Aren't you a medicine man?
Aren't your lungs full of blue smoke and jars of dust that your mother collected in Idaho?
Are you confident in the permeability of memory?
Confident in your snake oil cures?

I think I know you
I think I've been waiting for you patiently sipping my beer and humming "golden slippers"
I think the best thing about home is that there are almost no poisonous plants here and the bees rarely sting me

You sang the second verse of "Home on the Range,"
the verse that nobody knows
And I couldn't breathe thinking about what my life would have been if it hadn't been this
narrow

I went ahead and bought the miracle elixir

You see sod busted up by a long, sepia-toned farmer. He is pushing a plow that belongs in a museum of the prairie. You feel as if this is happening to you. To your insides, I mean. You feel a squirming pancreas, and a dancing spleen. You feel a change coming and you are happy about feeling, about movement, agriculture. You catch a glimpse of yourself in a window and realize that you have grown to be 10 feet tall. You are looking down on the corn; at eye-level with the barn. You imagine  your father, the farmer, would be very proud of the tree you have become, and the windbreak you afford his fields.

25 and broad shouldered
the sun hits his eyes
23 and half naked, my chest,
the top of our heads

The ocean throws boats off
the edge of the world
the horizon stretches
longways, a hammock

In the water eyes open,
his grin, luminescent,
In the water eyes closed,
the taste of salt, the quiet
way the waves go on and on

:AQUARIUS:SEPTEMBER:

Last month you saw Marilyn Monroe riding sidesaddle on a bicycle. Her cream colored skirt billowing as she passed you by. You noticed she had aged. She was gray and lined but still beautiful.

Last week you saw Tupac walking to work. He clocked in a few minutes early and kept his head down. During the lunch break he talked to you about settling down and starting a family. He used the word "suburb" and you almost gagged.

Yesterday you adopted a dog who had been hit by a car. You gave her a name and a yard and a bed and grain free kibble. She's fine now. She doesn't even seem to notice her stitches. She sits on the porch and barks at squirrels while you fold clean clothes.

Today you realize you have learned to raise the dead. But only so they don't remember themselves. Only so they have no recollection of who they were before. Only so their lives are blank boards.

You are afraid of your newfound powers, but with Mars in your house you will learn some control.
"Don't bring back your mother," you repeat like a mantra.
You won't feel restraint until the 21st.

Relax. Breathe into it.
You're a hill. You're an immovable object.
You are shaking this whole world
just by being in it.

Breathe into it.
You are going home now.
Like a forest full of birds.

We talked about ghosts at work
There are slaves in the attic
Where the floorboards creak
We have seen glasses and plates
break, untouched, Our house was built on Southern ground
in 1861

We talked about premonitions
There were brothers dead in train crashes
Where the steam boiled and metal buckled
And sisters finding body parts in their sleep

When I dream
I see my mother
Are you real? I ask
I can't be asleep again
Just more so now...

She takes my hand with cold soft
fingers she smells like her
hand cream her eyes make little 'm'
bird wing creases her face is smiling
the way it always has she does not
bother with mascara she sits bright
and hunched in tallness

Are you real? I ask
I'm real. She says

I wonder if tonight I'll dream of slaves
The floorboards creaking
Or of brothers
And their hands thrown in train crashes
Landing under metal somewhere
In the woods nearby
Of wholeness,
Whatever being haunted means

I am scared that nothing I do makes a difference I am scared I feel all of history pounding in my head I am happy to see her even being less real, sleeping
**even if she is *more so now

On horseback, they chase you,
But you are light and you are gaining distance. On horseback, they chase you, and you laugh along with the hoof beats.
Your smile catches sun, and you have never been scared of bullets.

