dodging shards of terra cotta
on the ground and
shards of croaksong in the
air we crouch at the bank, half
way there, and the frogs vault
over the tops of our sneakers.
we are
scaring chipmunks and hiding
from snakes, balancing
on the pipeline with our arms raised
out like birds about to take flight.
at the reservoir people are
jumping from on high, grabbing
at stars on the way down.
when they land the cold
pries open their fists
and they surface shaking and
full of nothingness.
someone tosses an empty
can of keystone into the water,
stumble-swims away from it.
it spills over one dam and
glides toward the next,
a girl flinches from a rock
like a moth from a swat
and pulls the can to the crags, they
both rest there breathing heavy.
they both dry off.
she pulls on her clothes and
pulls herself home
in a flurry of forgot.
as more kids jump,
more stars fall from their hands
until the can is full
of a hope too heavy
to drag home.

What if today was the last day I'll
see you?

                                                     What if it was yesterday, and I'm        
                                                                ­  not really here right now?

I love you.
      
                                                     ­ Who are you talking to?
                                                             ­                




                                            ­          I love you, too.

the numbers are introduced
to me
as imaginary,
gloves shaking my hand
and glowing figures
slipping through woods
with mossy sounds,
overgrown silence,
spells, keys, magic crowns,

until the fog stumbles in
and smokes us out
and hooded figures step through
the mist of does not exist
and into the sunlight of the other
side
that singes their edges
and shakes me awake
in the complex plane

of the linear mindset,
in which they're
parsing the problem
back to spells and keys
that don't open doors anymore
because the hooded figures
know all kinds of code,

see what I see,
see the root of hoodedness
enter our imaginary,
and as the only way out
the figures and i
shake a deal--

everything i imagine
now must real

I hear you tell
me I’m the trash
your college roommate
forgot to take
out on garbage day.

        Now this will sit
        here for another week,
        in our kitchen,
        where we eat our food.

are you mad?

        It’s fine.

        It’s settled.
        I have resigned
        myself to you.

With windswept hair and the beginnings
of smiles, faces in focus and the backs
blurred, arms out to the sides like birds
that are already flying, hands in hands
that brighten what is around them
instead of fighting it. Serenading each
other with words that settle into
the crisscrossing of passers by instead
of matching them step for fist. Wouldn’t
that be nice. Instead we sit a little apart
on the rocks, because even when
we are close the telescopes magnify
the distance, and I look up instead
of around, trying to recall the difference
between comets and asteroids and
meteors but only half in it. Those things
could be anything, as long as I get to watch
something else burn as it falls.

On the backs of receipts
and physics formula sheets
I've been drawing compasses.
Needles pointing randomless,
concentric circles, shaky lines
creeping outside their contours
and I don't need you to tell me
I'm an amateur.
I already can't
find my way.

i.
it takes the end of a death
(because death is where things start)
to realize how important it is
to lie down with heads close
and look at you falling asleep
across the way
with the same combination of
reds and greens
on your shelf as on mine
across the way

ii.
i don’t know you

iii.
i miss you

iv.
how do you measure a year
or the two years you steered
through the halls like you
knew them
or the two years i didn’t know
them but steered through anyway
and why am i still here

v.
there is punctuation now,
pauses and stops,
organization and fear

A schoolgirl, if you will,
in a fluid dress with fluent hair,
long, she’s probably blond
if we’re being honest,
and the dress is yellow too.
She hopes it is bright enough
to distort her vision.

She leaps in the rain,
but the water beads right
off her skin
long as she keeps her eyes down.

Moths swarm and settle
in her hair, mistaking it
for some sort of sunsilk.

It is the silk of her cocoon.

When she comes out
later, she sheds it all
with scissors.

Soon as the silk breaks
the water spills into her
but her lungs barely even whimper;
she has suffocated before,
and it hasn’t killed her yet.
People are waterproof;
water beads on skin.
It’s the dress they want her in
that makes the rain so public
and clingy.

