the RATF in Sandusky, Ohio
Is perhaps the loudest place
in the world according to Guinness—

Highly reflective,
with sound levels tremendous enough
To perforate an eardrum and shake
the vocal chords so viciously one might
feel like they’re choking.

But it may actually be inside my head—
The loudest place, I mean.
The words are all gathering up there;
shrill, in the corners,
vibrating against the concrete.

They say Krakatoa could be heard 3000
miles away but that’s simply child’s play—

It’s all neither here nor there, though.
It’s all hypothetical.
It’s all just a room at Plum Brook Station.

she is a fine cut of meat
my heart grills under the wires
she's fresh like cucumbers

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?

the eyes are probably the truest--
but even my dad said that people
may see colors differently

he told me it's kind of like you copy people


I saw a certain amount of truth in that,
but it was more like adding a layer of paint
onto a canvas i've already been working on--

ever since I can remember I have treated people
like arts and crafts, like books, like in depth studies
I've loved watching documentaries on the salinity of
ocean water
Shakespeare's secret life and cotton blankets
watched my father put together bikes
disassemble sinks and make things work
been at a loss for words but filled
to the brim with definitions i'll
never use,
always been
fascinated by the unknown
and the known, often found
with acrylic smeared on
my thighs like a palette
deep in thought with
no poker face, searching
for different ways to describe
the way I have or have not seen
people-- dodgem, reticent, abseil,
cloisonne.

so,
yes,
I see the truth in that
in wanting to understand so badly
that it becomes a part of me,
but how can you tell them that?
how can you tell him that?
how can you say, 'this is me'
a conglomerate of many but
still my own?

i cannot put a halter on curiosity
putting songs on repeat to harmonize
to, wanting to know everything about
the things people love because
there is so much to appreciate,
to follow, to grasp and I
want to get in and get
*****, I want to
twist between the gears
touch everything
every fencepost
every brick, every
old paperback

so,
maybe.

maybe that is true.

Occasionally they
ask me why we
are so different

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 am terribly
sad and angry
it is so easy for
you to be of the
world.

My mother once told me that
what's in the heart comes out the mouth
so I became accustomed to believing that everyone is inherently bad
instead of the latter

do all wild things
return home?

I used to say I wasn't--
that the blood of kinder animals
ran through me
                                      (although that may still be true)
I think i've bed down with coyotes
made off with predators
dressed in spots and stripes--
but could i have reaped
the benefits of a life so severe?
                  we are all wild in our own
varying ways
                                 not all of us howl or rage
some of us leave home and
feign courage, pull on our
faces, don't hunt or scout but
wander, and the others all
convene and say
              you are so unlike yourself
and the worst don't even ask and
say they like this new you--

this new you
a lost you
wild is not always
is not allways.
and I am not always

picking my way back
with little knowledge
of scents and markings
the lay of the wind
is all foreign
because I am not
truly a

wild

thing.

i imagine she is
so much more
fair, they all are
always blonde
and delicate,
I have to
tear myself away
from this place
where my body
is just a shadowy
afterthought in
the midst of a
hundred yellow
strands, someday
i will not stomp
through the forest
someday I will
be able to linger
and be the kind
of beautiful

the kind
of
beautiful.

i used to wish the thunder
scared me.


but it never has,
always wanted to
catch bolts in my
hair, whip through
the rain, yell my
middle name
into the hollow
or up the crags
near Rockvale,
i will never
claim a wild
streak but I have
a such a loud
voice inside
me.

Lately I have wondered
where my life has gotten
to while I spent my time
worrying about the sand
on the beach or the hair
on my head.

i asked nick
what year he
felt was the most
wasted

and he said even
one step is a step
forward--

but there could be
no better embodiment
of anger, it is there every
morning telling me that
he is home that I am
a body, that i am a bad thing
it rides in the bed of
every dodge ram
and permeates every dream
where i hear trumpets echoing
in the mountains, in valleys i stood
with my father and
God's voice thundered from higher
from clouds like a ***** through the earth
heavy rainfall across miles
and miles of unsodden land
and we were crippled
into the dirt--

I asked nick
what year
he felt was
most wasted

and he said even'
one step

is a step


forward.

I’m made of lists
Knocking on doors, I’m unprepared
half my mother,

I’ve been praying the Lord unmake me
Strip me bare, smelt me to my core

I’m hastening to be someone you could love
Could you?

Could you.

she is a flash
across the wheat-field
a tribal dance of light
across the grass, even
her shadow is thrown
across the sky.

He broke me and
i choose to still feel broken
I broke him and
he will forever blame me
for the pain that he feels
despite how many times
i would have told him I am
sorry
I am scared of boys and what
they can do when I don't make
everything abundantly clear about myself
My no's are too silent and too weak
everything I do is taken as a go,
go for it,
when i'm really saying otherwise
But I like to feel loved, and wanted
and everything beneath the sun, dirt
trees, water, water especially
i'm not agressive, I'm not these things
they think I am but
sometimes i gain
too much velocity
I don't want to skin
my knees to stop
no, not again.

i think i saw him riding by
earlier today--
with so much time we spend
staring out the windows
I was on a phone call with
a customer about overdrafts
and loans--
but you can...you can...call..call the...
every word following a little bike out
on the highway
Miss? call?
I'm so sorry, I say, laughing.  I was
elsewhere.

