I can hear my mother calling
through the cracks of the door,
her own hands split,
bleach bottles leaning up against  
crinkled wallpaper.

“What are you doing in there?”
gets distorted by the freshwater sea
I have created,
bubbles escaping from my mouth
relaying
“baptism."

But my mother does not invite her friends
or clutch the camera
hanging around her neck like it could choke her
nervously,
and I do not feel the wave of
divinity wash over me,
cleanse me of the sin of birth.

But, instead, I tilt my head
beneath the faucet,
and water settles on my cheekbones and
across my bare stomach and
clings to my hair, curling itself like
Velcro to my matted locks,
and it weighs me down
like a liquid stigmata.
Like a conscious sponge, I feel the
pressure and lapse further and further,
clutching the edges of the bathtub,
the womb of my mother,
the weight of the red sea, once parted,
sifting through my hair and along my wrists,
following more of a path than I
can find.

“What are you doing?”
repeats my mother
as her bleeding limbs
cup me out of the water.
No one claps, hands my mother
a bible.
She does not smile when dusty,
cracked pews flood and cleanse with water.

Born again—
that’s just it:
I never knew life
in the first place.

outside, a kingfisher falls from a snowy tree
and plants the blood from his frozen wings.

inside, i see the plunge and, as i stand,
feel my stomach drop
down to my feet.
that bird’s been dying for so long,
its song whistling flatly through its beak,
the tiny flash of color for my days
expiring, suffering, visibly diseased.

my sigh of relief for ended anguish
flows like a frozen river from my chest.
should i revel in my freedom?
should i be grateful for my breath?

outside, a vulture comes,
and inside, i fall back into my
now-cold seat.

I woke up naked
somewhere between you and me.

I must have been a tiny spider, curled up,
unfolded my limbs,
sweat adhesive for the sheets.
Liquefied myself
again.

You play with my tongue,
melding
with my spit
and my lungs.

I must have been a wind chime, swaying silently,
chest quivering, bare ******* showing,
wrists cracking, still trying to unwind.

I woke up naked
and swallowed you whole.

Constantly aware
of my
input
and output,
I am the most inefficient
worker bee.
Fur wet with honey,
I cling to the insides of
hives and lose
my wings,
unable to peel them back
away from one another.

A fortress much more a home
than a homicide,
rose thorns are hardly my sting,
so I weave in and out
of their buds and barbed wire.
I am not supposed to feel
a thing.

I die for my cause.
I am what I make.

I forage in the afternoon,
and then free my sting
from my skin
decidedly.

Abridged in still uncertainty,
autumn swept up its weeping leaves.

“You’re the red leaves on the tree,”
paused, breathed in,
“and I’m the green.”

Of the fall, you thoughtfully said,
“one is dying; the other, dead.”

Dread the fertile limbs
of the forested paths,
clustered not beyond doubt,
but melded back to the earth
by wrath.

You dismiss:
“it’s too bright,”
that is, my ghosted figure
and snuffed out embers,
and your own face blanched by
pseudo
light.

Axe me, but
dread
the two of us—
love, loving, loved—
dead.

The family dog is dying.
On Saturday,
they press her ****** paws
in cement,
and the eldest daughter swallows
some accidentally.

The middle son is in the backyard
raking leaves
when he tells the neighbor.
The words snag along
the electric plot line
and crumble to bits beneath his teeth,
brushed back and forth into
the leaf pile.

On Sunday,
the mother unfolds the quilt
that the kids use to make forts
onto the kitchen floor.
Her muffled pats on fabric
a motion to the coffin,
the dog spins in a single circle,
then lays down to die.
“This way she will be warm
while she is still with us—”
The eldest daughter vomits
the cement up in the nearby sink.

On Monday,
the father slides his hands
against his dog’s ribs like a xylophone,
then pulls back,
afraid to sound like
the morning alarm.
The family dog is dead.

The youngest daughter takes on the role
of licking her paws,
dried prints on the tile floor
where she lays down to die.