all my photos are in his passenger's seat
these black and whites of him singing
and talking about the wars he has and hasn't
been in, navigating Penrose like he walked
these roads a thousand times before he ever
took a truck--

and he know everybody's name, date of birth
and probably their social, who died and when--
he's been livin' as 14 other people,
never gets no space and I'm no respecter of that
neither cause the way he looks at me used to
scare me and now I know he jus' scared himself.

saw it when he told me about Braun's body
in the brambles, and in the letters he gets from
past lovers full of jealous jargon-- you made me
feel terrible,  your fault, ending in a hundred
goodnights, she wants the last word and all I want
is for him to tell me what he's thinkin' when he's angry


'cause he is angry, with bitterness sunk down in his bones
and swimmin' 'round in his chest, he lost weight out at the rig
but kept all that melancholy to himself, brings it home and
drops it in a glass before taking it back in


he asks why I'm lookin' and it's just 'cause.
Just 'cause i'm looking at his eyelashes while
he sleeps or the lip of his brow hidin' eyes a lot lighter than you'd think, committing the eagle on his back to memory
with that scripture from Isaiah a ways off in my head,
scrawled on the back of my heart,
written at the crown of his spine,


I used to wonder about the integrity of his skin
if water'd seep through or run off, used to think
he was made of wood with rice paper shutters--
but he's a mountain, a snowcapped alp
you wouldn't know it from a ways off,
when he's just a soldier standing out
in the field, shoulders hunched, chin tucked
breathin' cold air, but Lord he warm, fierce as the
mistakes he runnin' from--

we both beggin' to be right
or good enough, for the sunlight
to make us into somethin' pretty
somethin' new and shined--
but for now i'm takin' pictures shotgun,
hiding my fingers in my pockets
thinking about the way his voice'd
prolly blow in on the curtains on a
summer's day, and he's singing
My love, is somewhere in that mountain....


*my love is somewhere in that mountain

when you're out on the bridge
with neither end in sight, in the middle
or three-quarters way, barely there or
nearly-- never call the unsteady, the
hands that reach through the fog
or slap the waters through the
abutments,

you can love across wounds
with those who meet you, or
find their way, feeling the stones
gripping the railing, they've seen
you at the crossing and have come
to share the burden

but you keep calling, you keep
pacing, you've been waiting,
imbued with confusion, your
old self a ghost, all your worries
to the surface, belly up.

you've been inspired for all the wrong reasons.
You leave him alone.
I've been inspired for all the wrong reasons.
I leave him alone.

while you were eating
cherry pie that sunday
after i reached for your
hand and your fingers
didn't curl around mine--

i took to the trees behind the cabin
and stayed the mossy grove buried
in this golden scratch
the neighbor's conversation downwind
about the mountain lion they'd spotted
and the spiritual sort of fear I felt with
my eyes closed, the mechanical click
of my own heartbeat, how things
used to flow and now they only
swarmed,
always
swallowed.

i was singing songs to call you out,
like you did the first time, when you
came up around the hillside and
followed me a ways out--
softly at first and then no more,
replaced by the force that came
upon me, where suddenly I was
uprooting trees, picking the most
desolate, gnarled aspens--unhinging
their roots to press my heel into their
soft bases, hulking forward and watching
them stretch out and out and out--

I found old yarn and tied
it for later, to find, to untie
to hope for second chances
I left the copse and you were


eating cherry pie on the porch
rummaging through coolers
oil sloshing through your bones
dragon fire in your blood
hard-headed over puerile matters
over your time, over the weeks
staunchly grounded into your own
wild western ways,

The duck's back, the bear's pelt
You've been roaming alone in the forests
As the beasts do, the lost, the frightened,
Admiring the darkness of your own shadow
The way it draws and casts away,
Doubly conflicted of your nature that
Mostly takes and takes and takes
Bears and
Men and
You.

around the time Hurricane Matthew was
tearing through Florida, it was 10:34pm in
Divide--

A Coors bottle pressed into your beard,
settled on your bottom lip in contemplation
a boyish reverie spun between us when you spoke
softly relaying the genealogy of the Hatfields & Mccoys,
Ole Ran'l, Devil Anse piping in, your accent seeps through
real Midwestern like--stops when you're on about prayer
trees and La Llorona


But I was deeply introspective,
heavily burdened by a Randy Travis song
how earlier that morning your fingers
had found their way around my hips--
        mine around your waistband, down your spine
        a helpless explorer driven across the mainland
       transversing shoulder blades, fascinated by chains
        around your neck, nooses, playthings or jewelry
         how around 3 am your gravely voice sought me
         out across a sea of torrid thoughts to ask if I was cold


yes. probably.


and when we start the decline, tripping lazily over moss clumps
dead grass, fallen trees, I storm and plow ahead because
when in doubt, race yourself.
Sheltered by the truck gate,
you've come up ahead and stand
in front of me, unassuming
both hands complacent--
so I ask you to kiss me
and there's a fiddle playin'
in my ears, a highway of
country streamin' through
my veins, or,
something
like that.

