Slow like planets I’ll come,
as certain as glaciers and disease
a lovely plague upon this land
of fungus and food-bearing trees.
There is an age to matricide.
300 million years ago,
a paramecium split
and split again.
That was when we invented death.
It has been several decades since
that formation of the stars
and the felicity of orbits
maligned into recognizable shapes:
a crab, a pair of brothers
sharing a life.
One day I’ll ascend
to where the hydrogen obey me
and the slight edge of this
great earth releases my soul
and falls and falls and falls.

The sea stretches tight on a slight, white horizon
unflurried by waves, by the clean, boneache moon.
The water rests awhile, passing slowly through the ribs of continents,
its deep, deep chest booming with the cries of extinct fish.

I am not dead, though the salt has lifted me out
and away, its sting green-silver like a safety razor edge.
It rubs away chromosomes, the earliest layers of skin
and remakes me pale and raw as a baby’s spleen.

The land abandons me. The last little fishing vessel
returns to its village, bearing upon its sun-slick floor
the heft of my cells, my tiny stillborn children.
I know I’ll never be a mother;

the salinity of my blood has risen steadily
these past million years;
it itches against my arteries
and calcifies in the deeper pockets of my lungs.

I tower over grassroots, vivid as a corpuscle,
drinking from the local well and dreaming of lysis.

Elba

this sea is tungsten. it seethes at my touch
as white as bone, although not made of bone.
my heart goes undeceived. these waves
clutch at the shore and loose calamity.
surrounded by horizons i grow small.






Helena

the light is gentle under the surface.
the surf comes to me as soft sounds
not unlike small breaths.
my own breaths slow
to the scale of atoms.
my heart grows round
and perfectly smooth––
this does not taste like defeat.

in winter we rubbed off our skin with bitter yellow soap
& danced across the murky floor of our brains.
ankle-deep in ambien, our toes scraped urchins & palms of anemone.

we built shelters in the living room
from moss-green blankets & coffee tables,
our fingers making furtive wishes in the quivering dark.
we picked small hairs & pennies out of the carpet.

when i grew hungry you offered me your left thigh
like an unwrapped christmas present.
under the aquatic quake of the fluorescent light
you fat seemed to boil
& your bed turned into a small, cold island.

we opened checking accounts under fake names
& you started to worry about your gently doming stomach.
when the mailman came, we cowered in the closet.

each year the temperature of our livers
rose a few degrees.

spring brought us flowers that smelled like DDT.

––Appears in the Spring 2013 issue of The Columbia Review.

my mind frays in poisson distribution.
small remnants of your heat invade my chest
like shrapnel. the moths lose constellations
to buzzing lamps that light our careful rest.
we cup our heat in folds of fragile flesh
the way the oysters do––these streets are queer,
don’t bear our weight correctly.  pavements thresh
small bones out from our soles. they **** ants here––
the sacrifice of insects builds our nest.
air mixes carefully, distended by
the probability of night. the breaths
are small and incendiary,
but dawn means i’ll grow tall and be again
human and able to understand pain.

1.
Princely I am, as Michigan loam,
as carefully turned mud,
as old, old dust––

my breaths are still and unresolved
and don’t dissolve in alcohol
like snakes or dead, bloated fish––

I am nothing monumental.

2.
Stuttered breaths lie in limp open circles around our feet,
hanging by threads of unmade promises––

symmetry was never my forte.
The bent nose,
the crooked lips,
the slow-ballooning wen where nitrogen bubbles––
my flesh is like untilled soil,
all raw and swollen with possibility.

3.
You asked me if it was probable
to find life on Mars
where the iron-leeched sand
crumbles like dried hemoglobin.

I don’t know about amino acids or genesis
or the first man of Dust,

much less mysteries of lovesickness, respiration,
really good ***––
We’re barren in different ways;

your dust comes from dreams, from heaven,
crimson and majestic
and dead as Olympus Mons

while I am like moon dust,
just as cold as your bone-dry lakes of carbon dioxide,
but paler, heavier,

and more remote.

Strange now, to think of you
amidst this aftermath of scattered atoms and queer cells,
this apocalypse, the collision of bone and skin,
all gnashing and trembling and brimming with heat
left over from the creation of our aching, leaking universe.

Strange to remember those clarion eyes and fishgut teeth
and tongue curled up around cherry blossoms and beatnik poetry;
it seems, somehow, significant
that I still carry on my lips the shape and timbre of your smile,
each particle of warmth and aftertaste,
another furtive hope, another offering to absolution.

There was some hesitation
even in the last glows of these days
we spent in the laps of Sartre and Moses,
and while you dreamt of children with teeth like mine and eyes like yours,
I contemplated the vacuum between molecular bodies
and the heat death of the cosmos.