I wanted to remember your smell
Even after we stopped having
Anything to talk about

I wanted to remember how your
Skin shivered, warm and desperate
Even deep into my dreams

There was a day when you rode on my
Handlebars and we moved like
Water through canyons

There was a day when we traced
Each other's shadows as big as
Gallows in the dust

I keep having this dream of the spring of 1887: I go out to bring the cattle in, but they are all dead. Frozen to death. And floating down thawing rivers. I keep having this dream of Bolivia: we are cornered after robbing a payroll and I am glad you are not with us.*

The last thing I remember is your smile catching sun

I'm not as good at life as my mom said I would be. She said "Holly, one day you'll go scuba diving and you can tell me all about it." But I got stung by a sea urchin. Not even diving, just walking on the beach, toes wet. And now the aloe plant on my windowsill is leering at me. I'm never outside long enough to get a sunburn. Although admittedly, burning me takes more sunlight than the day ever actually has. I'm never outside long enough to feel like a deer anymore. The skull on the counter, still bubble-wrapped from flight, is sightless and maybe waiting to be painted. And I think when it is nailed up I will feel like a deer again, remembering about the antlers and the fear of guns, without even knowing what to call them.

I pray to the sun god a lot. For warm skin and fresh basil.
You pray to the stars. You pray for the sky like a yawning mouth. You pray for my father. For my sister and the parts of her she keeps hidden. You pray for people who are terrible at hiding, too, who leave themselves open, ripe as peaches. You pray for fall this year, for the harvest, that it will be consummate and yield bushels and bushels.
You pray that you won't forget anything important: keys; your mother's birthday; how to just keep breathing even though you're convinced your heart is shrinking. And you pray that you will live your life loosely, forever outside. You pray for that tightness in your chest to go away and stop bothering you at night, and for a scythe like they used to use for farming.
You pray that God is real. The Sunday school God who loves you and killed off his protagonist so that you might live like a soldier, unsure of what you're fighting for, but fighting nonetheless.
You pray that God is real but you have serious doubts about any creator who allows colorblindness and then makes the world and the sky and girl you love look like this.

Pretend that you are a snake

Pretend that the ground you slither on is live coals,
the lilacs are in bloom,
and there is an old woman after you with a shovel

Pretend the coals burn you, belly down,
and the old woman's rusted shovel finds the back of your neck
like a blade

Pretend the lilacs are the last thing you see
as your head is severed
Pretend the coals cremate you more or less instantly

You can be reborn a bird
if you burn all the heaviness
out of you and you can fly away

You can be reborn with legs and feet to skip across the coals
and you can dance quickly so you never even feel their heat

And when the lilacs bloom
in May on Helen and Constantine's feast day
you can wear them as a crown

As if you've never been burned and never felt the sting of change

I wanted there to be a word
For the space between
Her penultimate breath and her last one
There were no words
Nobody makes them like that anymore
If I had to pick one though it would be
A word like a waiting room or
A word like an anvil or
A word like being called on when you don't know the answer

But that moment wasn't so much
A moment as a pregnancy
Of emotions
And it wasn't so much
The expectation of my feelings
Being born as it was
The end of her feeling
Anything she could hope to use
Words for

*If I started writing now I wouldn't even know where to begin

After runs last August
I used to find the church unlocked
And I'd lay on my back
Under the altar
Sweat soaking into the
Blood-of-Christ colored carpet
Lily-scent
Inhaling deeply
I felt the waves wash over me
I felt the earth breathe
And I remembered one night
I was thirteen
Learning catechism
When the pastor told me
"Human and divine are the same things."

I ran to the church last time I visited home
And found the doors locked
So I laid on the ancient concrete of the parking lot
Exhaling deeply
The pollen and the sweat smell and the cut grass of moments
Passing
The blood pounding in my ears sounded like truth
And when I found a cut under the salt on my shin
Somehow it tasted like honey

He pieces her together: eggshells
She pulls him apart: saltwater
And outside it is always rose-light
And paper boats and some sweet breeze that nobody asked for
Outside it's all honeysuckle vining up the pasture fence

She falls asleep small against his tallness
He sleeps like a dog in the sun
If the truck keeps running
It's a metaphor for their relationship
If the truck stops it's foreboding

She loves him: pins and needles
He loves her: turquoise jewelry
And they're forever burning like
Matches on fingertips
Forever noticing new wrinkles in their reflections
As the mirror stays the same with age

"Do you still think you're going to marry me?"

