who can say
that they have
ever gone home?

i still hang my arms
out the window because
i need to feel the wind
i'd never call myself claustrophobic
but i've always been fonder of
wide places, as much as
my house feels like a
trench i still walk in
and breathe home
whether god is there
immediately or not
I have chosen to
believe he is present
in the most petty of
circumstances, even
then as I sat on my bed
debating the gas mileage
to his house, and instead
taking off my shorts
and turning off the light--
that each of these low blows
has been engineered and if
rolling with the punches
were any more true, (possibly
caustic) then I am willing
to take each hit or
throw a few if need


be.

here's what you do
he has the silliest, most
western grin,
you grab a good branch
everything is this nice
before-autumn green
and i'm watching him
plod ahead in his old
levis, copenhagen ring
a frayed outline
it's a good gun, is what I mean

you gotta get a good gun.*

he turns around and shoots.

I don't
know
what
people
expect
from
me

on the hammock this evening
the west pasture filled with thick
mulberry clouds, framed by sheathes of
apricot mist in drapes

I am watching the leaves of The Cottonwood
shimmer, flip their golden underbellies up
like schools of danios

And I’m talking to God about being alone—
I send a couple videos to Alyssa

Somewhere on Central some young boys
rip down the backroads up Fields on
their little bikes, setting every dog off in
the copse mobile home park

it’s not that I’m not grateful

No messages. Just wind, late evening.
Sunday with the Lord.

There was too
much hope in
that brownie
with the single
candle but I
wished on it

anyway

I want a typical romance
I will jump in the pool naked
brisk and covered in goosebumps
taut, skin straining out
if you offered to kiss me and
hold a split peach in handfuls

i am your

                                                  arrow


r­elease me where
you
will

He stands like William Stanley Moore
a mugshot of an old gangster I saw once
in sepia, stony, strangely clarified, endowed
immortalized in caramel marble
glassy eyes and all--

he plowed ahead that night
fingers twitching, only to turn
around outside of the light
once we'd gone through
the doors and I'd fled down
the stairs in his wake
to clip his heels

I've been chasing his shadow
tying my lead to his bow
far away from my own
dock, a sailboat piping
behind a cottonclad warship

I am small and timid
soft and malleable, unwild
unwoven, strips of silk in the foyer
running through his fingers
sheets sliding down his back
I cannot give what other girls
have given, the way they
dive and plead and swarm
I can only coat, can only
rinse, only lather, I can only
run over--

I am standing at his bookshelf
running a finger over the spines
gingerly closing the cabinet or
slipping into his bed, tucked
away like a porcelain doll
I try
i try
i try

what do you call that--in the morning?
between dried citrus fruits, orange and
lemon pinwheels strung on fishing wire
persimmon and crystalized cinnabar
soft bread rolls wrapped in muslin
with filtered sun refracting
through the crown glass
around her head like parhelion--
and she touches the spices
sumac, saffron, fennel, mustard seeds
and she touches the dishcloths
and she touches
and she touches
and she touches.

I think it was the spring
before sophomore year in
high school, a prelude to the
best and worst but I missed
that footnote. The previous
night was nice where romance
had intervened if at all possible
for 14 year olds. I should have
understood that devils come
at all ages in all seasons but
the stars beckoned summer
and your parents didn't know
and this was the first time I'd
ever been so secretive. Wasn't
until now I'd realized you have
always been a limit pusher, I
didn't understand then, when
you asked to stick your hand
down my shirt. I cannot call
myself stupid for being young,
but let's call it a lapse in morality.
you frowned, pulled back and
told me there was nothing there.
It has always been the smallest
things said that have injured me
the greatest.

I'm fond of those light touches
when someone knows how to
turn my cheek into their palm
in the maraschino hue, I like
that, I like that

I like that

I permanently imprinted
the image of you sleeping
to torture me on a good day
sweden filling out your lips
and long dark lashes rippling
back and forth, we have always
woken up mid-dawn when everything
is still soft and paisley blue, so I can't
remember you in any other way
than dark and lovely, the morning
light always spilling over you like
you were born to be in the daylight
with picks of orange in your eyes
just the way I like them, oak brown
like fresh soil, moss and maple tree sap
looking at me like i'm the only person
who will
ever
look
back.