But all the moths have drowned.
She kneels down,
bare knees on the concrete,
and picks up a wing
and lets it drifts to the ground.
Limp, listless flight,
more gentle than ever
the moths were in life.

The girl now
stomps on the wing,
scolding herself under her breath
just quiet enough to forget
that she is alive.
Like a knife she twists her heel
and rips the waterlogged wing
into fractals of nothing.
She knows there are some things
she should never find beautiful,
like death,
or girls.

The sun catches her fallen hair.
With fingers that boil
it offers her molten gold
as compensation for the world.

Next door the king who’d ****
a sorcerer on sight,
Merlin is living plain.
He nods at me on the street;
we know what secrets
can do to the sane.

What does distance really do? I don't feel
like I need you now that I've been balanced
with only my own arms raised
at my sides, my questions asked, my
physics written out in chalk, my palms
wiped on my jeans. I can do without
Rube Goldberg machines.

Was I supposed to miss you more? What
is distance even for? And be honest,
are you really shocked that I would doubt
what I want? On every Apollo mission,
two men walked on the moon
and the third one waited in orbit.

A foot slips on moss
from rock into water.
Like the phantom final
step at the top of the stairs,
the ground that’s not there
is my final monster.

I’m collecting keys,
weighed with opportunities
that stretch my pocket

Little gold arms and legs
dance below a little
fake diamond head.
Little gold chain around
my neck that had been
around yours instead.
Little gold ribbon around
the box,
long thin gray box
with the little gold person
inside.

I don't know what
you are trying to tell
me but I know what
I'm hearing.

You wanted a man
for me but you gave
it to me in a coffin,
thin and gray like
my soul,
but your ribbon outside
was alive and gold.

The ruby heart-red body
was fake.
So I can't accept
your dead concept
of man,
but the least I can do
is move the little gold
arms and legs
and thank you.

Seven miles it took
until I wasn’t thinking about you
for a moment, until I shook
with something other than tears
and stared with something other
than apathy.
Love and hate, respectively.
They cycle as they spin, like
the light and the shadow through
the spokes of my tires.
My feet are getting smaller,
or the pedals bigger–either way,
they don't fit.

I miss you, but I don’t
wish you were here.
I can only breathe
in the shadows of trees,
but I know how you idolize the sea.
What can I say?
I run for my heart,
it hurts my knees.

I know you like your water in
ebbs and flows,
ebbs and flows,
sea lions basking in the rhythm
of the shallows.
But what about the gorges?
The rivers, the rush
that always moves forward,
hawks soaring with their eyes
on the prize, and the prize
is dappled in light
through the leaves,
and the leaves crunch
like words that have become orders,
and the orders soften as the snow falls,
and the snow melts as the birds call,
and the birds sing as the seasons complete the ring
I had in my shopping cart for months but never
ordered?

What about that?

Seven miles in, none of it
has gone away.
All the ice has melted
into the lake and there are still no waves
because the wind is blowing, flowing,
spilling away from the shore.
A gale to bring water to the eyes,
to sweep gulls of course
but with the waves
heading away from the shore
the surface looks smooth.
Imagine that.
I’m getting over you.

I can't keep the colour of the sky.
I can't keep wanting to try
but this camera won't focus on things
that are too close up so if I'm not going to lie
I have to say
I'm a little glad you're so far away.
I wrote it down for you, the colour,
and you can read it to another
or copy it in your handwriting
so the words pale away from my slanted ink
to the link
in the stratosphere and are now reigniting
on paper you've touched that I've never
known as such.
I hope you use it to start a fire so I can
see your smoke clear
and I hope it doesn't change the colour
of the sky that I hear.

I ache with how much I want to do nothing.
I want to listen to someone else sing,
and live in someone else's life with my legs
crossed until they go numb, the dregs
at the bottom of my mug unnoticed and the
feeling gone, focusing on living unfocused.