"I won't let you get away again," he says,
Knowing she's young and she's fast

She smiles like pawn shop diamonds
Knowing he's lucky to have her
And having never felt so stupid
In her wicked wayward life

Cancer
That grew so
Big it swallowed the sun
Mercury venus earth mars jupiter saturn
Like juicy blinking pacman dots
And pluto a non-planetary cherry
On top

"Kiss me," you said into the
Microphone *"I don't want to die
a ******."

i. You are lying in a bed with no sheets and you are convinced your friends' parents are alcoholics. You are convinced that your entire life has been woven of slimy, sloppy lies and half truths. And you are convinced that you are a werewolf.

ii. At the chili cook-off two years ago you were wearing red flannel and a bandit hat and you were watching your entire home town get wasted, looking at you like a museum. You are convinced that you have been lied to.

iii. It was a full moon and you wanted to tear your clothes off. Except for the bellbottoms which you wanted to carefully hang up with a finicky crease for next time.

iv. You notice that down the street the Hy-** has closed and you are unsure how to proceed because you know that normal people do not get upset about such trivial things as midnight blue pies and insomniac coffee. You want to sob, but people will talk.

v. You are convinced you are a werewolf and you have been lied to. Everyone is smoking around you and you want only to make it stop. This is where your mother grew up. You say nothing.

vi. Drinks seem to appear in your hands, unsolicited. You have forgotten your ID, but everyone knows you from the papers anyway, everyone knows your family and they sort of apologize for spilling beer on your boots. Sort of.

vii. You crave pies at midnight and this is a "beautiful city" with a square that does not quit and causes quite a few accidents. This is a "beautiful city" filled with people who will never get over the high school quarterback, people who will never admit they have a problem with Stag, though the cans lie all around you.

viii. You are a werewolf and you are convinced you have been lied to about alcoholism. You are upset about the Hy-**, more so than you should be. If you took off your flannel now, you would never be able to get your heart back in your chest and Belleville would laugh itself to sleep.

In the fall there were two of them. Wild animals, I mean. New driver's licenses of shiny, longways plastic and long limbs that hadn't filled out yet. She was filling out her Freeburg High School T-shirt pretty well he thought. He was taking it off her innocent body in the parking lot. After the lights at the football field shut off and she kept drawing monstrous hearts on the fogged up windows in the back seat of a car it was almost as if she could let it all go. Hardly thinking about him at all as his hand slid under her waistband and she woke up as he was fumbling with a ****** wrapper. How awkward, she thought, to be a teenage boy with a ***** how tragic, not knowing how to handle a latex balloon when you have it. Like the Hindenburg, she thought we're both going to die some day so it might as well be an explosion and I might as well put on a show for it. She could feel his heart beat in his ***** the way that nobody talks about it and she laughed a little at their nakedness and it was tinny in the climate of their hot breath. I love you, she said.

As if it would change anything anyway.

There's new grass
Growing where the Bear
Laid in state interspersed
With fine chaining dandylions
And quick cutting ramps
Lou's wool socks hang
To dry on the porch, the
Color of her

If I asked nicely, the sun
Would not quit today
Pulling up green shoots from
Her death bed
Yesterday was fodder
Yesterday was mama crying
At the close of another time
The wind pulling my hair and
Telling me secrets

Nature is gentle
A pillow of birth
Where the Bear
Laid in state

See?

*all things are new

"I LOVE LOVE!" She shouted, speaking to herself in third person.
It was then that she seemed to float away
A balloon on Macy's Day.

It seemed I was the only one orbiting earth,
watching those performances of daily life applauding
for a well-flipped omelet a superbly
fitted glove a full tank of gas at $4.00.
I couldn't believe my luck

Terrestrially, there were husks sipping coffee
and rasping and rustling at each other
desiccated.
Privately, she was buying real estate on the moon
I LOVE LOVE! she shouted
Dancing like an egg on a spray of water
a declassified military satellite who through some dumb luck
had escaped the pull of gravity and won
Marveling at the moon rock
on her finger, even a stubbed toe just seemed
like the ideal opportunity for extorting kisses.
And it glinted in the light.
Everything was fine.

Down on earth it seemed all the wine drinkers
were toasting to us cheering as we terra formed
the moon. *We couldn't believe our luck
as we rolled back our stone.

