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.

The tide pulls in
and sine waves intersect,
surf scalloping and cresting, small,
breeding pearly foam into sea breeze.

Your breath pulls in,
skin washing over collarbones,
ribs expanding to swallow oceans––
another kind of wave.  I feel my soul swell and fall into place.

The tide makes eddies––
gulls cleave shimmering half-circles in the air,
partition wind with meat, voices.
Sand swirls around my feet and is dragged out to sea––

Your skin makes eddies.
Conversations sink like round stones
and your toes open wide, sweeping arcs in the sand.
My heart beats just over three times.

The sea feeds trillions.
Ships wreck and barnacles forge their homes,
and fish school in Fermat spirals.
Plankton absorb sunlight and divide exponentially.

Your liver feeds trillions.
Arms envelope me
and nestle into the hollow under my spine––
I press my lips against your sternum, starving.

The sea pulls out.
The moon's orbit decays
four centimeters every year––
the disparity destroys worlds.

Your breath pulls out.
I cup sea glass and small, smooth shells,
my footprints forming acute angles to yours––
this disparity destroys worlds.

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.

Somewhere in the furrows of pink and gray
flesh, nestled between delicate arches of pelvis,
in what was supposed to be bowels and pulsating warmth,
lies the wish for chemotherapy.

Old images of skull-white sundresses
glimmering with the glory of summer days in the world of Perfect Thighs
fester imperceptibly,
buried in some remote corner of the midbrain
that smells like half-digested chicken parmesan;

each memory’s tastefully arranged––
rows of wheat, sharp as disinfectant,
sour with antimetabolites and metastatic guilt.
October levels prospects like a hurricane,
and as your mother balances a salad fork between chalk fingers
the full plate in front of you reminds you of ruptured organs.

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.

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.

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.

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 summer before
her chest hollowed out,
ribs bowing around vacuums,
her lungs ballooning new geometries.

The summer seas invaded body cavities,
feral and chemically sweet.
Her body became a gondola
ferrying pale, diminutive hopes
across the wide strait of your pelvis.

Oceans shifted gingerly,
unborn into the intimate dark
of throats, heart chambers,
marshes between thighs.

She drew the shores around her close, paranoid.

When they got to her
she’d filled her mouth deep
with different types of char: love, anorexia, Quaaludes.
Marrow coagulated and stopped ebbing
with the orbit of the moon.

Her heart smelled like day-old fish.