~deleting this 4 now 4 reasons but if u buy a copy of the next issue of 'winter tangerine review' .....~

You wear gloves like they
are second hands or more

like a pair of ghosts either
way they are extra i.e.

not a part of you i.e. this
body (your body)
that you are in

should belong to a cow
but you have never stepped

onto a farm you imagine
a farm with soil black

and bitter with language (your
father worked on a farm

when you were younger you
did not know him but still

you grew a beard the way he did)
And now you wear gloves

they are secondhand

they are like graves
they span generations

Here, this water is for you. Here,
you have a body all strung out
like a highway, cutting through
fields. Here, call your mother, she
still worries about you. Here, once
you died. Here, once you slept in my
bed, we slept together, we slept
together & we did not ****, even though
I wanted to ****: you slept curled
against me like a small bird meant
only for the palm of your hand, breath
warm as a new layer of skin.

Neighborhood boy dies this summer.
Now you are in love with a ghost.
At the funeral you hate your body. There
you realize that your thighs have been
growing rapidly, like an infant’s breath,
and your stomach looks mountain ranges.
The boy in the casket is thin as ember. You
swell with jealousy. You do not cry. The last
funeral you went to was for your grandfather
and you didn’t stop asking questions,
about where he was going and who he’d be
living with. Now you are all silent stuffed animal.
You have not gone to church in two years, have
only prayed when the boy has been listening.
You could not love Christ if you tried; you haven’t
tried. You only drink his blood to feel as though
you are being touched by hands that aren’t yours,
or your parents, or the boy’s. Your hands look
like pet birds, always. Your hands are trembling
underneath your dress, pinching at your stomach.

I.

It begins with a couch and with me thinking
that I’ll feel better if we sit together. The couch
is as brown as my knees were when I was six and playing
with dead worms and building statues out of the bones
of grey soft birds.

I am thinking mostly of your hands and of your lips
and of my mother: in a few hours when I return to the house
she will be yelling, shrieking in a voice
like warm alcohol.

II.

If I told you I loved you, you would cry; it’s only
been a week, maybe, or a day, or three weeks, or two months
(here time stretches and then is collapsed, is sometimes
flattened and thin and other times curls thickly as the hair
of one of your former lovers). If I let my head fall
into your shoulder, gently, maybe then you will let your hands
rifle through my hair.

III.

My head is too heavy for your body, your body light
the way I think a girl’s ought to be, the way I think
mine ought to be. My bones feel shadows, they press
into your backside like a birthing womb.

IV.

Tonight we are in a womb together. Tonight we are birthed
together like Christ and dog. Tonight I do not miss you anymore,
tonight I could not miss you more.

there is rain and there is lightning and there are trees
and in one corner of the field there are
two women
in long skirts, white like your boy's face. they are picking
flowers just for you (for your hair): hydrangeas and lupines. in this dream you do not have a name, just a mouth, to swallow the rain, and the clouds that hang
overhead like dead kingfishers are heavy and black and swole
with more water. your clothes are not wet in this dream. 
your skin is, your skin is pink and wet, looking the way it did
the day of your birth, but your clothes -- mother's old blue dress curled 
carefully around your knees (the dress is too small -- mother
has always been so tiny, so much tinier than you are) -- are dry as your lips. 
your stomach is churning, you are standing in this field you don't know,
and your stomach is churning as though you love a boy. you do
love a boy, but not like this. your boy is pale, your boy is quiet
as your childhood house, and so your love for him
is quiet as well, it never churns, but now your stomach is churning,
with rain, maybe, with this dream. you think about the boy,
but he is the wrong boy. you are ready to wake up.

sad news this morning from mars: first baby to be born there died that same day. miscarriage, very ******, parents named her rosie, i think. picture rosie older with hair long & black like the dress of a widow. picture rosie older: going to church; giving birth & screaming. there’s a picture of her in this morning’s newspaper: a picture of her in her mother’s lap, both of them lying in the hospital bed. i say black hair, long hair, because her mother’s hair is long & black, too. her mother is all dark, dark, dark like the feet of a child after a long & grueling day at the beach (spent with no friends, just family). her mother is beautiful, even in hospital gowns, even having just given birth. when i gave birth i couldn’t stop screaming.

The day we broke fast it was late July & your body tasted like heat
& rain, even though it hadn’t rained all month. That July
the grass died, & then our parents died, & then the neighborhood dogs,
& the cows, too, out in the large fields, & there were flies everywhere,
buzzing like the wrinkles of the elderly. You died last, the day we broke fast,
along with every other boy from the neighborhood. Your bodies
were all empty corpses, sprawled out together flat & open & with hanging tongues,
like a high school football field.

The last night of July I had a dream in which you were the devil,
all red skin & hair like a bucket of moon ***** & missing eyes.
I woke up screaming, but very quietly, because it was still early, 6am,
your eyes were missing & so were you. The last night of July I tried
sneaking out of the house & into the small graveyard next to the small church
that rested up the hill by the small school, but your tombstone was missing
& I cried until I didn’t have a throat anymore, until I was just one large body,
very empty, very carved out, like the pool
down the street
that Grandmother used to take me to.

I don’t ever want to sleep with you
in a hotel bed in white sheets
in white sheets with you I feel death
I don’t want to ever feel ghost with you
I spend all summer with you in lakes
water makes me feel
more ghost than anything else does
you hold me in the water & love me
& I keep thinking
is this really what your body looks like when it’s sunny out
(like a mountain range like a museum of moths)
you have a face like a moth
& I have a stomach like a moth
how fitting
my stomach is so large in this water
& in this water I am ghost
& in this water you are holding a funeral & in this water
everybody is holding a funeral
for somebody else
I am not the most important ghost anymore
I am just a simple ghost floating
through gentle mists
like a child

The first story I ever heard was from Grandfather,
about a boy & his dog. Grandfather looked pale
as ash that day. It was December & I was still
a small wrinkle in a bassinet. Mother & Father
were still new parents. They never listened to Grandfather,
just cradled me like a bundle of empty beer bottles.

Even now I’ve never seen either of my parents
drink, but I can hear them screaming, at night, about me,
mostly, sounding like whorls of fingerprints
being rubbed together in the wrong direction. My body is so often

being rubbed together in the wrong direction: a stomach that feels like moths
or eggs boiled incorrectly, too soft or too hard. My stomach growls, often.
Tightens, often, like thousands of screwdrivers in my throat.

If Grandfather could see me now he would cry. In the story
the boy & his dog are having trouble moving their sled down
a steep & snowy mountain but in the end they succeed, sliding
down the mountain the way hands do across large bellies. I am not a boy,
I do not own a dog, or a sled. Nights I stay up late
curled on the floor of the kitchen or the bathroom,
clutching at my body,
at the swole of my abdomen,
as though it were a large pile of greasy, brown rats.