everything dries up this time of year
driving into the wind I cried for four hours
but the desert air drank the water from my face, from my lips:
brittle sacks, experiments in evaporation

candy bar wrappers blow around the backseat
courtesy of these broken windows-- impractically high speeds
I don't know whose trash this is
I've been driving with a ghost

shouting at it, in the vacant passenger seat
all the things I'd never spoken
(for I swore you could read eyes)
but illiterate you saw only reflected stars

trying to find yourself in the Pleiades

all you knew of love was mythology
all I knew-- diesel gas, freon, points on maps
you read nothing in my vacant looks
I saw nothing in your ancient texts

a translation problem. little less.

The littlest things are all your skin
tape wrapped around my glasses
when I pull it off it bleeds
the seven stitches you fixed my shirt pocket
it ripped again and screamed
all we've got are ironically high speeds.

I swore you belonged to the Pleiades
uncertain which sister—
so you ask why you never earned a home
in the seven portraits beside my bed:

if even scraps of skin around here whisper
I'm sick with fear
for what it might have said.


A twelve-step program for growing up and growing over
I will till the dust you kicked up and drove away
plant poppies to fill the space
the progress where I scream at the sky
stand obscene before the sun
I will grow over you this place
there will be flowers when I'm done.

waiting for some white winged fantasy to fall
from the sky, landing half dead before my feet
and lead me away
to caves
back to morocco
to long tombs where chilled in our cartilage we could
await dawn.
tired from numbers, tired with names
all I ever muster is to sleep, warm and alone
wishing to be cold again
wishing for winter, to know dark without end
wishing to watch the city lights from the reservoir
churning through cigarettes, heads hung
and sunrise on hooks.

in june I felt the project change
from trying charting all scenarios of your face
to looking to books to blacking out spontaneous lines in found papers
to clearly eventually
be a misneglected omen of your impending collapse.

"I would like to blame this on the weather,"
I said to the sky,
"I would like to stay."


I felt the camera flash stop taking
strobe light moments of our strobe light moments
instead slipped tape recorder in your cereal box
videotaped the tooth brush
ever scraping dead skin while you slept.

I said, "If you wake up I will know nothing."
if you call this a dream, I will shake
and shake.
I said "it is clear now that you are decomposing."
(there's only so much the heart can take.)


stopped thoughts about the bus would hit you
spent time watching the sun through your palm:
little bones will scatter light.
little scars on thumbs.
we are made up only of who puts us back together.
and I could smell the rain.

I said, "It is easier if you stay angry"
I said to the sky.
"I would like to stay."


I put the Starbucks mug on the radiator
ceased to chart your worried looks.
I knew your brow, heavy clouds as you'd undress
but made a scrapbook of frozen dinner clippings
drew a line through where you went that day.

I said, "I want to prove that you meant nothing"
I said to the sky.
"I would like to stay."
I said to the sky.


and then the rain.

If you are willing and obedient,
    you will eat the good things of the land;*
-Isaiah 1:19

You left your hair long in the hopes some
Jersey-eyed boy would braid flowers into it
Mark you with sequins and well written post
And treat you like a
Better than most.

But there was no way of predicting the air, up here
The dry dusk crackles with static and you know your head's a mess
but there is always the summer always monsoon season always
The way your little hands would break what they could not bend.

and all the eyes are on you now but they are desert eyes
And only in dark rooms. And only at night.
And they hold your hair back as you

And leave you reaching for the light.

And when the summer comes you are brittle brittle
Cakes baked in hot sun
and your hands have fought so many battles and
So many battles and
little hands they come undone.

and to you you are the only one.