Hot cocoa,
so saccharine,
so sweet,
Warm me through the bitterest winter,
the iciest claw of the wind

Hot cocoa,
melting on tasteless tongues
warming my tiny, gelid hands
You trickle and run down numb throats
leaving milky, brown streaks
on colorless lips

Hot cocoa,
rolling and tumbling in nippy stomaches
as my belly rumbles and thunders for more

The baby is born to the death walls
that line the cellar. The cellar is dark
and musty like the inside of a mouth
that has seen every forest in the world
that needs to be seen. There is animal
screaming and cheeks wailing and blood
smashed. There is the floor: cold as bath
water or lungs or teeth or healing. She
wanted a midwife. The midwife looks
ashes of change, her hands shake  
like a pale fire. Her hands shouldn’t
be shaking, I want to say please, leave
the shaking hands to us, we are only
a professional family, but you are really
a professional, your brain is snowed with
palms that knead proper parturition. But
my mouth is tight with breath and ash.

I.
On February 5th I am told
that I am best when built
from spruces; later that day,
in the basement, I find
my father’s fingerprints
deep inside the wooden floors.

II.
The next day Mother
haunts my bedroom
like expired medicine.
Her arms are wide
and pregnant and encircle
my wrists like toothy wires.

III.
In my room hangs
a photograph from
camp: the girl’s body is an altar.
Highways line her arms. Small
green snakes weave through
her teeth the way my toes
now weave through salt.  

IV.
It was after that summer
that I turned spirals, that
the ridges in my throat
grew deeper. Now I am

V.
an icy church.

the night the sky broke open
all purple and ******
like the bruises tiring my thighs

was the same night my father died
was the same night my mother cried

was the same night I
ran around in circles waiting

for my legs to fall off
for my body to disappear
like a bird shot away like a sad holiday  

I loved you that night
like a whispered ghost
like a poorly built church

that night you were at my father’s funeral
you were burying his body
holding the shovel between your hands
(calloused as a windy lake)

that night at my father’s funeral
my throat was damp with guilt

I was not like my mother
my face was not marked, not wet

We drink foul fluid from plastic water bottles to forget
about our mothers all tucked alone into their beds like
forgotten puppet shows. We want to forget about
the boys with faces all black & vulnerable
like barbecued hooves of deer & about our stomachs
swollen as skinned water. Summers like this
in towns like this during nights like this would be
better if we could drive. We sit together with knees
bare & bruised in short grass. We’re drawn to one another
like widows to cemeteries. We’re convinced that we
would look good in white wedding dresses. We grow
our hair out that summer, our hair long as piles
of dead snakes. The boys pretend to laugh at us. They
have ribs like cores of apples, ribs that would look better
discarded into the earth. The boys remind us of our
fathers, the ones busy building lakes as though they
were clocks. Our fathers are the same as us in that they
are constantly filling themselves up with water so
as not to get hurt. & at night they are not with our mothers.

i.

Kathy tells me about god in the bathroom stall.
She tells me about the time when he told her
that we’re really all just suffering together.
“I was at Harry’s basement party,
drunk leaning against a wall, standing by myself,” she says.  

She says she can taste the suffering the most when she’s standing in church,
eating one of those **** communion wafers.
I laugh without knowing; I’ve yet to eat a communion wafer.

ii.

When Kathy gets really drunk
she grapples at my hand
and forces it to her skin.
She says my hand sobers her up
more than water does. When I touch her forearm
it is as though I am touching a dead infant.

When I touch skin I am thinking about standing outside
in air that could only be so cold in the summer,
my body all bare, my body standing outside
of a loud and lit up house
with me whispering,  “please don’t touch me, just let me shiver,
just let me faint here peacefully.”

When I think of skin I think of my grandmother and her wrinkles,
of generations of wrinkles.
Looking into the bathroom mirror
I see the body of my grandmother and the face of my mother.
I am desperate for a toilet.

iii.

Kathy knows about the days when all I do is eat.
She knows about how much I like peanut butter,
about how my skin sags from my ankles,
hangs around my wrists. But still
she holds me when I must *****.

she thought nothing
of the *****
shaped
bar
of soap, and nothing
of the boys
who’d no doubt
worked together

in close
quarters

to create
from their
gods
the ball
god

dropped, and still

nothing

of the note
in her locker  
instructing her
on how
to take

a bath-  not everything

takes the form
of a sickly
double
afraid
to meet
its match

you are a house
made of flesh and bone.
throw rugs of blonde
on a hard wood floor.
only two windows,
that are usually closed.
your door
never fails to open
when I need it to.
your nerve endings
and veins
are the tangled bedsheets
on the floor
with our clothes.
you are a house,
made of bruises,
and cat scratches,
a house
with a fireplace in your chest,
coaxing people in
when it's cold.
You are a house,
but you are not a home.