I am in a bar with more TV than artwork on its walls. This breaks my principal rule of bars, but I had to *** and the bar was open and I felt guilty using the bathroom without buying anything, so I am drinking a Blue Point Toasted Lager and trying to make sense of a sample chapter of Judith Butler's book Gender Trouble on my smartphone while a group of three to six drunk men a few meters to my left debates the relative fuckability of Meg Ryan vs Sally Field in the nineties or the eighties or sometimes both and this whole thing feels ironic and like maybe it could be a scene in an indie movie.

tap me right and i am a tuning fork
my bones hum a desire to shirk, to move,
to shake the dust for vistas unseen

my feet are hungry
my skin has to taste every flavor of dirt
it gets bored with the daily repetition of texture and shade

what of all the palms unpressed and eyes ungazed?

i am a drunk and i'm late and i can't find my keys but i know they're in my bedroom somewhere
so i search unevenly, moving from corner to corner, stumbling, overturning pillows and ***** t-shirts, knocking down lamps, cursing and muttering, squinting and sweating ugly

this is my each day. my skin feels too tight. i want to crack it open at my elbows and the edges of my scalp and crawl out of myself,
swollen so large no city can contain me.
let me boil until i am atmosphere,
citizen of every nation,
kisser of every lip and eyelid,
dervish of every flame or patch of dry earth.

it begins with a meditation

she does not speak in thunder or the roar of conflagration
her voice is not rush of water or gust

listen for the small, still voice

find it in the hours when the black of the highway is unbroken by headlights and the night is a secret you tell no one

find it as a breeze lifts the sweat from your cheeks as you sit on a mountain outcrop born a billion years ago

find it sewn into the lining of the noise of the coffee grinder, in the gaps between the words "green tea with milk and honey"

the right silence is not a crushing of voice
do not cover the wound but let it bleed until there is nothing
silence is an emptying
each chore or occupation unattended is a balloon rising within you
do not contain them
touch each one, then let it go
watch it drift up into every shade of blue until it's too far to see

now, listen.

if we were peacocks,
i would blue-green iridescent burst beauty
all the other ***** would high five me for my excellent choice of eye shadow and  elaborate evening gowns
brightness would be bravery, screaming LOOKING THIS GOOD IS WAY MORE IMPORTANT THAN SAFETY FROM PREDATORS
pretty would mean masculine and drab would mean feminine
feminine would still be an insult.

If we were leopard slugs,
we would all be one ***
maybe my dad would be your mom and my mom would be your dad
I would never worry if I was man enough
I would love all of my hermaphroditic glands equally
or, more realistically, I would be ashamed of all of them equally,
never sure if my gonopore was symmetric enough,
if my translucent blue-white ***** was beautiful enough to ever intertwine and bloom with another's
there would be no gay bars or marriage equality movements or swallowed-wink "no ****"s
no one would tap around your abdomen in search of the right organs before declaring your birthright aptitude in cooking or car repair
you and I, we would follow each other around all night, exchanging playful licks, before impregnating each other, circus-suspended from a tree branch
... I guess that part would be the same

if we were blanket octopuses or anglerfish
masculinity would mean smallness,
would mean quiet dependence,
would mean dissolution of self
i would search for you, my love
cling to you, give you my everything
you would be my big strong hunter, my provider
this is the only world i can imagine needing men's rights activitists
i would log in to chitter (like twitter, but, like, instead of birds tweeting, it's a sound dolphins make? it was the best i could come up with)
i would log onto chitter and try to tell of my deletion, but
some overly muscular two-meter-tall woman would write back,
"I've never had my body gradually absorbed into anyone else's. If it were a real problem, more octopeople would be talking about it."
they would threaten to eat me, to rip me apart and feed me to sharks, would laugh.

we're humans.
we're closer to slugs than octopuses
we aren't from mars or venus.
we don't act like it.

