In fourth grade I got a handwritten paper back from the teacher.
All my lowercase letter b’s were perfectly circled in red ink.
I think that’s what made me allergic to fire ants and yellow jackets.

I used to work at a breakfast restaurant and I smiled a lot.
I brought him his omelet and he told me it was as big as a body *****.
It was nice that I got to ask strangers for their first names.

I donate blood every fifty-six days on the dot because I like the questions
about prostitutes, and the ****** Butters, the rubber bands and the iodine swabs.
I am O positive and I feel regeneration as the bag fills up.

I wore black in Valencia and I could feel the gray matter pulsing in my brain.
I danced with the balcony girl in the bathrobe and I watched the whole city burning.
He always offered me the same breakfast, a warm glass of milk and a cigarette.

I slept on salty bark in Big Sur and we drove fast over Bixby Bridge.
I couldn’t get my head far enough out of the window in the backseat.
I smelled so human and breathed in the waste of the redwood beasts.

I came across an old barn with an old truck parked permanently behind it.
The bed was piled high with bundles of dried lavender harvested before I was born.
I grabbed scratchy handfuls and rubbed the brittle stalks on my arms and neck.

I stood in the cathedral so I could feel the weight of each broken back.  
The forest sculptors and lamb carvers believed in what they could not see.
Light pours in through the stained glass window and I feel the colors in my bones.

Gravity isn’t a factor when a jellyfish plague leaves
a layer of purple gelatinous mass on the beach.
The hills unzip their jackets into the ocean waves,
feeling the cool breeze on their uppermost ridges.
Rocks are painted from within
demonstrating all the colors of the turkey tail.
There are spirits around me,
watching from the pine trees and rippling the water when they wink.
The explosion of the dawn wood pigeons
startles the leaves awake.
I was there when the lightning made this river,
filling it with life and movement.
I can see your shadow from behind the aspen grove,
tunneling the light towards the chalk cliffs.
The ground is shaking from the thunder core of my fiery center,
I take shelter under the strongest branches.
I wrap a blanket of constellations around my shoulders
and count the times the bullfrog burps.

“I can never remember if the Earth goes around the moon
or if the Sun goes around the Earth.”
‘That’s alright, I can never remember if the tides are pulled on strings by fish
or by machines under the marsh.”

Then there are these blue dreams of mine, underwater in a car with one door open.
My ears are popped and I can’t get them unpopped, even if I chew bubblegum.
So I put my thumb and index finger on either side of my nose and blow.