My parents when they slept they slept with snakes.
My parents when they slept they died, every night, in cycles, like monthly blood:
the first time I got my period I was 12 years old and wearing jeans
newly stained and thought that I’d killed a man.

There are still times when I think that I’m killing men, or boys, by accident,
because of all the milk swirling around inside of my collarbones

(there are still times when I think that I’ve killed you)

When you sleep you whisper to your parents. Did you already know that?
Have you already told somebody else about the way
your body looks when you sleep, all stretched out like the legs of a newborn?

You’re a boy with hair as red as emergencies,
a boy who belongs best on subways, with your body lanky,
with your hands like skies gripping onto the metal pole.

Later after dinner I am that metal pole, only with a larger stomach. My stomach
is always largest after eating dinner. Your hands are always the most over a girl’s body – your hands the most like skies – after dinner: this is the worst horror movie:
my stomach popping like a mountain or an ear high in the sky (or, worse,
my stomach never pops, it is always there).

In November we are in a parking lot
(it is late
it is full of rain) and you don’t know my voice, a voice sounding
like ****** up broken jewelry.
For my birthday you gave me a bracelet you found in your mother’s bedroom
and it broke two days later, beneath a softly lit streetlamp.

Somewhere in the middle of a sidewalk somewhere near the east river I am holding the bracelet and crying water from littered water bottles but nobody sees me (or:
it’s all a dream, and it happens over and over again, cyclical, the way my parents used to sleep, used to die).

The two times that you’ve rejected me:

once: my parents with banged up bruised bodies in the hospital // when I saw them lying in between sheets cotton like your t-shirts I fainted
twice: the funeral is back home. I fly there and my ears won’t stop popping,
like a mountain, like a too full stomach. At the funeral I forget hands
like skies at the funeral I fall in love with everybody I see at the funeral I forget that
I am no longer in the city (I can trust people)

I see you now as a ghost: when two ghosts **** we are horizon over a snaky river when two ghosts **** we are flying back to the state of my birth
when two ghosts **** (in ghost parents’ bed) we sound like car crashes

Before I left home I had just cut my hair
too short and my neck was all too ******.

I ran past towns with a body
that looked like the ghost of a willow tree,
clawed at it the way mothers claw at fathers
during the births of their daughters.

Pictures of Father holding me up
to a willow tree each time
I cried. Nobody else could hold me

up the way he could, his arms gold
with too many storms. Pictures
of a boy who has been covered
in too many storms. Too many pictures
of a boy pasted to my face. After I left

I had dreams of my face covered in scrapes
that were deep with small soldiers and miniature colonial women;
I didn’t know any of them, but they all knew me.
They kissed me the way tangled up Christmas lights kiss arms
in the winter. When they did their mouths felt like the teeth of wolves.

I have stopped being the girl in the white dress,
with the pain in my stomach, the marks across my arm.

But there are still bruises topping my face, from a boy
heavy and dripping with his mother’s old gowns.

My legs in these hot and dusty new towns
are sore and happy.

And I had to walk away
I was just hoping at least he noticed I didn't run

The car we decide to drive looks
like a crooked body. When Leo and I stop at a gas station,
we enter the bathroom, look into the full-length
mirror. Even with him standing up, I can count
all 24 of his ribs, all of them poked out and looking
like nooses. I imagine witches dead and dangling
off of each one of them.

He is that thin.

The way he looks
reminds me of my father.
Right before my father died,
his face looked like cruel weather.
My father in a hospital bed,
my father in a coma.

Right after my father died I listened to “Wild Horses”
on repeat. The lyrics seemed to fit well with the white
of the hospital walls (I know I dreamed you a sin and a lie.)

When Leo and I get back into the car
I put on “Wild Horses” again.

Leo was not there the day my father died.
Leo did not come to the hospital once. Leo
has hands large as Vatican City. There have
been times in my dreams when Leo looks more
like the Pope than he does himself. Leo’s skin
is not nearly as wrinkled in real life.

In the car we eat cheese and peanut butter crackers,
drink cartons of orange juice. I eat and drink until
I feel sick. This is normal. In this heat, sticky and dry
as the corners of my mouth are, it is all I can do not to make
Leo stop the car so that I can stick my hands down my throat
and *****. The vomiting is normal, too. I have only

just met Leo. It was me who suggested this trip, my body
in his bed, me staring up at his ceiling, and it was me
who was surprised when he agreed to take it with me.

i. We set up a tent in your backyard and spent the night with the bugs. You told me you would love me forever. It’s been three years and you can’t even look at me. It should hurt to look at you, but it doesn’t, it brings back that night in your tent. The look of your face with that little flashlight swinging back and forth was enough to know I loved you.
ii. The first time we hung out together, when we were officially a couple, you sent me a text when you were walking beside me. It asked if you could hold my hand. I wish I would’ve read that text before we finished our walk. I’d give anything to get that text again.

iii. Do you remember the few days we spent at my grandmother’s house? Do you remember making promises to me in the middle of the night? You were so drunk, but I thought being drunk made you more honest. I guess I was wrong.

iv. You started doing drugs after we broke up. I started doing drugs too. I think you take them to have fun, I take them to forget your face for an hour or two. I don’t know if you even remember the shape of my face.

v. Do you remember the night when you wanted to **** yourself? It was midnight and I still came over to make sure you were okay. I spent the night holding you. I would still do that again, but you found other people to take my place.

vi. My mom warned me about boys who smoke and sag their pants, but never about a girl with brown eyes and a withering soul.

vii. You never want to talk to me anymore. I shouldn’t want to talk to you either, you put me through hell, I’m still trying to put out the flames. I cry sometimes because when I talk about you to my friends, I say each word with love. When you talk to your friends about me, each word spews hate out of your mouth.

viii. I’m trying to forget about you, but you gave me so much to remember. I’m sorry I can’t find a way to forget about you. I know you wish I’d leave, maybe someday I will.

I feel the world shifting
Beneath me
And I stop to feel
The wind brush against
My rose tinted cheeks
I let myself become engulfed
In the romance
That has settled in the ground
For a minute I forget where I am
Because every single bug and flower
Captivates my thoughts
I'm inhaling Spring
And I let out a sigh of relief -
Exhaling Winter

in winter it is my first time home in three years.

I am in my bed again with a body full of volcanic acid
and a throat nervously full of phlegm as repulsively sweet
as the water of the river that I swam in when I was still young
and naked and fleshy. I have not been  
young and naked and fleshy in three years.

My bed is as hard as I picture your body being tomorrow
when we are both in your car again
and your face
still crumbles open like a basket of bread.

My mother has never baked bread.
My mother at night lies alone on sheets cold as the light from a moon.
Her voice wails like a pair of haunted hands.

Last time I saw you your voice broke apart
atop your final word to me.
Before that your hands were on my thighs like a new curse.
Since then I’ve pictured you standing with raw hands
cursing into brisk air. There are times when I try
to picture my body into something smaller, like a ******
raccoon against the side of a highway strip.

There are no tall trees
in the yard anymore, nothing
to compare my body to. (Mother cries about them all falling
in past storms.)

When my father sees me in my bed he says nothing. He’s
best at walking with his hands sour as bees.

Why are there gates into Heaven if it's never too late to be forgiven?
Can we not just fall to our knees and beg for mercy there at the entrance?
I just don't see the God that you preach as someone to say "too late".
I can't see how he can stand to watch his children burn in Hell.
For Heaven's sake.

I don't understand
how a man
with so much virtue and honor,
can be someone
who allows his children
to be accepted as goners.