I want to hear someone else speak silently, I
don't want to say a word, and when one defiantly
speaks out loud I want the sound to be blurred like
my vision because I've left my glasses on a stack
of books somewhere and I don't want to see
anything farther away than what's in front of me,
don't want to hear anything that makes noise,
nothing that destroys,
only things that build the life of another,
I want to cover my mind with yours and live under
it for a while, stumbling through my life blindly
because yours is right against my eyes, so close
I can hardly see,
and I want us to live like that, blind, tucked away,
you and me.

luck is like gold.
196.967 grams per mole.

Why is there so much sugar
in cake? Why do we never notice
mosquitoes on our skin
until it's too late? How do some
butterflies travel farther
than some birds? How
have you not heard me?

How come an eagle always
soars overhead the minute
my camera dies? How come
it's so easy to lie?

How can the lake look so much
like an ocean, but I
always just look like me?

A cloudy sky offers so much
more than a clear one--
more texture, more tough.
There's not much salt in
Lake Michigan, but
there's probably some, right?
That's gotta be true?

I'm sorry I like you.

In a land without hills
there are as many bicycles
as people.
There is a synagogue
with a steeple.
For every boy on a swing
there swings a man
on a pendulum,
explaining Illinois to you
like he invented it.

I flip from about the author to the dedications
again, but I'm sure I like
an appropriate balance of looking
back and staying here. I break
Passover when it coincides with your
birthday this year. When the snow
melts to reveal the leaves with crunch
preserved, and they dance in the
storms that make birds cling,
I welcome back the dead
while I breathe the living.
When the weather vane tucks
in its arms to gain momentum I watch
it spin, but I never spin myself until I hear
the rain tell me it is copying the comet--not
falling, but reaching for grounded like
imagination after I close the book.

Eleven years ago I am a vulture
picking at a rabbit on the side of the road.
I am just doing what I must to stay alive,
and the casual observer passes by
to observe, rapt, disgusted but unable
to look away. Then a wind blows and I
am Victor in the motel hallway, knees
enclosed in my elbows, head tipped back
against the wall and eyes on the ceiling
in dismay. Then the train hits the tracks
and I am cracked and reassembled
in the present day, carrying all these
ways that we’ve been gay. Feeling our
burns of each degree, how we are
learning family.

if vacuum decay swallows
this entire disarray, then
we are not the chosen
ones. this boson
eats your faith for
breakfast or any
meal--time does not
have mass.

every 13 years cicadas
come out screaming,
crickets crying, dragonflies
are dying and fireflies
falling into luminescent
dreams, the crepuscular insect
menagerie.

as the sky thunders and lights,
here's to wishing the lightning bugs
a safe night.

thirteenth north and left on third,
climb the hill,
confuse the bluebirds with the jays

and orion with aries,
a fumbling through
everything you love.

and when you've burnt it once
and can't forgive,
consider this:

the soufflé is not the soufflé
but the recipe

Alaska is the largest united state. Jupiter
is the largest planet in our system. Yours
is the brightest eye in the darkroom,
loudest boot-soles in the hallway, a real
sonic boom of a presence. I like
to see you taking up space. Weaving
the lanyard through your fingers as you
swing your keys, chains colliding over
and again bringing you home. I like
to be there when you return. Green
walls, eight paws, books strewn and notes
scrawled--I like the signs that you live
here. I like the volume you occupy. Demand
a kiss when you burn your lip. Unzip
your coat and hang it on the back of your
chair because you live here. I like to see
Jupiter's cyclone hasn't shrunk it and
your storm hasn't stopped you.
Think of space, and then take it.

the person who doesn’t have
any reason at all
is the person with the farthest
to fall

don’t patronize me,
it’s the fire station across
the street
that doesn’t have any open doors

and the pack of people
on the road
making a solid wall of liquid drinks
     (once more unto the breach)
in some big show

that I can’t pass through.
where are you

and which one of us
is here

Yellow and blue,
yellow and blue,
one sleeve rolled to the wrist
while the other falls loose.

