a dead man who before he died liked to stand
on top of the one cliff that looks out onto town
and yell, “I will not spill my guts!”
But he died anyway.
Would I be lying if I said I loved my grandfather? Would I be lying
if I told you who I loved?
Here: I will tell you who I love, for a dare (triple doggy dare style)
Here: this is an experiment
Here: on Judgment Day (on the day my grandfather died)
we’re all experiments; we’re all experimenting with those we love
in terms of the way we kiss them:
we go into the woods
just to touch each other’s chests.
We lie on tops of rocks and I kiss you
as though I still need more fat on my huge body.
Mar 12, 2015
Mar 12, 2015 at 1:26 AM UTC
This feels like coming home from the moon
the way ghosts do. Do not tell me you love me
on the days that you don’t. Winters here are
far too heavy with snow, make me feel sick
inside. I will always remember sleeping with
you beneath your comforter, and I will always
hate it. We stick our fingers into slices of lemon.
When we pull them out, we see blood. This belongs
to us. I am sorry, but I am not small enough to faint.
I am sorry, but I am terrified of the boys who
lock their doors & love their mothers without realizing
what it is that they are doing.
Mar 6, 2015
Mar 6, 2015 at 2:54 PM UTC
The two of us pick chicken eggs
in heat sticky as a mother’s breath.
The heat that rises off of the lake
in the summer feels worse than any
awkward kiss. Your body is taller today, your hair
slightly lighter. We pick chicken eggs
for our mothers. Our mothers wear dresses red
as the entrails of flies, and sit out on porches, and drink ghostly milk
from sweaty glasses. We watch them drink the milk
and we picture them as newborns. I wonder if you sometimes
picture me as a newborn. This is the first day on which
I am afraid of you. My hands blanket my stomach (hands like wool);
my stomach is growing larger everyday, gutting itself out
the way the waves do off of the lake when it storms. It’s because I’m
feeding myself too much: this is what I get for being afraid of you.
In the summer we get too many bees. How many calories in a bee sting?
How many of them can line the inside of my mouth, all sharp and dangly,
before I die the way a snake might? How many calories
are in the shadow of a tree? Us and our eggs sit underneath the shadow
of the largest tree we can find, with me trembling, without tears, without *****
just a wooly mouth. Today, I’ve never missed anything as much as I miss
my own ribs. Today, you look beautiful like the largest cow. Today, where
are my fingers? They used to be so long. You used to be too afraid to touch me.
Mar 5, 2015
Mar 5, 2015 at 3:49 PM UTC