When he says he wants a family
and I say I want everything is it
too much to pluck the moon from
the sky and carry it in my back pocket?
Rather than his hand there I like
the feeling of not being pregnant
I like hot air balloon rides and
sinking into the earth after rain
when he talks about the future
it's a pie chart and a clearly labeled
and concisely drawn graph and
when I talk about my dreams
in the morning they are vapors
and LSD my words mean absolutely
nothing I weigh less than a slice of
bread mostly meaning happens in
between things or when I hear Paul
Simon whispering lightning in my ear.

*Our children would be green-eyed monsters

Fog covers my eyes
Sores cover my tongue
My lips are chapped as
Sandpaper against the nights
Last night I died,  I don't
Remember
Losing my chapstick
I don't
Remember getting home

Birds outside my windows
Bellies already
Gorged on worms and
Sunlight
And petals spread wide and webs
Spun silk in the tired light
Yawny as the day goes by

Tuning his piano
Lid open
Musical mechanical
Guts exposed
Ear to strings
Plucking
Humming
When his cat
Knocked the lid closed
Human mechanical
Guts exposed

After one bite
Of grimy
Teeth sinking into
Mottle red (and green and brown)
And yellow skin and crisp
White flesh

An explosion of giraffes
Full of shrapnel
Chaos
All the colors
Gazelles jumping
Into and out of and through and around
Flaming hoops and elephants
And zebras and hurricanes with names
Names she never knew existed
And existence like a bolt
Of lightning struck the very heart of her
Churning her insides chaos
Theory and all the colors
Hyenas laughter
And painted ponies leaping out at her
Grinning as her insides
Cooked like thunder and she
Found herself
Screaming like a panther
Hiding under dappled leaves and strung out rain-flecked hair
Crying like a baby over
An apple core

Me and John lying in bed
And on the train tracks is a
Groan and shriek
A metaphor for rambling

O, that whistle sounds like Holly
O, that whistle sounds like John
O, that whistle sounds like going
O, that whistle sounds like gone

Me and John lying in bed
And on the tracks is a dying away
And on the ceiling are familiar shapes
The moon makes

O, that whistle like my mother's voice
O, that whistle like a charge
O, that whistle sounds like running
O, that whistle sounds like God

Me and John lying in bed
And in our minds are separate thoughts
And in our heads
And in our hearts
A metaphor for getting lost

"Oh, that whistle,"
Whispered softly
"Oh, that whistle,"
He agrees
With a quiet understanding
With a nod
O, that whistle calling
As our lives are getting gone

Fly away little bird
Sleep around
This country is too beautiful
To settle down

My father believes my mother is a hawk
Circling above him building bonfires
I think my mother's soul was born again into my dog
I can feel her there when we hold paws
My sister believes in a heaven
Where good people get their everything
And float
Over streets paved in Tiffany diamonds

I am outside.
My dog barks at a bird in the sky
I twist the ring off my finger
The stone flashes in the sunlight

Uncertainty lingers in hearts and minds
I was Butch Cassidy in a past life.

Flash of modesty
As he gets dressed in front of me
Fast hands and mismatched
Buttons
Hiding white skin and brevity

So I miss you in the spaces
Where your hands go
The between times
In our sleeping
Where maybe we aren't even touching
But I can feel you
Hear your breathing
In the spaces in between
Sweetening my blood
Flowing thick
Like mesquite honey
Hummingbirds in my stomach hovering
And drinking
their fill

And I'm enough for something
Sustenance for something
Other than me
Enough for someone
Who sees my betweens
And puts his hands
Where they need to be
Warms them
On my belly full of flowering mesquite
Nectar for the humminbirds
And bees

Oldest of two
Responsible for none
She was always a daddy's girl
And a morning person
She quit a lot of jobs
Before she turned 20
And when she wasn't planning to marry someone
Exactly like her father
They were ripping each other's heads off
Over nothing

She had strong shoulders
Not as broad as her sister's
She started swimming later
She was always more of a runner
Than anything else
Her parents should have known
Not to let so many hopes
Ride on her

Because life savings didn't translate
Into education
Her nose was always sniffing in the wrong books
Nothing on the booklists
Flouting authority was her favorite thing
So all of daddy's money
Couldn't buy her a degree
And all the lectures
She didn't attend
Couldn't make her see a dream that wasn't hers

