inhale
exhale
skin breathes
your scent envelopes me
i'm choking on every word that
i've never said and i begin
to spit shattered shards
of thoughts into the
palms of my
hands
and this is
when you notice
me heaving and you
roll over onto your other
side facing the steady walls
so you can be a 33 year old man with no
attachment to an 18 year old who mistakenly
emptied herself into your salivating, ravenous
mouth and you inhaled me with such
pleasure it almost had me thinking
that perhaps i mistook your
distance for sadness
as soon our time
holed up in the
nostalgia
of your home town
would come to an end
and maybe your feelings grew
much taller than even our abhorring of
love and strings being tied to you and
anyone else but i think now i understand
that inside of you is a tragic, drafty cavern
filling it all the way up with every thing you're
not has become such a habit that when your wolf-like
eyes rested upon something youthful and impressionable
it was simply second nature for you to devour all of me and
then leave me with a cavern of my own, you know i've seen
a mirror since we had to part ways and if i hadn't known
any better i would've said that i've started to grey
around the edges and my teeth looked rather
sharp, if i looked a little closer i may have
even said there was a canine-like
resemblance that now suits me
beautifully, naivety is dead.

my childhood bed had too many sheets piled tall
as a strange boy. I stopped sleeping there at 10.
I stopped talking to mother at 12.
At 12 years old my hair is short and layered as my stomach.
At 12 years old there is a phone call from my father:
I picture him standing then, at the hospital window with his burnt eyes
pleading to clouds that were beginning to shape themselves into gods
he’d never believed in. I picture my father and the nurse, I picture the phone call, I picture me with short and layered hair and a teacher with soft face in a classroom door. Dying mothers I now know are the most loved.
Dying mothers I now know do not use bathtubs and they
do not have wrists. I picture mother with face white like cow spots.
I picture mother with no more milk from her cruel breast to spare (She didn’t want children anyway). I haven’t slept in my childhood bed eight years.
Sometimes when I’m brave I’ll sleep in mother’s bed. Sometimes when I’m brave
boys touch my chest and my stomach and their hands never flicker.

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

who knows how it works?  
the way I end up like my mother
in a dining room at a wooden
table eating for two

2. the way I take baths now
my body wrinkles in the tub
the way hers always did when
I was two years old just learning
how to clench my fists I would
clench them around the wrinkles
of her belly, kiss her temples
all round and sharp like the caps
of beer bottles

3. when I was just two years old
I would drink the leftover bathwater
I still sometimes drink the leftover
bathwater in all of its murkiness I was
drinking her body now I am drinking yours

4. she called our house heaven
if our house was heaven then
heaven is made completely wooden
our front door was heavy and isolated

5..  dirt paths dirt roads matching dry dirt
buried into our matching dry hair
our matching dry mouths our chapped lips

6. with snow pushed to the side of the ground
covering our feet like threadbare blanket
like a lost husband’s lost hands

darling darling
you are not what you seemed
a gentle whisper in the wind
turned into a blood curdling scream