I look up because a child is screaming
but it's just the man on the steps--
he takes a drag and wheezes

folds in half, disappears inside
his hood, nothing but the tip of
australian umber for a face

he curls again in anticipation
these pitiful silent gasps followed
by a wail, the children screaming
the black whistling.

well something deeper
than the ocean here burns,
splits apart and quakes --

we've seen farther than the working
men can go--felt the emptiness of a
disillusioned life, wondered how the
masses buy away their souls,
he touches you and you feel
not a thing, just the skin beneath
his hairline that doesn't glow--

You hear about his sanguine childhood
a finespun gossamer thing,
stretched across the state of colorado,
webbed and spun around
tent stakes, campers, drawn into the Four Corners
spooled in a Chattanooga coffee mug, dipped in  
day old orange juice
I have
settled
into the bottom of his
cup, a thick pulp, rind
and stem -- terrified that
I won't pull through,
that this isn't enough
that I am too much
or too little, haven't
been or seen
there are no
scars on my knees
or callouses on my hands
when the bears came I had
no pots and pans --

I study the sofrito, stir the
rice, break open green olives
and slide the pimientos onto
my tongue --
deftly speaking about shredding
chicken, chopping onions, rolling
corn tortillas
wondering what it is about people
about parents, about chile con carne


this pan holds 21
like the age, like the game, I think.

I am truly terrified.

i always fall for boys with broken trucks


who track sod into the living room
and smell like cattle and cologne
with knotches in their hips from
tying dollars 'round their waists
strung from welding rigs and pipelines
bad backs, torn hands and ripped
ligaments scarred over and healed
with whiskey--

those men that cause a raucous
but attend the song of every whippoorwill
who take peace with them down in the
holler and carry sunlight on their backs
they've got bones so cold you'd think they'd
crack but they've been bucked by bulls and
motorcycle seats, and are quieted by the sounds
of a woman breathing--

softly, slowly, in and out
softly, slowly, in and out.


how do you not fall for the broken?


softly, slowly, in and out.

i think i am lost


because i've felt nothing
to be right, anger in every
drink of water, i used to be soft
and gentle,

but I am too calculated now
bleeding white lies and pretends
soup broth, brittle bones
snapping beneath a touch
or shaken by a lust
awaken by a kiss
put to sleep all the same

I have so little to give
I have been fronting with
what my mother wants to
hear, and I'm afraid it's all
a fib,

what if I am only a shell of
words my father has spoken
paper mache and tea leaves
a prophecy spoken too soon
what if I am to fail
swallowed up in
this bitterness


what if I
am to
fail.

is God by your bedside
weeping against the bookcase
and the cabinets in the
kitchen, filled with long
grain rice shudder and
tremble, vibrating against
their hinges --
it's all over the floor, you say.

it's all over the floor.

I said
i like the smell of whiskey
and the whole cabin was filled
with puerto ricans and chile pepper
seeds scattered on the floor, a hundred
pots lined up on the stove with rouxs
and sweet syrups, masa mixed with
pork broth, shortening and garlic
the men lining the porch in
sunglasses and blue wranglers
going on about the rig or Virginia
or Hurricane Matthew--

what is it?
about running away?

I thought;
time passes so fast
I've clipped pieces from the past, snapshots i've unknowingly gathered
Uncle Dude three sheets out, standing in the kitchen
after you'd been drinking all day, your mom reminiscing in the corner
with tired eyes and stained fingers from wine,raisins, condensed milk,
consoling a drunk neighbor, (Florida State won earlier)
through the screen while you reclined in the sun or
the rotating image of your heels crunching through the
long morning grass.


I'd been sustained on quiche that needed no seasoning,
coffee creamer, cherry pie and the feeling of slipping bare
feet into boots, on quiet, on  
dark forearms and white biceps
the print of a little bird ring,
dark, brittle nights that smelled like cigars and Coors--


I've been trying to talk to God
all weekend but I think he's gone.
I think I'm alone.
I think I've run away.

I'm home, but there's nobody here.

He's tapping on the hardwood floor
to draw me out of the cracks, the
slender peels of sun stretched down the
hallways, arcing across the patio,
the way hard working men
rap their fingers against the walls to find
studs, stick pocket knives in the frayed wood
beneath the house--

shakes me out of the sand, viciously vibrates
me into his palms, tears me from
deep considerations
where i've already grown
where my roots have struck out
in all directions, says not in this place
not in this soil
not in this way

and I go where he pleases, kicking or
weeping, sometimes with ankles smarting,
raw from the whipping

not this place
not this soil
not this way

Half of the time we are silent.




I see the tip of your tattoo--the head of an eagle
at the nape of your neck below the delicate loops of a
thin silver chain -
and the thing about skin is that is whispers and pleads
to be seen or stung or washed

to be photographed, of course
mountains and valley exist on more
than one visceral plain, the earth comes
on more than one planet, one grain, we know.