Smile in the eye,
tear in the heart,
yellow and blue stand
in envy apart.

The sun in the sky,
the light on the water,
dancing at surface
and down it gets darker.

Yellow and blue,
yellow and blue,
I've treasured them both,
the have and the lose.

I know when to cover your ears,
where to tread lightly,
how hot you'll want
your tea on a scale
of lukewarm to bitter
to scalding,
when to cry with you versus
when to distract--
     I bet I can make you laugh--
and when you smile I think
I'd work time and a half
every day just to come home
to that smiling eye,
and when you turn away
for a minute
I am become
a purposeless thing on the ground,
just breathing,
wondering when the
paralysis hit,
sure my arms worked a minute
ago when you needed a hug,
now they can't even reach
my shoulders,
let alone the bottle on the shelf.
why don't they work
for myself

The silicon in sand is learned
by crystal system, organized
into branches and the seed
crystal is cubic imagine
diamonds in the grains
imagine cut
against the grain a glass tree
doesn't know enough
of crystal symmetry to grow
back imagine it opens
a book leaves to pages
to learn only half
how to help the other
half how to dissociate
ions scattered across the earth
crust never enough.
This is how sand is made.

I can't forgive you
for teaching me self defense
is always to ****

The clouds crouch low over
San Francisco, and they are deciding
between blanket and weather.
They do not know whether to be
comfort or a cold matter of fact.
They do not want you to look back and
sea provides the cold, air provides
the hot, the marine inversion
the Atlantic never had.
Have you ever said things confidently
without being sure? Have you ever asked
about her faith and listened to the answer,
say, the number of beads,
without being sure,
but knowing she was? So at least
that makes you sure of something.
Have you ever heard music
in a public place and felt that foggy weight--
what does it take to dance anymore?
What is that extra oomph it takes
to get your arms above your head?
What is the difference
between fog and dead?
The joke is that I don't remember.

In the morning before work
I sit on the floor and pretend
that it’s dirt. I look out the window
and pretend that it’s church.
That gods of the earth and sky
and space all did their research
in collaboration to be sure
that today is worth it.

And yet I don’t seem to remember
that anyone wished for District Five
not to have exploded the dam
that lit the Capitol’s lights.
I don’t seem to recall people
buying the tale that the police
were keeping any peace.
We were not given the mirror
to look at ourselves and say
"no, that’s not me."

Just sit still. Look
out the window and wait
for the wind to change,
and the tornado will teach you
to feel relief when waking up
held by no one.

You start with withered hands clasped,
shoulders hunched, knowing it all,
avoiding the highway in Indiana,
the telephone wire reminds you
of yellow birds (that remind you of her)
and the stars are that time on the soccer
field, july 4th is a flinching
kitten under a couch, and all
these pretty things make you close your eyes,
but imagine living sunset to sunrise. Back
to birds are birds, and this is sky,
fingers relaxed, every day growing down,
untying ties,
focus and simplify.

None of this over, no, not
start, not twiddle your thumbs
lined up for take off.
We only want the beginning
of the middle. To wake up
on a Saturday morning
instead of Sunday or whatever
the other options--maybe

she sees you back, wouldn't that
be nicer than standing
dripping de-icing fluid
on the tarmac,

I am not a moth
but I fly to other flames
moths do not feel shame

I read books and had the practice
wedding in Sunday school, where Benjamin
got to break the glass with his foot
while I watched--I watched films, I knew
what I looked forward to. As sure
as I knew my baby teeth would fall
out. But unprepared for five years old,
when my first loose tooth fell in.
Not me and him but me
and Sandrita, little milagra, on the swings,
she knocked into me and the tooth was
swallowed whole and nothing to show for it.
I had the tooth fairy pegged from day one--
how would she have have known to look
for the empty promise under my pillow?
Now every time you stretch your neck
to glance up at the moon, hair behind
your ear, roll up one sleeve and then
the other, every time I fall again to five,
unblinking eyes, something shatters and I have
to run my tongue over the gap in my gums,
leave a note for my mother so she can see
her girl smile gap-toothed for the fairy
who will never come. You tilt your head
towards me and I must take the promise
of the broken glass beneath Benjamin's foot
and swallow it whole.

