I am hot in
my hands
the warm flow
of life buzzing in us
is leaving me -
I transform
womban

this deep
in mystic mystery
when eyes see nought so be it.
When eyes see me , see me.

Come back , flow out
humble me and humble me again till
I am worn
smooth
and round.

This feels like coming home from the moon
the way ghosts do. Do not tell me you love me
on the days that you don’t. Winters here are
far too heavy with snow, make me feel sick
inside. I will always remember sleeping with
you beneath your comforter, and I will always
hate it. We stick our fingers into slices of lemon.
When we pull them out, we see blood. This belongs
to us. I am sorry, but I am not small enough to faint.
I am sorry, but I am terrified of the boys who
lock their doors & love their mothers without realizing
what it is that they are doing.

I have chapped lips, red skin, no bones, no blood.

Think of blood/think of hands.
Think of hands/think of blood.
Think of blood/think of hands/think of me,
with a cigarette in between my teeth like the corpse
of a puppet.

The two of us each smoke a cigarette for the first time
on streets dark as the water that leaks from a body
that has just fainted on a bathroom floor: There are times
when I picture myself fainting on a bathroom floor, with
a bit of blackish blood cornering from the tip of my mouth,
me nauseous and vomiting. I’ve never told you this and I won’t now,
even though it is night and I am lying in your bed once again,
once again my stomach feeling too much like I have just ****** an ex.  

A story about ******* my ex:
once after we smoked we tried to **** on the carpeted floor
of my father’s apartment, lots of sirens and taxis crowded
outside. I didn’t have any collarbones, any hipbones, panic
sweltered in the back of my throat like a cruel joke.

I am going to make mixed CDs for everybody I love.

I am going to let my hair down, I am going to forget to wear chapstick,
or worse I’ll remember, but my lips will still be chapped. A lot of the time
in my sleep I am asking you where my bones are. Or I am dreaming of old
women, old women who are either grandmothers or witches or both –
I can never figure it out. Neither can you, who are supposed to be so intelligent.

You are so exhausted, of everything, like a newborn.
You have never had a beard. My mouth tastes
like peanut butter. This is not a good thing, even though
I like peanut butter. My mouth tastes nauseous. Don’t you
dare kiss me. I am afraid to even kiss your cheek. You with
tall bones and lanky spine and the eyes of somebody who should be sad.

i.

Kathy tells me about god in the bathroom stall.
She tells me about the time when he told her
that we’re really all just suffering together.
“I was at Harry’s basement party,
drunk leaning against a wall, standing by myself,” she says.  

She says she can taste the suffering the most when she’s standing in church,
eating one of those **** communion wafers.
I laugh without knowing; I’ve yet to eat a communion wafer.

ii.

When Kathy gets really drunk
she grapples at my hand
and forces it to her skin.
She says my hand sobers her up
more than water does. When I touch her forearm
it is as though I am touching a dead infant.

When I touch skin I am thinking about standing outside
in air that could only be so cold in the summer,
my body all bare, my body standing outside
of a loud and lit up house
with me whispering,  “please don’t touch me, just let me shiver,
just let me faint here peacefully.”

When I think of skin I think of my grandmother and her wrinkles,
of generations of wrinkles.
Looking into the bathroom mirror
I see the body of my grandmother and the face of my mother.
I am desperate for a toilet.

iii.

Kathy knows about the days when all I do is eat.
She knows about how much I like peanut butter,
about how my skin sags from my ankles,
hangs around my wrists. But still
she holds me when I must *****.

my stomach in the bathtub
folded over and wrinkling
like the skeleton of my grandmother

hands that look too much like my father’s
blanketing my stomach like those of a cruel mother

on the best days the window next to the bathtub
is uncovered and I can see out but nobody can see in

on the best days I look down at a body
that is nothing but a pile of snow leftover
a week after the storm has past
somebody has forgotten to shovel me whole

there is a damp hole in my stomach and I am
staring at it unsure if I want it to melt
wondering who might fit shoveled inside

when brother sings he sounds like church bells.
when you sing you sound like the dark circles that rim my eyes.
today we are all drunk & today it is raining & today my father
is calling everything beautiful, then yelling at me.

it's like we're playing ring-around-the-rosy all over again, standing
& circling on dirt roads outside of white houses covered in pink flowers.
we're three years old & so far nobody has died.

who knows how it works?  
the way I end up like my mother
in a dining room at a wooden
table eating for two

2. the way I take baths now
my body wrinkles in the tub
the way hers always did when
I was two years old just learning
how to clench my fists I would
clench them around the wrinkles
of her belly, kiss her temples
all round and sharp like the caps
of beer bottles

3. when I was just two years old
I would drink the leftover bathwater
I still sometimes drink the leftover
bathwater in all of its murkiness I was
drinking her body now I am drinking yours

4. she called our house heaven
if our house was heaven then
heaven is made completely wooden
our front door was heavy and isolated

5..  dirt paths dirt roads matching dry dirt
buried into our matching dry hair
our matching dry mouths our chapped lips

6. with snow pushed to the side of the ground
covering our feet like threadbare blanket
like a lost husband’s lost hands

When I stand in the bathroom with these girls it is 4am and I see them as ghosts and my stomach is churning with too much salt (too many fritos), churning like the fields from back home that carry more wind than they can burden. My head feels like too much heavy space and all I can think about is a bathroom stall with a toilet bowl like a burial ground.

Lately it’s been getting haircuts and eating too much in a desperate attempt to keep the boys away, then food becoming the graveyard in a desperate attempt to draw them back. But my body still smells of ***** and my hands are still teethed and I wonder how many people know what I’ve done. I wonder how many people I can get away with telling.

Later when I sleep there are dreams of a mother dying with flies and the girl from camp hanging herself and the boy from down the street only 21 and dying in his sleep (and missing the memorial service). Every January it’s tallying up the deaths and every January it’s my brother asking me how many people will have to die in my poems before I’ll finally be able to make up my mind.

I can’t stop seeing blue faces against white lakes; a father who yells and then asks what’s wrong; a mother who takes baths with her daughter just to compare the way in which their bodies wrinkle like water.

Somewhere hanging up is a picture of us taken by some boy, in it we are singing songs to graves about breaking bones and bruising nail beds and now we wonder why we no longer speak to each other.