That scientific studies show water to seek
the lowest point,
the lilac crest, the thoraclumbor fascia
(are we water? are you water? am I water?)
a percentage of it is water and the rest is
heart, the rest is soul

go stand beneath the water
and take your shirt off, take
your shirt off, gentle so that
the muscle doesn't stir, so
that you feel every inch of
cloth that doesn't belong
so that you don't see me
behind the lens
so that I don't
ruin what
good can
come of
being
naked.

the backroad to
Florence, the one along Elm
that cuts past the McDermott
trailer park--

from matt's house past
Cedar and the old liquor store
at 50mph the cicadas sound more
like a cry or a lingering scream
the crickets don't stop for passing trucks
creaking to the metronome of a swishing
cow tail

farmers switch off their brights, come around
corners slow, in striped beat up Chevys, rusty
toolboxes weakly sliding from side to side
like their owners in threadbare leather seats
the young kids trail close, bumper
to bumper on a two-lane road, just me and
some kid named after his grampa, poppy,
Clint, who needs to get home before
mama chews him out--

sunday service still warm from this morning
where a single beetle clung to the wall and translated
my father's sermon, morse code for the elders, for the
elk and deer, he's been known to speak to hummin'birds
anyway, I think.

the count of monte cristo
sounds so much better after two
glasses of sweet wine, the rim
resting gently against chapter 5

“This philosophic reflection,” thought he, “will make a great sensation at M. de Saint–Meran’s;” and he arranged mentally, while Dantes awaited further questions, the antithesis by which orators often create a reputation for eloquence.

How great this will make me look, in other words,
this fine comparison between two similar things.
and I find myself smiling, like one would over
the renewal of past lovers, past books
the direct gaze of persons no longer
strangers, beneath waterfalls
wings spread
vaguely vulnerable
and somehow
liberated.

i once wrote about
men in California
weathered men, crust of the
earth, salt-soaked docks off the shore
with leather sewn into their backs and
hip bones made of steel and exhaust pipes
that smell of chicory, sweat and cayenne
who dip women by their neck, never sleep
never eat, only feast and when the wind
blows they
leave.

what i never had the chance to (let you learn)
was that I dance with the shades up wearing
nothing but the sun, telephone wires casting
cuts across my lips, small ******* that don't
swing heavy but fit in palms,

how much
have you changed since you were casually knocking,
since before you might have thought I was
untamed but a conquest you had already mapped--
realized I was a bit more to hold, (you did)

But that I so often go back to those two nights
telling myself I should have whispered your
name, to gauge a reaction, to hear your last
name tagged onto breathy mewls--I shouldn't
be this way, knowing i forge relations through
fingertips, I dunno why kissing is such a problem.

Probably because they write you into a chapter
that goes on for hundreds of pages afterwards, after the
supposed ending, even after I tell you that I'm done,
what is it like to be you? To be them?
to be able to move on so quickly,
and replace others with others with others

all day i was thinking
about that letter I wrote
you and how it was in
Wetmore now, in Silvercliffe,
in Jim's green mailbox, finally.
how I didn't seal it in perfume
but thought about it, how I rewrote
it five times because there's only so
many ways to convey myself in a good
light after breaking all the bulbs

I was choosing words like I'd choose flowers
only baby blooms and strong stems,  ending with
sincerely, cordially, then just my name.  I miss you
replaced by I saw that post on Facebook about your niece
hoping prayer sifts through the ink, that he can feel my hair on
his cheeks, a letter that pleads, please don't hate me
but I don't think anyone ever has--and I certainly don't think he will


I don't know what's wrong with me. I tell my mom over breakfast, over dinner, on the way home,  and she smiles at me--says
goodness in the way she usually does, in the way that says her heart
sometimes beats for me

but that thought has permeated every action and every day, lain over me like a sunshower with the rain flecking through in drops of gold
I've never had these thoughts before I whisper, exasperated, throwing
my hands up and stuttering. All-abouts unsure of myself and wondering if while he's been away I've built an empire around what he
could be.

What am I doing? I ask, finally making eye contact.

there's a ringing in my ears that
sounds like the feed trucks roaring down 50
and  broken country music coming through
an ancient stereo, sounds like the way your
thick palms look when they pull a cap off a Coors
bottle, and that side eye you give, why do you keep looking at me like that?

Like what? As if my looks were incendiary glares and not photographs, I'm only taking you in, not taking you out. Like what? Hasn't anyone ever traced your lips or wondered if God built you out of brick? Laid silk over your harsh corners and sanded you down with a smile--why am I looking at you like that?

sounds like I put myself here and effectively took myself
out, sounds like you're one of kind and so different
and i've never felt this way
but I've heard all of those--

he's not waiting but i am, maybe for some kind of epiphany,
some kind of insurgent thought--an outpouring of light in the
rooms he thinks are lit, i wish I could light candles down his
tenebrous hallways, hang lanterns in the crook of his elbow,
make sure that the shadows only ever follow at a distance
but I can't assuage the feelings you haven't found, the fleeting
thoughts you ignore, I can't smelt the ore from your blood or
even pull a
splinter from
your palm.

