he* brought me out to the
                                     woodshed

gently opens the back door
but it slams behind us, pneumatic
cylinder busted so it catches my heels
and i slide off the last step
into the gravel and his steel-toes--

he silently brushes through the
prairie drop seed and mexican
feathergrass, nothing but an oil
stained back lumbering amidst the switch
eventide shivelight striking through
the creases in his ears

full of his old tools, horses,
hidden shelves--
and i've gone cold since
we left the house, a
**** frost set out
on my limbs 'cause
i know i done wrong
all the blessed evidence
up and down and that's
before he starts to turn--

ungive.

ungive.

I'm standing at the departure gate
and the world is all before me, the
flight is leaving and I have two ways I could be going
I'm standing there in my best dress, in my heels
with my hair done up just like you taught me
with my shoulders back, just like that?
the flight is leaving, the flight is leaving
the flight is leaving

there was once a spider in
my bathroom who wove
a thin globe around itself
for who knows what reason--

I've felt it slide over me,
a thick film, it happens
the way something suddenly
becomes a scar, you're there
for every moment that it
is red and puckered but
one day you find that
your body has taken
aim and fixed itself.

i imagine this is how
people go blind, like
someone has etched filigree
over my lungs and now I
breathe a little easier--
but something has gone
missing, i've always seen
my thoughts as people
and she is no different,
swaddled and taken away

i don't think there is a word
for the process, just the faint
inclination that some things
never existed, or did in another
year, another place, i've always
found myself here,
healed over, maybe
the single tremolo
wavering over my
shoulders, wet out
of a monsoon
usually
box elder leaves
like schools of minnows
diving and plunging

me.

there.

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 can't get that out of my head--
the image of you still as a buck
in your recliner, bringing up
that old flame like i knew you
would, said you saw her out
in Florence, on the street, at the
bar, I can't be sure she doesn't
haunt you in other ways too,

i only meant i couldn't compete
with the memory, with the pull
with the drive for warmth, but
you should know that I've seen
your softness, your genial self,
the talkative little boy, you can't
lie to me about your pain but you
can lie to her
so

I won't try and argue the specifics
about time, or save you from going
around the mountainside, you fancy
yourself a dog man, born and bred out
of the cheyenne wilderness so if you're
gonna fight, then fight against the women
who are no good, 'cause I know you
feel it in your heart, darlin, I know you
feel it in your soul, cowboy, I know you
saw it briefly in a girl like me, matt.

In June 2013 I made fun
of you because your beard
was scraggly and patchy, but
you smirked and told me to
wait until your birthday,
because by then it would
be there. Well, your birthday
has come and gone and I anticipate
your pictures on instagram waiting for
that cold to strike me down, but you really
do have a beard now.

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.

we're standing at the corner of the
bar and for the first twenty minutes i'm
scared I didn't lock my car door.

I'm wondering why people are so fragile--
how some feel like staunch walls and others
bone china, how when you hold them, some
feel like they have been here and others like
they have been nowhere, as if you might
fall straight  through them because you
should know better than to lean on a shoji

When I touch people I feel their sadness--
bodies have shields but I've missed that
stair step, forgot there was a ledge there,
groped for the light switch and found                                air
he isn't a body, he's a hurt, a walking,
talking, immortalized pain.  


Sometimes I find myself desperately searching
for something witty, for a laugh, for an old topic
we've already discussed.   I ask did you get home safe?
by default because worry is the only place to go that's fair
territory, to care is to succeed, thrive in your propensity to brood

I'm still standing at the bar in a peach cardigan
the bartender squeezing in and out of the opening
and some biker with a gnarly gray beard buys us
shots of jameson which is pretty fitting but there's
still a full 4.30 worth of Redds in my hand that I
won't much touch--


Greetings from Inside My Head, a postcard I should
have sent out years ago, halls and halls of literature I've
written about each day, catalogued in scenarios, in fantasies
in trucks beds, events that lasted no longer than ten seconds
I've written monologues about people's fingers and how the
sunlight falls on different shoulders, every moment is a
stanza, every Alpha state a macrocosm, I'm in a room
full of well-oiled people and they're made up of tea
leaves, soot, black leather and molasses.

it's 11:33 and everyone's facing away from me for a moment
I keep telling Jessica she looks like she's crying, ironically, I didn't
know that's what happens when you're hammered.  I shake
someone's hand, my name is somewhere out there on the pool
table, knocked around and lost down a hole like a billiard ball
like with anything, comfort requires the right kind of place
with a specific time zone, the one that comes with certain
people and my clock keeps spinning,

spinning

spinning.

we sing the concrete jungle
(you can get lost in the country, too)
in fact, you can get lost anywhere that is
and people that drive away from their problems
thinking that it really is location, location, location
are lying to themselves

because the reason he decides to take a job in Utah,
probably isn't because he hates where he's at, or because
his boss is a ****, but because the unease that pulses through
his hands tells him, verbatim, that you could belong somewhere
else, you just need to keep moving.  If you've ever tried to run
and talk sense into yourself at the same time, you'd know that
the two aren't so much mutually exclusive, that you're either
running or you're thinking and most people
don't like to be




alone




with themselves, so we've perpetuated the notion that distractions
are healthy and ourselves are not, that most thoughts are too heavy
to bear and the crack of each cannon drives you borderline pyschotic,
so we hide in the trenches or break for the trees,
pretend we don't exist,
pretend we don't hear
what goes inside our heads
and all the feelings that could
be real that churn inside our chest
like the taffy machine in Depoe, Oregon
wrenching and loving and yearning and angonizing--
how we've learned to so mercilessly ignore ourselves
is beyond me


so when we pack up our travel trailers and claim that
anywhere is better than here, I'd propose that everywhere
is the same, and here or there, whether between the red rocks
in Moab or the aspen trees in Palisade, while ultimately different
coordinates, look
just
the
*******
same

when he comes I hope i'm ready
I hope by then i have healed over
that my scars are just midribs and
my backbone the strongest flower
stem he's laid eyes on--

that i won't be the prettiest thing he's
ever seen but I might be the brightest
because maybe he'll see me from miles
out or maybe i'll be the dimmest glow,
maybe I will be the brick beneath a sheath of
Virginia creeper,  and he will have to pull
apart the vines to see,

i am not trying to hide I will say,
i've just been still for so long, i stopped
waiting, I was done hoping, i'd accepted
that you might not show up but lord
i am so grateful you did--

and maybe the rain will fall and
i'll stop being hidden without trying
and all the moments I laid in the tub
with the hot water running over me
will not seem so strange and I will
not shame myself for crying
so often.

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

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.

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 blatantly tell
god I hate him
i really don't
want to be talking
to you right now
but I still cry over
scriptures from
Galatians.

but all i
have to
say is
that i'm
terribly
afraid
of men

Have you ever seen the boy inside the man?
when he sleeps, he holds the pillow,
shoulders tucked, chin to chest
calves lay as though they were young, hairless
he speaks the truth when he's drowsy, innocent
things in a soft voice as he rubs his eyes and pouts
i'm tired
I see him as a little
boy whose legs don't
even touch the floor
hands so soft and damp
inside a man who
is so self-righteous
during the day.

I spent years trying to be
one of the boys because i
couldn't be one of the girls
that boys like or girls liked

so now I've learned to be
whatever boys like, whatever
men like I'm not sure. so I search
for those perfect traits that align
with mine and they're never in
the same place, all in different
bodies.  And however petty
it may seem, i'm worried

that no one else will ever like
me for me.