In the beginning there was light
and so much fight to be drunk into
our very bones, not an eye sunk in,
nobody drunk except on finger paint
and what the stars might taste like
when we thought stars were small,
when there wasn’t far to fall,
before the white-tiled kitchen floors
grew too far away for us to notice
the texture of the black mortar
that held them in place like Elmer’s glue.
School is a bright maze of halls
that we walk through hand in hand
and mark our heights against the wall,
unsure whether to fly or to stall and stay close.
Our eyes are level as we hopscotch
round the ankles of women and men;
I think we’re going to be friends.
They weave a Charlotte’s web of pigtails
and bright red balloons, but isn’t it just
true that we feel safe close to ground,
tempted upward by gold and warmth
but torn, for the kitchen floor is close
and nice and cool, and doesn’t burn us
to the touch.

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.

standing on the moon-
the view is breathtaking, and
so is the vacuum.

When I was seventeen
I'd come home from school every day
and hope the house would be empty
so I'd have somewhere to pour into.
To pour all the things people
inadvertently filled me with

And all day long I defied the laws
of surface tension at the rim of my cup.
With nothing to hold them in, things
somehow just kept piling up.

I drove to school and when the faint
smell of gasoline met my eyes I
opened the windows until all the lies
were sliced away by the cold air.
What terrified me was that as it's coming
you can't see gasoline.

I breathed the freezing air in
and the gasoline out through the open window
and the passing cars said I dare
you to survive being this scared of
what you can't see.
Because people fill you up
past your brim without seeing
the way that your limbs are holding
things in place light years above that
little lip of water that can sit above the rim.

The headlights of the cars join in now
and they say you are not a cup.
How do I know if they're lying?
Headlights only show you what's right
before your eyes, and they expect you
to make the whole trip that way, farsightedly blind.
They say, you have so much tension that
you don't know what's yours and
what you pulled away from others
so you hold on to all of it and it
ever extends that little lip of water
that can sit above the rim.

And now the colored traffic lights chime in.
They say the irony of surfaces is that you
can't see what's inside because of them,
so if everyone is drowning beneath her own
surface tension you'll never know.
People are too hard to read.

I dare you to survive being this afraid
of what you can't see.

the baby teeth are a map
and a compass. when they
come out the real guys file in,
erupting the gums, ending
sentences with prepositions
until they learn where to stand.
It's a wisdom trap--the third
molars are learned until
they know they don't belong.
Someday they'll stop trying
altogether. Good riddance.
And in their place, the sutures
sew the site of eruption
like tying the loose ends
of a volcano and hoping
the lava pressure doesn't brew.
I came out when I saw I
could stand next to you. I trip
over uneven stitches.
I am not held together.

I dive right in even though
I know that by the time I get
to the bottom the pool will
be shallow

and when I stand up and shake
the water from my hair and
open my eyes I know for certain
that the water will have drained

away entirely. Just me, soaking,
sopping, sobbing in an empty
pit of gray concrete. I will still
dive because that
                               fall
                                    
through the                      air

will be the most precious thing,
I suspect. I am sure it will be for
nothing in the end but before then,
it will be for you.

I will do it for you and for my
own selfish reasons, because it's
you, I know, and I will never find
another like you nor will I try.

When you leave I want to remember
you properly, with your eyes shining
but not from tears. Smiling eyes,
laughing pools of brown, open.

Always I will remember you and
I want the memories to be perfect
because I love you and I am not
as selfless as you and I want to

remember love this way so that
when I fall into the shallow water
and the shock flows up my spine
and stings my soul I can remember

your face and remember
that I did it for you, that love is strong
enough to push acrophobia off the
edge and send it     
                                 s       o    a    r       i    n    g  

with arms spread wide and eyes wide
open. Maybe if I can remember that, the
soaring before the fall, I will try again
to find it even though I know it won't

be your fall. I will continue in search
of it anyway, a hopeless search for
something halfhearted, but I will
continue it whole-heartedly, that I

might always be reminded of you.
And now, I will embrace the concrete
floor, the stinging of the spirit and
the soaring of the soul, as I fall, that

you might see my smile and enjoy
the fall with me,
before it crashes.

That is how much I love you.

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.

An avalanche kills a deer
that feeds a mountain lion.
If it all came crashing down
who would I become?
So badly do I need to know
that I push the first stone.

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.

sometimes a lemming
can't make it across the street
you're my incomplete

The mouse in my brain who controls all the switches
Sits back on its haunches to wait for its pill.
It swallows it down and then blinks as it misses
Whatever it was that had first made it ill.

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."

She doesn't wear sweaters anymore;
the thread unravels at the edges
when she needs things to stay together.
Every group of things she sees
comes unstuck in space; a sheet
of glass over everything
magnifying what's underneath, so
as she sits letting droplets hit her back
one after the other on the floor
the bathroom tiles file past her eyes
like crystalline symmetries,
footsteps in the snow fold over
on themselves, glide planes on high,
her own feet are a rotary inversion
of the version of her that mirrors her walk
upside down, her own feet
are always the ground
she walks on, always moving,
always soothing and then falling through.