Other kids think I love
you too much, and adults
tell us children, behave
because we aren't playing right,
arm in arm climbing up slides
or otherwise hiding with hands
where our feet should be.

When I was scared of other kids
and monkey bars
I would have been relieved
to see police tape
surround Fireman's Park.
Now again I look such
surfaces in the eye
and think: if you killed me
I would die

In you grows the fig tree, lush and green
and bold against the sky. The skin
around the fruit is half-hearted; open
it breaks and out spill the stars fully charted,
and there you are pointing, did you see that
falling star? And the leaves rustle as you nudge
everyone and whisper: make a wish.
And everyone does.

You coil in the doorway
and look at me
with eyes
a snake just sits
and looks at me
until I am afraid of it.

Falling in love?
Falling into the well that is love?
Falling free through space until you hit
the bottom of love?
Gasping for air and rubbing your neck
from the weight of the drop?
Climbing the perimeter of the pit
of love, eyeing the top?
And in a place like that,
what is there to do but try
to climb out, see what you’re made of?

I'm thinking of events that require name tags.
The first day of camp. College visits, and orientations.
Conferences. Mock United Nations.
I'm thinking of hearing parties through glass
and turning the fan on for the noise.
I'm thinking of trying to think about boys.
I'm thinking of driving from Illinois
to Indiana to Ohio and watching the terrain
stay the same. I'm thinking the check
engine light is on. And I should get a new
lock for the back door. And fill out a W-4.
I'm thinking of how intense a crush
would feel to a binary star.
I'm thinking of the oceans people are.
I'm thinking, what is it with poets
and the sky?
Why do people hide? How many strokes
can I take without a breath?
What other kinds of sentences are there?
Are we there yet?

But don't you get tired
of being the kite?
whipped around on high,
to be sixteen again, to look
down and see nothing
but still be waiting
for the fall, to lean in
familiar for a human kiss
and step back to see
a glass eye.
If you killed me,
I would die.

Listen—sometimes I forget
where to put the x's on checks.
I still pat my empty pocket
with the hand not holding
the keys.
I am still relieved
to see the butter knife
                             cantilevered
on the edge of the sink
when I get home.
Somehow I thought
in the depths of my day
that the crows
would have gotten
to it by now.

I am still practicing personhood.
I am still finding my own way
to pack a suitcase:
roll the t-shirts,
stacked close-packed
like lumber, then folded
flat the sweaters
alternating like bricks
in the most efficient
way to maximize permutations.
Why aren't clothes ever
just clothes? The problem
is the answer: people grow.

I can count to thirty to nudge
my breath back onto the tracks
but I still can't yet know that
falling in love is not falling asleep—
you don't get there by pretending.

Think of the moment
you realize you'll miss
someone when she leaves.
Imagine stacking packages
onto the conveyor belt
at the store when you tap
your pocket and feel
the memory of your
wallet waiting on the counter.
Do you refill your cart
and shuffle retrograde
through the aisles,
watching your feet,
putting everything back?
Do you look up at
the cashier and just ask?
I am still learning
what to do with you.
I am still laying down the track.
I am gripping
the edge with my toes
                     while leaning over—

The peaceful transition of power and I
needed a walk. We sat on the edge
of the moon with our legs dangling over,
and we looked at the Earth.
We waited in unrest, her head
on my shoulder, my hand running
up and down her arm for warmth,
waited for sun to set in the west,
for the planet to turn,
for our home to come into view.
It looked blue.

The lightning goddess taps her
finger against the glass of us
And flinches back as it shatters
and if the very sky can break,
surely hardwood floors were a mistake?
It’s not safe to fall.

The tornado will teach
of the relief of waking up
again outside your arms.