He told me once he was in no hurry, no rush. But I've felt like i'm waiting on him, how strange, he'd probably say. Probably tell me
at least once more how much sense I don't make--but I tell myself that only a few people beat for me, run the tracks at the same speed--
that my explanations are enough for every other part of myself
and trying to explain that I am many, that I hang fire and break beds with prayer is like trying to describe colors;
warm, but not bright. Rich, hearty, elegant. -- Untitled. 1994. Oil on canvas.

you will be able to say
once in a while
during the brief
jaunts in our underwear
the glimpses of green lace
under a white cotton shirt
that moved across my shoulders
on the hardwood floors, our heels
stomp and slide, and my thighs
quiver under weight and laughter
you caught me and I turned
turn to hold your neck


but I pause to bring you close
to hold you, as if you were
a vase of baby's breath and ferns
to look you over and wonder how
one moment I was sitting here writing
this on the couch on a september evening
and how you are here now,
with a strange familiarity
and the watch on your wrist
softly clicks forward
but I can hear it from
inside the glass, atop the second hand
sweeping over the ticked surface
reflecting the sweet blue daylight,
the warmth of your body and
the gentle harmony of two people
who have found eachother.

we the daughters of sliced sunbeams
and those who chase gales in between
the pasture gates and barbed fences behind
the silo--

who think there's nothing softer than the way
honey sounds drizzled on toast or daisy petals at the supermarket
the women of ferocious silences, standing before
dozens with trimmed smiles and deafening inner beauty

squeezing our fingers down barley stalks and sewing
the roots into our dresses, we've tried six ways to sunday
the rules, the book on being wanted, before realizing that anything
born out of self-indulgence wilts away
all the work we did to grow and plait our hair with vanilla,
dipped in sweet almond oil we had no idea
that pretending
could only get us
so


far.

didn't have to try
the *** on top of
the fridge from texas
to suggest *** or
heavyweight championships
you laughed when I said
whiskey smelled like vanilla
and again when I took a swig
of apple moonshine and
cringed, yeah, not even
I can handle white lightning
consequently I started humming
that song by The Cadillac Three
the soundtrack to letting go of
waiting or worrying or wanting--

the chrysanthemums on my coffee
table have lasted about three weeks -
about the time frame of things that
need to go

I say something like
I want to know everything about you
and that's not me lying, just my genuine
curiosity out there in the open so when
people ask about you, your favorite
flavor of ice cream will fall right off
my tongue, a thousand little facts
about your truck or your garage
or things I picked up just listening to
the sound of your voice

I like to know people the way I know myself
but maybe i've been careless, maybe i've taken
hearts and made them cranes, taken their soft
rippled surfaces and flattened the corners,
maybe i've been too negligent in the art
of loving, in making sure i've not made
a home where there ought not to be
because i'm good at finding a place
to nest, in the rafters of their chests
and most don't mind birds but


girls aren't birds
girl's aren't birds
and don't have the right
to come in and say they have
all the answers

so i'm out on a county road and I'm saying something like
i'm sorry, please don't leave


I'm sorry, please don't leave.

what have the drunkards told you?

that you were beautiful--
different, gentle, pure
while they were busy
vacillating, you found
yourself whole among
their stormy seas, a tidal
wave bearing down upon
choppy waters where sailors
are lost and boats are sunk
ships full of diatribes and
bitterness, crippling resentment
folded into the bathus --

What have the drunkards told you?


to be less, to dissolve, to speak expressly in
salt and ***, come down from the hill, from
the towers, from the lighthouses where you
poured over the bounding main
learning to be for others lost
what have the drunkards told you?
mixed and unbecoming, double minded
and hopeful for your body


but testimony seeps out from beneath your dress
and some men are scared of lights and lamps
of flowers pressed into the walls, quiet and
unassuming, of stair steps and bookcases
without books

be the light
be the light

yesterday a seventy year old man
named Stan slid a crumpled receipt
across the teller counter and asked
me out--and James from Faricy had
his manager give me his number
on the back of a deposit slip

and I told Ryan that I was positive
he had caught me off guard, that anything
more than friends is not doable so he
thanked me for my honesty and
stopped responding.

and a whole slew of other men,
other apologies, other dancers
and sweaty palms, all lengthy,
wordy paragraphs ending in
too quiet or christ, just take
a break but -

i am falling asleep. upright, at
the bank, to the sound of cashiers
checks sliding out of the printer
an angry little girl knocking at
my door, a child from too long
ago who's never been in love
slipping in and out of a
subdued conciousness
I give up my idea of
the perfect man,
I give it up


i give it up.