To see the world on the scale
of atoms,
to break down
the random, to battle the chasm,
to search for structural integrity
in her enthusiasm
so she can know it will hold her up

and yet everywhere opposites attract.
On the scale of atoms, positive
and negative, north and south,
an attraction and repulsion,
and evolutionary revulsion
that she can't make herself feel.
Ratted out by evolution, still
she zooms in on everything
to try to see a reason she still exists.

The sundancer is dodging space junk on the moon.
She is daughter of the sun, reason the moon shines.
The view is breathtaking, and so is the vacuum.

Below spin smells of seaweed, wildflower perfume,
but here satellites crush to dust, just alkaline.
The sundancer is dodging space junk on the moon.

There's no air to breathe up here, only fumes;
she sees moons fall into their planets all the time.
The view is breathtaking, and so is the vacuum.

Sundancer somnambulist hears ghosts in her bedroom.
She pulls the tides to her chin, tucked in, and hides.
The sundancer is dodging space junk on the moon.

She dances in dark but keeps a toothbrush in my bathroom.
She is trying to survive.
The view is breathtaking, and so if the vacuum.

She whistles at birds, content in her own volume.
Constellation clustered face, her freckled stars align.
The sundancer is dodging space junk on the moon.
The view is breathtaking, and so are you.

watching things dry
is always the same:
the paint, the tears, the
puddled up fear that sits
on the bench and
then lives to regret it,
the solder that cools, the
hair in the breeze, the
ruffled bird's feathers when
she learns she's not free,
and she. a slight
glistening gone, trick
of the eye, flight
of the bird, end of the cry.
watching tears dry is
like watching paint dry.
the toll taker sighs
on the bridge, takes
your money and holds
it while he waits to give
it to somebody else,
just counting coins and
watching the water
hit the sky.

a question on a slip
of paper, maybe the back
of a receipt, maybe written
with the pen at the bottom
of your bag that has been
missing its cap for two months
but is not yet dried up
and you fold it in half, maybe
three times, partly to hide
it and partly to smallen,
and you roll it and hold
it between thumb and index
and you look for god in
the rain taking the ink and leaving
the leaf-litter wishes sodden
on the ground. your prayer
was query, not request, but it
too could litterize. then you tuck
your roll into the stones and
turn around anyway,
all forward eyes, and
that is faith.

The first time you flew
you told the birds how unfair
it is that the air is so much
thinner up here,
that below they have to breathe
the crushing weight of the
stratosphere
just because they’re accustomed
to it, and your gasping
for breath doesn’t make
any noise yet
every day you choose life,

man and wife
man and wife

placed in a gunfight with a pocket knife
and a guidebook of expectation.
You don’t remember filling out an
application for this life, for
now-flightless wings and for being
their daughter,

I will love you
come hell or high water

and the first time you flew
you heard birds laugh at you
and the air was so thin
you fell right through,
and the silence so thick
you landed hard,
lungs aching,
but you were never afraid of the dark,

in the high water
watch out for sharks

because you aren’t one for stark
contrasts and it’s nice to feel
like nothing at all,
keep falling.

The first time you didn’t
write a poem you drank tea
out of a paper cup, no mug
in the sink, no need for anyone
to look up when she came home.
The first time you used the key
in your new house’s door
it fit so perfectly that you didn’t feel
at home anymore,
and the first time you were afraid of the dark
you weren’t,
because it can’t get you
if it can’t see you’ve left any mark.

The first time you didn’t
write a poem the *** boiled
even though you watched,
and you drank tea out of a paper cup
and no one looked up, it was
biodegradable and then it was
gone.

The first time you flew.
The first time you really saw you.
The first time you heard that
song called poison oak,
the first time you said what you
meant to say,
the last time you spoke.

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.

19 April 2013.
Today is silent.

Today I write day of silence on the back
of my hand, letting the words sink into my
skin the way they try, heavy as they are, to sink
into the minds of the ignorant chatters who ask
why I haven't spoken. If, indeed, they've even
noticed. Nodding and smiling will get you pretty
far, and people hear their own voices so loudly
as to assume yours has just been drowned out
by their own superiority.

Today I get home before everyone else and
I scrub the words away, because while it means
the world to me and I stand for what it implies
I cannot show it to them; they don't know who I
am, but they think they do. I do not have the heart
to crush their reality. They're wrong. There is only the faintest
off-colored tinge to my hand now. It could be a scar.
But they won't notice it. People cannot hear something
as loud as silence— certainly, then, they cannot see
something as loud as scars.

Now not even the message remains.
Ink down the drain.

she used to say,
I want to go to a small school
where no one locks their doors
and everyone knows each
other

she came from a big high school
so many kids in the hallways
and naturally she got used to
being able to slip though the cracks

of the system and avoid the world,
to use the people to hide from the
people. oh, how she hated the people.
and now suddenly she is seeing

that in order to blend in and be quietly,
in order to hide from the people, you
need to be where there are lots of people.
humans are paradoxes in everything else

they do. why not this too.