masculine and feminine aren't straightjackets. they're edges of a map.
on my continent, we take ballet and write poetry and cry in public
we love math and cooking and we don't really know how to fix cars but we can figure it out if it's in the user's manual
we want to be strong and graceful and warm and safe.
you don't have to live here, but don't tell me not to.

i don't know what it means to be a man
i know what it's like to be treated like a man
to be given deference i don't deserve
to be obnoxious or impulsive in conversations and not be called out for it

people with bodies like mine, with skin like mine, we take up too much space.
we can be smaller.
there's room for everyone.

today i am at work
it is very monday
everyone's face is very monday
the halls are muted
the sky is an even grey
i can't tell if it's raining

saturday morning, the oven clock was blinking 12:00
something made it forget the time
i woke up to no internet connection
silently, i blamed my
****** roommate, her boyfriend, the cat

the cable company e-mailed me
to apologize and make promises,
speculating a downed tree or
car accident

(life mysteries: an e-mail to
tell me i don't have internet
like a letter to tell me
the post office is closed
like a missed phone call
to tell me to check my work e-mail
because a car is wrapped around
a utility pole and a boy
is in a hospital and his friend
just isn't anymore
so now this sixteen year old
has to carry the friend he
didn't mean to ****, dragging
his body down the corridor at
school, propping it up in the
bathroom each morning so
those unseeing eyes reflect
in the mirror, cradling
it to sleep each night)

it was later that day that
facebook (peace be upon it)
told me this child had died
his ghost must have got caught
in all those power lines and
the joy he had in life was too
much for copper or aluminum
to bear and so it wept great
showers of electrons and
made my oven forget the time and
made the earth forget
a boy

but today i am at work
in nine years, i've said bye-for-now
to maybe a thousand pairs of optimistic eyes
most don't come back
so each year, i silently erase them from my heart
(it doesn't hurt, after nine years)
i have become well-practiced in the art of letting go
so today i feel only guilt for feeling
nothing

i tell myself
boys die every day, i
tell myself we can't
weep for all of them

the principal tells me to send the lost kids to the library
but give the rest normalcy, so i spend the day painted thick
with forced calm over false pain over shut eyes

today i teach them where wind comes from
the way nature tries to smooth out bumps
until everything is equally cold and dead
i teach them anemometers measure wind speed
because anemo is like animate or animal and
they all mean wind or spirit or motion
because those are synonyms and i silently wonder
if boy's spirit has joined the atmosphere as some
small bright gust
dancing snowflakes into drifts and
playing music in the leaves for
millenia, racing faster as sun grows hotter,
finally escaping into interstitial space


friday, they will lower him into the ground.

i'm wandering nyack in search of
poems. i like it when the full moon
and the lights on the tappan zee bridge  
reflect off the hudson.

nights like that, the tides sing me something
inescapable, and my legs take me down the
steep part of main street, east of broadway,
and i stand on the undulating dock and
let the waves pass through me as i scream
song lyrics or memorized poems until
the water calms me. saltwater has a way
of reminding me of deep secret histories.
my mitochondria all remember
being born somewhere like this.

not tonight, though.

it's cloudy and the sky is whispering
but he spits when he talks and
i thought spring was out tonight
but she went home early because she forgot her wallet

all i can find is
drunk strangers and
beer i don't like

few things reduce you
like so many unfamiliar faces
in a familiar place

inspiration tiptoes
out my pores in fine droplets,
evaporates; leaves behind a salt-crust of
voiceless hollow, so
i go for a walk
letting the almost-rain try to rinse it
from my bare forearms, calves, cheeks

i don't find any poems tonight,
only a feeling of

jeanann verlee is on the kitchen table
in a pink mohawk and a polka dot dress
she is racing hummingbirds next to
the onions and the avocado, all
frills and lace and nosebleed and broken glass
like she's chewed a fistful of gravel and
spat out a mouthful of chipped teeth and ******
diamonds