Jessica said she was jumped by two men
down by McClures, they followed her down
Main Street and caught her in the alley way
behind the apartments, grabbed a fistful of her
long brown hair and pulled her to the ground--

I said you should have called me 'cause
I am two streets down from there, two minutes
walking or 30 seconds flat if I ran, and she smiles -
says I can do laundry at her new place because they're
fixin to get her a new dryer

asks me about that kid I was seeing and I tell her
he's not a thing anymore, ain't no thing
I leave out the part where I pray for him
every time I see his name pop up -- and it
does a lot.  Prayin' don't always mean good
things happen, no one ever said it did.

And we discuss other boys in light voices
yeah, I think I hurt him. and she doesn't
deny it, just sort of nods


yeah, I think i hurt them.

i was half asleep on a kitchen counter
curled up around the steak knives and
soup ladles, threaded through thick duvets

when you came and tucked yourself into me
with your burlap jacket, but I let you under the
covers--and I distinctly remember pressing my fingers
under your shirt only to feel how deathly cold you were
as if you had just come from the outside, or had risen up
from the snow drifts, opened your ribcage and let the cold
seawater fill the cab

but you were whispering something, a secret I couldn't make out
an undiscovered motive, slight of hand, slight of breath
you were lieing and I was letting you in, letting you in
beneath the weapons, beneath my skin, into my body
and you reached in for a handful of grain but I was a
barrel of cords and twine

meshed and tamped, you found the soft damp earth where
I grow and we somehow managed to make it seem ok
make it seem ok
you're out there ok
crimped and furious
a mean cuss on your lips



touching still means too
much to        me

i had this dream that they
had thrown me into a hole,
and by a feat of bravery I
had managed to escape,
out the window and through
the azalea bushes--

but I returned with a raging
hatred, an unquenchable vengeance
that manifested in red clay that
settled over the creases in my palms
and poured south in waves shaped
like old angers and great mountains
giant bison that snorted and plowed
forth--

but I was the bison and I was the clay,
greeting visitors with crushed eggs, yolk
weeping through my knuckles, the voice
of a hundred i'm sorrys creaking through
the speakers in the living room,

and i'm wiping blood from the meat in the kitchen
on my dress with the yellow fade near the hem
telling visitors yes, come in
yes, come in
when they shouldn't
and I shouldn't

but I could shake the earth, father, I'm so angry.

I could shake the earth.

earlier today during service
I was struck by a strange vision--

that I was running breathlessly
through a misty field, terribly
afraid and naked with a .69 caliber
flintlock musket bucking against my
hip, and the mud did no justice, neither
did the deep grass stains on my belly,
to hide how truly piteous and terrified
I was.

As if somehow during the battle I had lost
my company or else deserted, been stripped
and cashiered--left to my own to roam the empty
wilderness that creaked and cracked
the air that shivered in my supposed dissolution
my feet caught in the dense mire, the very ground
that used to be so resolute, firm to touch
was giving in,
swallowing me without mercy,
I had been separated from my regiment, I thought.
But only deserters would think such a thing,
I had left and was lost and

the congregation began to rise to sing
but I was still there with burning lungs
desperate to find the colonel or captain
the leader or teacher
the father or
God.

it's abut 9pm and I decide I don't want to be alone



there was a car crash earlier that day up west towards Salida--
some Kansas man who was killed by a driver trying to pass
in the right lane, declared deceased on scene, another man
from Monument who was air-lifted to St. Thomas Moore,
no critical injuries.

I tend to ask God for these big signs, signs that I'll recognize. I tell him
that they need to be something I'll notice because you know me, sometimes I can't hear you. Anyway, signs, crashes. A Kansas man died.  It's 9pm and I pull on some jeans and leave the house.

I'm supposed to be at a rodeo dancing, but maybe I wasn't supposed to be there after all. I have this white dress in my closet that you can't even see, tucked between everything else because it's so thin, lays flat beneath the aztec smocks and cream cardigans. I take it out and brush it off, thread my fingers through the open lace--

10pm. When I breathe soft enough the stars look like they're hanging on strings, like I could reach up and snap them off,
they'd be no bigger than dew drops on a spider web
so light they'd drift up in the night breeze and
set up in my own natural atmosphere.

What good would it have done me to be there? I only ask
myself to assuage the warm fear i've been feeling since Friday
night, a lingering umbrage I did not think would stay--
I can see the white stitches in my jeans that look
like they're glowing,
smells like rain out here.
I wish I was out at Chaffey
for a quick moment, enveloping
someone else in this chanel perfume
makin' someone else envious of the
way another man got to spin me out--

I'm trying to be all these people at once, an  
audience of crowd pleasers piled into one body
It's so quiet, I'm so quiet up on the sideways knoll in
Florence, tired of letting people down easy off the sidewalk
curb and being tossed off the bridge over the state highway myself,
I can't help it, I want to say aloud.