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.

If it is true that for every closed door
there is one that is open, then I have
closed every door to look for cracks
in the windows, slivers of light near
the rugs, waiting by the slot for the
mail to arrive, never blind-peeking
because I place weight on the hope
that this house will break apart and
all dust will fly from the rafters above
me, who might finally breathe the
foreign air and taste the new day

Long division, twelve red balloons
in the wind, I'm heavy with thoughts
that always keep me grounded,
a heartbeat driving home against
rubber-bands, swelling in paper skin
disintegrating beneath drops of gravity,
people who sound like piano notes
silvery, sustained harmonics
and smell like peaches
feel like home

would he love me
with a bounty on
my head, with two
six shooters and the
audacity to leave

would he love me
with scars scribbled
down my back, the
tacit agenda of every
one before, every thing
ever said,

would he love me
would he love me
with a bounty

Through the twigs and savory green,
dry yellow sun bits. A wet vanilla perfume
lingering in sweat droplets, staining
that white tank-top too busy being
baked in, dead grass fastened to your
thighs a bit like tassels. I am sometimes
positive that you grew from the thirsty
dirt like a

cactus

Drives a part of me mad
thinking about that bunk
bed soaked in my perfume
how you ******* her, midst
my hairbands

before the maroon 5 concert
chaz said his mom wasn't home
she had stripped his mattress and
put everything in the wash
and I only remember wondering
why it hurt so much
and the silk threads of the seams
catching on my bra straps--
I had thought it was
supposed to be so much more
than pumping and churning
like pistons in a truck,

the difference was you
stopped when I asked
shiverin' above me in
a warm sweat
and all i could do was
run my fingers through
your hair over and over
stay silent and move slowly
because no one has ever seen
me like that, wavering
and rocking, working my
way up, using your hips
like training blocks, stretching
my thighs out over your bed--
lord I ain't ever asked for more
never bruised nobody 'cause
I wasn't thinkin', he's got
these welts i don't even
remember, he sayin he let me
in like he left the door's open
during the storm and I was
rain, hail or wind, a noise,
a knock, just me.
but I opened the windows,
the basement, the attic
pulled out the chairs in
expectation, I have nothin'
to say for my fears, they're
there and sometimes they
shift gears and gun it
but that don't mean
i didn't look at you
and wonder about
things I shouldn't
or replace my daddy's
name with yours just
to
see.

I long to leave the loop i
weave around my legs, listless
okay, once in a while, waxed over by
candle drops, wishing water would
soothe the burn brought on by bittnerness
cooked into my skin but my body is nonporous
can nothing save me from
being too dramatic?

i read an article on the asymmetrical nature
of internal organs including, but not limited to
the nature of the heart

and how the body folds in over itself so
many times as it forms.
how outwardly being able
to sense things on both side of the body is crucial, so
we are to have two legs, two arms, two ears, two eyes--

but the heart was on the inside,
with less pressure to be two,
mattering less as to where it was
distributed--more likely to be
a mess,

would i have been better with two
hearts-- one on each sleeve?
to sense things on both sides, would i
have been more aware, more transparent, or
more dense, with the capacity for much, for
much--

or would i have been
overwhelmed with the novelty
of each person i meet, which I often feel anyway
as if i should tuck them away
and seek out promises to
keep them stolen into
the one, singular *****
that I have?

I should have been born with two--
either way, the unevenness of it all, you can't fix
the broken with the same crooked hands,
I am not at all symmetrical
I do not sense with both sides of my body
not at all with my heart
I have acted on an imbalance and hoped
the sullied appearance of such a vigorously beating thing
rough and on it's own would
speak volumes but it does not
and has not.