in winter it is my first time home in three years.

I am in my bed again with a body full of volcanic acid
and a throat nervously full of phlegm as repulsively sweet
as the water of the river that I swam in when I was still young
and naked and fleshy. I have not been  
young and naked and fleshy in three years.

My bed is as hard as I picture your body being tomorrow
when we are both in your car again
and your face
still crumbles open like a basket of bread.

My mother has never baked bread.
My mother at night lies alone on sheets cold as the light from a moon.
Her voice wails like a pair of haunted hands.

Last time I saw you your voice broke apart
atop your final word to me.
Before that your hands were on my thighs like a new curse.
Since then I’ve pictured you standing with raw hands
cursing into brisk air. There are times when I try
to picture my body into something smaller, like a ******
raccoon against the side of a highway strip.

There are no tall trees
in the yard anymore, nothing
to compare my body to. (Mother cries about them all falling
in past storms.)

When my father sees me in my bed he says nothing. He’s
best at walking with his hands sour as bees.

Boys with faces
like beds full of bloodstains.
Boys with faces
that drown best during winter,
when all the wolves in the town have just been killed.
Father every day goes out with his gun
to see what he can shoot. He leaves the house quietly,
leaves through the screen door, through the porch, his footsteps
soft as my old nightgown:

I was young, then, in that nightgown. Young, but
I remember the small bathroom downstairs
and a weathered hand ****** deep underneath the tight skin
of my chest. Everything seemed ****** then.
Everything seemed six years old vision then and he was my father’s age.

A week later the same weathered hand was on television,
this time dead, this time run over by a drunk boy.  

Tonight I love drunk boys, tonight they are the only boys
I could ever love. With their eyes blank and white, they look just like my mother.
Neither of my parents know about the nightgown. My mother
does not know about my father’s shooting. My father
does not know that I know about his shooting. At night once I was awake
and heard a gunshot and pictured a car belonging to another drunk boy.
In my dreams the same man is dying, his body crushed by a car, over
and over again. In my dream there are no drunk boys (no boys), there is just me.
In my dream I have never had parents and father has no hands
with which to shoot.

I was at the edge of myself       almost becoming
the words waiting in silence


maybe i don't have to explain
because I saw two trees
embrace
in the justpastmidnight light
and the vision
stilled me.

Sounding out the scripture
of a leaf heartbeat
i was weeding in the garden, found one that had flowers blooming on the back of her leaf that was no longer than my pinky finger,
a row of tiny dusty blue beings lined up along the spine
and this creature was to be destroyed?
i couldn’t pull up any more.

There i am soothed.
a still sensation stops by me and offers me a breath
emanating from the earth between my toes and the chest high basil i’m trimming.

You fenced off your eyes
with a charcoal black,
then stranded in snow
and an endless depression,
you painted your death-mask
in venetian ceruse,
hoping that it would be enough
to appease your critics;
to keep away from the sun,
to slip through the seams of time,
and to a place where
the evenings do not seem so long.

You gave your sanity
to a useless drug
and kept your identity
to the picture
within his wallet.
I hope you know your bravery is noticed.
I hope that for once
you can find peace
amongst this constant state of war.

maybe you didn’t feel it
when i licked myself
off of your lips.

maybe you didn’t feel it
when i traced the back of
your knees with my fingertips.

maybe you didn’t feel it
when you rolled over in the
morning and saw how well we fit.

i knew it when you
picked the eyelash off my  
cheek because it felt like a kiss.

i knew it when you
took the long way home so there’d
be a few less seconds to miss.

i knew it when you
would wake up and leave me because
my heart would contort into a fist-

all so i’d never have to let you go.
but you would never know.