I can't help that I am this way, collected.
calm in hearty hysterics, anxious to tell
you about how I've been fixed,
that warm fear growin' hotter
a coal for every man who suggested
I be less than who I am by pourin' more
into my cup,

I'm trying. I'm trying.

we're standing outside the grounds and
i notice how my forearms look remarkably
tan against the white bars, darker than the
loose wet sand out in the arena, a calf trots
by and darts off when a young boy flips a beer
cap at its head--

Ben looks out to the bleachers and goes so, I gotta ask
and I know what's comin' before it leaves his mouth,
know it's something about you, something that's probably
gonna sting a bit so I say, yeah? and I smile real nice like
I don't expect a bad thing--

and he peels a layer of skin from his knuckles and says that he went and asked Alan about me, about what kind of person I was--
that you up and told him I was real ****** churchy all full bore and what have you...so I go quiet and he looks over and gets this startled
expression, like I've gone pale. Which is funny, all things considered.
but he bumps my shoulder and says I won't bring it up again,
i just was curious

I shake my head because I know I'm good at hiding an
erratic heartbeat. I can see you leaned back somewhere with a
*** of copenhagen nestled into your front lip, real ****** churchy
comin' out of you sharp and smooth like a blade,
I imagine you might be hurt about it all,
what business have I got with a Rusher?
twice as crazy as you, probably.

I tell him I've got to go--gotta go because it's late,
because the rodeo is over, because pluto is 4.6 billion
miles from earth and I can feel its gravity--I gotta go.
While I'm driving home, I'm tapping out the syllables
and counting the letters, whisperin' real ******' churchy
to myself, incredulously, in agreement, partially because
I can't think of much else



I didn't expect that, really.
Not from you.

the boys will pick up sticks
down by the river bank and bury
themselves in swampy soil and inch
thick ***** mags from before they were
twinkles or considerations and their fathers
ignore their quick wits and charms--let their
curiousity coil around the garden stakes till
it chokes the tomatoes and lays itself across the
blushing rhubarb that mama worked so hard to
cultivate.

Papas, why didn't you chop down those trees or
tame the stinging nettle, the roof is riddled with
bullet holes and the rifle in the attic is still warm
still vibrating on the shelf, buried in moss, in
wisteria dropping in and growing up the sides--
she can make a man more beautiful but still hide a broken a home

you had a chance to guide your sons

you had a chance.

Travis stands outside the grounds
with me and listens while I recount
the past two months, several times he
sighs and knocks his ball cap up, takes
a rough palm and wipes it down his face,
holding his jaw briefly,

he's smaller in frame, my height, makes eye contact
and holds it, takes you in when he speaks. He's been
treated pretty rough from what i hear but still keeps the
back porch open for visitors and I guess I am one--
twisting the cap on and off a tube of lip gloss, we
talk quietly about his brother who is in and out of
the swinging doors, there are so many men with
blue plaid shirts in here and I can hardly keep track--

and when we head for the Dome, I maneuver through the
old carousers and dark drunks who lurk in plain view, men who
murmur of course, hermosa when I gingerly place my hands
on their shoulders and inch past the doorway, I am searching for
you, for your blue sleeve,
but instead find Travis' and we dance a slow song--

I think he understands how I'm feeling, might be the lack of a poker face, we two-step and I trip over his boots, and when we're done he
kisses my shoulder lightly.

If I wasn't so affected by the warmheartedness I'd tell you I'd barely
noticed, but I am, when people are good, they are much softer. Their
intentions are palpable and tender--
and maybe I find comfort in touching people which i don't do too
often--and for a moment that was all i needed was a hint of
kindness after being handed off
from man to man, from feeling
intensely right with your arms
looped around my waist
with my fingers loosely settled
in your palm--to stranded with a memory
too many times where
you walked off and
i still had so much
more to say, like,
I truly love you,
maybe.

all weekend i fed cucumber skins
and apple chunks to Minokie
and several times i thought the old
corpses of tree trunks were fallen calves
leant to and packed with damp soil, white
roots stretched out under the overcast sky
peeking out of the natural mulch and fern
soft and raw

If I walked past the rocks quick like, they
looked like shoulders or kneecaps, angel heads
that the earth washed out, pines keeled over with
their innards exposed, the sound of veins being ripped
from the bedrock still audible

I started thinking of things based on where you
could have been or would have been
with me--sleeping patterns we might have
discovered, the narrow places we find we fit,
the hollows too cold and mountains just right--
how the night flashed behind my eyelids
like a buoy in tumult and the rain sounded like the footsteps
of someone stopping at the edge of my tent over and over

I keep casually mentioning your name because
it still sounds right, but i'm cautious around the syllables
as if i've taken clay to fold around the ends, spoken secrets
into sego lily petals,
I'm a little more down in the earth as if
i've been too high up in the clouds, i've picked up
this strange way of speaking that the old folks are
drawn to--they touch my wrists and pray with me
over their anemic daughters and passed sons--

they hear me.