Truth be told
She wasn't aiming all that high in the first place
A sturdy library
A cottage in the country
A dog
A tattoo sympathetic
Honest-eyed husband
And then she picked all the wrong ones

With every broken heart
And every finished book
She called home crying
"Dad, I can't do this. I am so lost. I see the destination but not the path."
She'd been drinking again
Frequenting tattoo parlors again
It would be a lie to say he wasn't disappointed
When she could have been
A professor, a musician, an author
Or president by then

"It'll be ok," he said
And when she asked why it couldn't be better than just OK
He asked "have you been taking your meds?"
She hung up

And thought back to a time when the whole world tasted like
Beer and pretzels
Before she even knew what beer was
It was a picture on the wall
A curly-headed
Naked girl
Tiptoe on a stepping stool
Making pancakes with her daddy
So when the sun came up
Breakfast would be ready

Those sleepless summer nights
Sweat pouring from every crack
In thinly layered sunburnt skins
It was all *******-on-the-floor
Blood-on-the-sheets
And *******
Living out highschool fantasies
Like the cool kids

Life before 22 was all a dream
Of midsummer swelter and
Salt water
In the mind of the dog
Chained up in the universe's yard
Tethered to the ether world
Racing rabbits through space
While I was turned into an ***
Staring at the mirror
And my expressionless face

This must be how cancer feels
Growing increasingly smaller
In a world where cabinets
And aspirations grow increasingly taller
She met the devil
For coffee on diagnosis day
But the deal they made didn't take
Her hair fell out
And her body atrophied anyway
She found herself
Floating far far away
Her blood coagulating like
A broken thermometer
Of mercury

Salvador Dali painted this fall
The house of salvatore
Minds gone to roost under warm eaves
Staring fireplaces
Hungry couches and singing windows
It's all ******* drooping like clocks
And derailing thoughts
The local biddies
Cluck their tongues
At the absurdity of infinity
And the girl in Ace Hardware
Buying shoepolish to hide her tan lines
Yawns, as her boyfriend feels her up

*Meanwhile I collapse
Like a house of cards with a flick of the wrist
Thinking about life's mathematical beauty

I'm a matchstick
With a sulfur head
Dying out quick as I'm lit
But God
How bright I burn
For those few seconds in
A darkened mine
How I shine
Reflections in ***** eyes
And lantern light
How I singe the fingers
Of black lung victims
Lying underground like
Spent matchsticks

I. That summer the radio
Played nothing but Cat Stevens
While I hummed harmonies
In my first car
It was a wild world indeed
when kudzu overtook
The cornfields
All the ears were foreigners
The leaves basked in light
That dead-ended on route 15

II. That fall we spotted UFO's
Shining over the municipal
Park
We chased them across the
Ballfields
To the high school cross country course
A dirt track running
Through the woods
And when there was nothing
Alien lurking there
Our hopes fell
Faster than the stars

III. The following winter
Three inches of ice cut the powerlines
Impounded our school supplies
With the outtages
And the temperatures plummeting
Seventy percent of our hearts froze
All the parts that were water
Expanding our chests
Like balloons
Expanding our vision too
We thought this was the beginning
Of the end of St. Clair county
We though we'd all get out someday

IV. By spring the graveyard smelled
Like lilacs
And dead town elders
Came out to dance in the scent
We played capture the flag there
On school nights
And the cops could never catch us
Behind the headstones
Of our family plots
We wrote our own epitaphs
"I was water and I could have been
A fine wine"
*I fell asleep in sweet green clover to the sound of smalltown sirens...

I love him in the morning
When the sleep rolls off his skin
And is buried in wrinkled sheets
With last night's stale sweet nothings
And my scent

I love him in the morning
When he just barely cracks his eyes
And it's as if he's seeing me for the first time
I think when his alarm goes off
The whole world
Stands at attention

He couldn't stay for tea
He was afraid he might feel something
Upstairs instead of in his
*****
If he had been thirsty
I would have shown him a metaphor
For dehydrated relationships
Gallium spoons dissolving in any hot liquid
Solubility tends to complicate things
We lose pieces of ourselves
At body temperature
Boil down impurities
A reduction of our leftover parts
Our leftover lust