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

I feel you slipping
and it has me on edge
what are you nervous for?
nothing
you haven't got nails left
no.
why?

to the quick.
all the time.
because I remember not
two weeks ago
I was missing you with
an unforgettable ache

unforgettable. I remember
the ache. but I don't remember
the why.

I was scared you'd forget me
but now
I'm scared I'll forget you first

The rusted chests of robins
are bobbing in the breeze.
Their little feet above
their heads, isn't it odd to see?
And just as I’m about to dare
this bird a bat to be,
I blink and see instead
the clinging of the leaves,
all dead.

We are done trying to piece
our hearts back together
with glass and glue each time
they shatter
because there is only so much
blood one can lose
and we are strong enough each
to reach for ourselves again and we
are strong enough to be friends
and to look at the sky and to know
that there is no race to fill up
all that space

I remember you bringing reds and oranges
back to the leaves as if you’d painted them on
grey canvas where there’d only been negative
space before, remember watching you watch
your works of life drift to the floor.
I remember you trying to look down
when a perfect snowflake landed on your chin.
Now I sit on the ground, just waiting
to hear that your flight got in.

I remember sitting in the crowded café,
remember knowing you had entered
by the way the room got softer, the way
the colors saturated and the crowds got smaller
and the windows magnificently taller.
I remember staying away.
I remember being afraid.
The sensation was not enough to drain
the warmth or color from the room
until you left it.

In eighth period no students rest
their heads on their desks today.
They are afraid that the moment
they look away, they will turn back
to find they’re not people anymore.

As for us, we had a voice at least.
We had a dream of being
the teachers with the same last name,
the English teacher with the periodic
table on the wall, and her wife
who teaches monomers
like they were grass’s leaves.
Is that a complexity you can understand?

You can repeal our hope
of exchanging rings—
our feathered thing—
but we will still converge
on the ninth graders of your nation
to be sure your face has not tinted
them with your fear. There will be
no redshift here, only a drift
of progress. There we’ll be,
stationed in the inspiration
of youth to undo
your unfathomable bigotry.

Those who can’t, teach.

Wild woods, moss-green gowns,
secret keys and magic crowns
are lit by the sun until
this forest is so bright with hope
that you shrink away, blinking,
still learning to cope
with your right to stand
among beautiful things.

What if I told you the fairy dust
was just bits of dry skin,
nomadic in a sunbeam through a window,
forest of perpetual Sunday afternoon,
slowing the light down
to the quaint speed of sound

would that make you feel better
about lying on the ground?
Your shoulder blades are not cutting
at the grass like you say.

You are a resident of this light,
citizen of the liquid state it’s in,
of every grain of sand in this clearing,

you are so alive,
and every cell of you that dies
is a particle in the current in the sky
that gives buoyancy to fairy flight

so please, come sit back down
with me.

There is a child in you that still believes
in fairies,
and I would like her
to see how green the ground is today,
how sure
it is that her feet belong,
that this ground is hers
to walk upon.

from the sixth floor, see
the traffic lights change
in time with each
other up and down the
street snake eyes snake
eyes snake
   eyes snake eyes
       snake eyes
green green
green  green
red  red
as they always
did but not just
as they used to

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.

she couldn't see it
she tried so hard
to be who she is
and she is
but she can't see

it shines in her eyes,
all the long hours
she's put in,
all the success
it shines so brightly
but she cannot see
her own eyes
or maybe the light
is just blinding her

she casts her eyes downward
content in herself
but it's not herself
it is her own warped version
of herself, that has
not been properly
reflected back to her
vision.

she is literally perfect
and she doesn't see it

why can't you ever help
her see it

it's heartbreaking.

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.

sometimes, even when it is
bothering no one, I turn
my music down and put

the earphones in, because
music is so precious and
personal, and sometimes

when I am hiding myself
deep within myself
I like to keep it that way.

mine.
within.

I wonder if you pay as close attention
as I do to the little things,
the ones I go over in my mind
hours after you've walked away—
you turn and wave over your shoulder
and I walk the other way smiling at
myself like a fool.  I love it.

I am thinking about the slight tilt of
your head when you want me to
hurry up and follow you; about the soft
way you tap my arm with the back of
your hand, that I might turn round in time
to see what you're pointing at, something
you've decided I will enjoy, before it's
gone; the way, when I am sitting with my
gaze cast downward, that you reach out
and brush my hair away just to check that
my eyes are sparkling but not wet.

resting your knees against the tips of my
feet when they are in the way as we settle
into our little corner of the world, trying
to get comfortable. small things. I wonder if
they are but instinct to you. To me, they are
you claiming me as a friend.

I am weak. I let you, but I never claim you
back. I am no good at subtlety— everything
I do is too little, too late, or else it is too much
and far too soon. But words are forever, and
since I can barely speak at times, I have written
mine down.

Words are forever, and these are for you
my friend.

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

Out of sight, out of mind
       except
I haven't seen you for a while
and I see you everywhere
in everything