I keep thinkin' maybe we're meant to be or maybe
you were the catalyst to an end of a softer life i'd been
living, one without the smell of cow pats baking, the dense
grass giving off steam, uncomfortably humid but it makes your
sweat kind of sweet, and the bees think we're honeysuckle, foxglove
jim hill mustard, soaked up in truck exhaust at 5 am,
a dry cold that advances on your lungs--
almost hurts the way it unabashedly fills you up,
doesn't feel sheltered, feels saturated and heavy with
possibility. Feels like the amber grass, newborns, cold tin roofs,
stars in the back of your throat.

tell me, was that in your blood? and when i dug splinters out of your
palm, when you were staring around my earlobes, did it spread? Did the birds pick you up and scatter you like wildflower seeds? it jumped river, through our mouths or elsewhere

we're not talkin but you're still here
we're not talking but I'm still there.

i'm doing that thing--
that thing where you only
remember the good things,
the good things are saving me
from the bad things which were
so few and far between, which in fact,
weren't many at all,

I was trying to distract myself, really
if it's a question of whether I could have
loved you regardless of our differences then
the answer is yes, yes, I can.  

but the proper analogy for what we had probably
looks something like two indians on opposite sides of
the river, or maybe you were in the middle, maybe I
was knee deep in the shore, toes between the stones
with an outstretched hand, maybe it wasn't a river,
maybe it was the rapids---was I yelling?

When I said I was done, what I really meant was, i'm done
hoping that you'll cross the river. Because you're pretty stubborn,
like you're on this rotating pedestal, and you pick up where you please
but I'm rooted, dug in, cemented to a lifestyle.


I dunno. I couldn't ask you to change.

I'm doing that thing--
that thing where I remember all the good things.
wondering if God has you or someone else,
it's funny how much I miss you.

I recently unearthed old photos of me
with a mop of scraggly black hair and
a ***** smile on my face, the kind of
smile I used to give before sinking into
myself, twisting my face up to disappear
and reassess my insides, how was that heart
workin' out for you, sweetheart?

And years later I still feel the familiar jolt,
manage to think that I am too sloppy for
loving, I've always been a pallet of nudes
a swarthy child waiting to be as blue as
the sky, holding myself to a standard
physically impossible, people tell me
I'm beautiful and I still wonder why
if this is as easy as loving myself then
I want to know how,  I say thank you
with a hand over my heart to hold in
the little girls, who still wait in the middle
of empty classrooms for a partner, who still
envy the women that grew fox-glove petals
in the golden hour while I crouched in the
curly willow branches, semi-dormant
perpetually brown with too much skin
standing off the side because I was too
afraid to touch others,

too afraid of an olive complexion. Too afraid of being in this body.


When someone loves you, how will you know?
what will they do when they see my scars, the ones that only
show at certain times in certain ways? Under hot water and at
noonday? when will I be okay with a broken heritage, with a mexican
daddy who cut the ropes back to the village where I was supposed to
return to? And why do I feel like the winds and hot sands when boys hold my hands? Like I am burning up the rivers or smoldering beneath
the dry autumn brush in San Isabel, where only beetles and lizards congregate, a backboard baby with
an overprotective mother, carrying the strings I've tried to tie to others--

direct me home, sir.
direct me home, ma'am.

Tell me who I am.
tell me who i am

I keep having
these dreams about
you, (I keep having
these dreams about you)
i have nothing to say
a lot of redundancy, mom, why
is it taking me so long?
was it because of the
night in the barn?
I dunno, I tell myself.
I can put on a pretty good show,
i guess, I'll sit at work and
reprimand myself behind the
fax machine, you told him you were done
but that was really for the greater good,
and I think about how to him, everything
has the potential to be fixed--
like people are brick buildings or
wooden shelves or long pipelines,
he's been fixing everything for a while
welding all his wounds shut and shootin'
the rats that find their ways into his room--
that doesn't change the things he said--
that I won't bother repeatin'

redundancy, like i was saying earlier.



that doesn't fix the dreams
how I changed a little with him
that I feel a little warmer with
sweet tea, with milk, with the
old men that walk into the bank
all watery eyed and spotted,
who I have to yell at so they
can hear me past half a century
of haulin' hay, i dunno,


i dunno. Dakota brought
out something good in me
the way streams wash out
little flecks of gold


i'm okay


I think.

have you ever felt your body?


have you ever felt your body?
a mellow clay mold sitting in the
bathroom, filled with pops and
quick ticks, i've often searched my
veins for pains, and they manifest
when I do, so I wonder--

about that.


and when I think about it too much
my belly starts to buzz and my chest
thickens with a warm afterglow, yeast
rising in a far clavicle, in my kidneys
and spleen--when I focus on the sounds
I can hear the pin drop of my soul, a tiny
bead on a string, a group of pink seashells
on Newton's cradle in a room shadowed in
broken evening, clicking against each other
softly, a lilliputian clock keeping time from
another century--

lost in twilight, in dawn, skipping the day,
my spirit always sinks into the everglades
a flighty anachronism, a homing pigeon
caught in telephone wires, beneath bus
wheels and modern dating--

ah,

out there?
hello?
forward message.  
I am here.