I was elsewhere.

lightening out, a thin
blue flash and I can
feel your arm around
my shoulder and your
kiss on my forehead.
It's true I try to forget
but you still permeate
my scenarios with each
rumble, it's true

it's true
it's true.

I felt the life
inside of her
stomach, a
warm glow
I wanted to
whisper
hello baby
hello in there.

Maybe if I were a
hummingbird. Wine-throated
in Guatemala, would that be
far enough away, or is it such
a romantic notion to want to
to be fast enough to escape but
beautiful enough to be noticed

Dreamed about you
last night, I hid in the
sunflowers against an
old white house and
you came to find me

i like the things you do to me
that's the only reason i stay
the way you draw the water out
the way you pull my skin apart
that's the only reason i stay

they seem to think I can heal you



they seem to think I can heal you,
but the truth is I can only be there
and when there are cracks in the ceiling
and the mountains are frozen or gently
rolling over mustard seeds, I will hold
fast to the one Mainstay and encourage
you to do so too--because I can't walk
with your legs or talk with your words
nor can I delve inside your dark waters
and know how to navigate your thoughts
that so often I won't understand--

and I won't change you because we will
be a team, a single cog rotating in a royal
body, bearing the heat and blows so that
when you are away and toiling, or burning
the sheets with newfound anger, I will
stand by and let your battles rage until
we meet on middle ground and grasp
each other's forearms in the dust, heaving.

with you, this will not be a game.  You will not
be a piece, a checker, a player. I will not move
you or take mallets to your foundation because
it will be mine too--I will not hate you because
that would be hating myself and I will not hate
myself because that would be hating you--

I will not question your love for me like I have
questioned the masses, because this love will
not be antiquated but fresh and ripe each
morning, anew with our combined inquiries
and issues of heart, barrels of quinoa to sink
our fingers into and count ceremoniously
each grain a celebration, a victory poured
over quiet nights shared between whispers
and hushed prayers

and though your initial compliments and flattery
fade away, when our first meeting has worn off--
no lit suppers but bowls of hot oatmeal on the
couch, when our voices have failed to address
the day and time has only built between our hips,
I will quietly say that                                                 I have missed you
because though we are one there will still be
wedges---doorstops, rocks and boulders and
great things that drop and slide between us
that find their way into fissures in our flawed
surface  


but

I will love you through that.

I will love you through each fight and missed
opportunity to apologize, every door closed a
little too hard, each cold dinner or syllable too
harshly spoken, when I send you
to the supermarket and you arrive with only
half of the groceries, when the world is splitting
in two and we are fleeing from city to city and I
can hardly recognize you through the grit and grime

I will love you.

jack of hearts.

i can hear you
greeting every single person
with a sideways hug and a slap on the back
and the words echo down to widen the crack,
these people are fillers, are caulking, are clay
their presence is a temporary fix,  a belay
a hold on the rope, a helium anchor
the weight of a person held down by paper


you used to put me there cause I fit just right
nestled into that place where you had
carved out a ledge, less room for emotion,
for feelings, for thoughts, a space to put
whiskey, clean sheets and some guns

you reckon you're empty, that people
can forget, but these pennies are wishes
that you can't be rid,
each wish is a stone tethered back to the source
when you find you've been slinging rocks
at your younger self--

the injured rabbit beneath
the porch, the ghost in the attic was you all along
rattling chains, speaking in tongues, writing down
in the books that this was all you've got, all you've got
to give, all you have to offer, that if this didn't work
then nothing would ever--

and i can't tell you enough how much
that isn't true, how beautiful you are in
the sun and at night, covered in shadows
whispering hank williams songs or sharpening
knives, sprawled out in the bed sweating bulleit rye
with these soft little breaths clenching your shoulder blades
tight, with your back to me trembling beneath my touch
it's been a while since you said that felt good.

I've never immortalized so many moments
wondering if i'd ever get them back, but i've
made the process worse by opening my mouth
i've never been the easiest task, always formulas
and charts and long scrawled out graphs
words and scripture and please-be-safe prayers
split down the middle and made of a jury
a table of people watching you perform
you've probably felt like you loved a crowd
an audience of me all staring you down
but
i
promise that the person i want to be
will be softer and kinder, capable of
unfolding, unlocking, unsheathing,
opening, and stronger and easy
to
love.

and i'm praying for nothing
but for god to crash this train
and ruin who i don't want to be
because i can't stand the person I am
and can't wait for the person I want to be
and if honesty isn't enough, then actions
will have to do
cause I have to
think i'm enough, darlin.
I have to think I'm enough
without hearing it from you