I'm a resonant body,
made love to the man I hope
comes around in my dreams
and his torso distended and separated
kissed his stomach before his legs became
driftwood and slabs of black marble--
his house was carpeted in grass with
rivers running through them
and I stood half-naked at the
stream with a makeshift fishing
rod, folding spotted paperclips
into hooks, there were no doors
but you came around the sunlight
as if there was, stepped through the
air and stood beside me--and the fish
came to you one after the other
until I accidentally dropped the wire
and it floated downstream to the front
entrance,
where is my heart?
in the misty moors
burnt off by noonday
convalescing in mossy burrows
trying so hard to make sense of
the people that become bales of hay
matchsticks and empty cotton shirts.

when when  when
and the more I say it
the more it sounds like
another language, archaic
german or synonym for
rice bowl in mandarin
the more I say it, the more
it fades from minor burn
to casualty, from rhetorial
question to plea, until I'm
sweating out in my apartment
angrily slamming clothes hangers
into the closet, shakily raising my
voice at God like a waspish child
and tearing dresses over my head
proclaiming see? see? I'll never
get to wear this one either.

curling my fingers into the bedspread--
around bottles of tea tree oil and dragging
an old kabuki brush through peach blush
holding my lips this way and that, when?
when will it be enough?


When will it be enough?

I'd forgotten about the last frost
the tv casting a flickering glow on
the opposite wall, I'd been counting
the number of times you'd said ****    (six)
still expecting (hoping) you to take my
hands and blow warm air through
my thumbs--

we left the cows (which had dwindled since I'd last been)
and climbed the rails near the house to get to the roof
it's so dark that it's light out here, I've got some song
by the Randy Rogers Band coming up through my
hair and buzzing on my lips

curse the photographic memory, I see you wobbling on the icy ridges
putting your faith in bolt heads to hold you upright--this stretch of
stars linin' up with your shoulders, your heart is crooked but beats
pretty straight--sometimes the air glistens around you like you're
still cookin' in the sun or maybe you've got some of that anger
still left over from Ashley, (who knows) I don't say a thing.

People say the night is black, but the night is blue. The night is the color of the year, purple quartz, johnny cash's long drawl, the night is your shadow, your laugh, a wily hand briefly tucked in the seam of my thigh where it all runs together, where all the water meets on Coleman land--disenchanted by our differences, scouring skin like shrikes waiting
for an opening, going in for the dive and finding that I am all melted
wax and whimpers--
lying shoulder to shoulder like we first
did up on Skyline,
boy, did I.
Boy, did I?

to the man who loves me next and last

at some point i'll have to tell you that I've
been waiting for you for years, and that in
the hearts of every passer-by I saw bits and
pieces of who i thought you'd be, half-truths
and mostly lies, fantasies and countless scenarios
buried in an inch of sand at the bottom of a flower
vase

that at one point you were a Chris or a Chaz and several
other men who never even made it past the door, sometimes
tall and usually short and even missing half of your pinky
in 2013--

but as it turns out, I always kept walking, and sometimes the
ground shifted forward and carried me away-- there were a
few detours and places where I'd be standing beneath a swinging
stoplight for an indeterminate amount of time, where I sent a hundred
postcards to friends and family in riddles and broken
seashells, roots still damp and undeveloped strips of film

And there were many days where I sat staring out the window
at the storm clouds rolling over the arkansas river, carving another
man's name into a birch tree dug into the shore, nestled into a hundred
other initials-- wondering if his hands were yours or yours his and if he'd be you or you'd be him--quit smiling like that, i mean it.

But if you count the number of days I work throughout the year and
realize that for all of those I twisted an apple stem and always came up
on a different letter, you might think I was a little bit obsessive about
my dreams which is probably why you never showed up--
when I was deep in between the mountains, trekking in the tall grass where the cicadas vibrated the muggy august air--

I'll have to admit these things to you, divulge the secrets to my fridge
and buy new perfume to christen you with the seasons, share the passwords for my wifi and clear playlists filled with memories of other people, but if you can believe it--I think we're a little bit closer.

things are moving pretty fast and I'm being shoved along as if by wind or flood or corn plow, scooped up and cultivated, i've been having dreams of multitudes, of wading out into the ocean to scoop up fish
and sea glass with silver flecks, old flattened coins with thick films of
verdigris--

I'll be sitting at work completely disgusted by myself--and that's how I'm sure. That I am becoming less of who I was and more of who you'll know, less of a thought and more of a concrete idea, a person, someone
worthy. Everything used to be discussed based on how worthy it was of me, but maybe I need to be
worthy of
you.


I'll have to tell you these things.