There is a wooden church and we
have just dusted our way into a funeral
and we are trying to be sad for this corpse
but really we are sad for each other, only
we are not even sad. See you are smiling
like a cobweb, all draped and dangled, then
your hand is on my (bare) arm as though you
have never touched my skin before, which
then I realize you haven’t and there I am suddenly
shivering like a clock. Looking back on it now
I am realizing that at that point we should have
started to drive away but we stayed seated with
your hand on my arm and you grew much, much
older and I grew much, much younger. Think:
a parent. Think: a child. Think: a parent teaching
a child how to swim in a lake full of bees.

My father only likes what is made of wood.
Every night I am trying to find my carpenter.
Every night the heater’s breath-teeth are
full of ambulances -- there is a bang
and I am startled out of these sheets that are still
all drawn with your flesh and guts. Yesterday
in the car there was a Golden Fleece floating
in the sky and I thought about your skin, about
how it looks best when painted or fragmented.
These days I am fragmenting everything,
even trees’ branches, even your cheeks’ bones --
i.e., everything belongs to somebody else, i.e., at
18 yrs old am I a body yet? Once you called my
body beautiful, once you called me cute. Murmur
in your sleep that I am beautiful and hopefully
this time I won’t spill out my organs. This time
my organs will remain intact inside of myself like wooden
piano keys, only I am still trying to find a proper forest
to spin inside of and to be built from.

I. clay and ice

In the bed: sheets white
as a faceless whisper. Think
dark and unwashed hair. Also,
eyes shot with too much blush.

II. eyes

It’s too easy for me
to look into the mirror
when I’m brushing my
teeth. Lips paired with
a dark sigh. Lights bright
as the careful hands
of somebody newly pregnant.  

III. dna

In the evening, I mean
very late at night, often
you are there so split into
two. Get into this bed, then
clench your muscles one
by one like soldiers’ play.
Your arms rest on the windowsill
like smoky moths. It isn’t until
you clasp your hands like a bird
falling midflight that I realize: you
are so much less than our fathers.
My mouth will be resting inside
of your neck but you won’t be
able to hear me begging
like a cancerous womb.

I touched your spine and it bent
like a tree angry with the river angry
with the train that passes every morning
at 2:43 am and wakes the young sleeping boy

Once it came at 2:42 am and it woke
up everybody in the town because none
of their dreams had prepared themselves
for this startling event.

i bruise my knees on wintered floors. you can
tell so much about a person just by being  
in their bathroom. now i know why your hair always smells like
coconut. is there a holiday that you spend taken away by
isolation? what’s it called? that’s what i want to name you, maybe. you told me
to come up with a nickname for you in your last letter. i haven’t yet, though,
because nicknames remind me too much of skyscrapers --
too permanent, you can’t move them, our limbs
should move more from this bed.

i spend two hours in bathrooms, leafing myself open.

i spend two hours missing you, swerving from full
to empty, back to full again. you’re giving my honesty back to me now.
there’s too much of it, stop it, stop this, i don’t want to eat any more of it.

last year, i lied to the beard-strewn man
on the subway. the subway seats were too pale. i called him
my grandfather when he left. he looked the way my grandfather
looks in the scarred photographs my parents keep underneath dust.
my grandfather looks like a tombstone, still, but i’m waiting for that to change.

i’m being too honest with you again. i swallowed saltwater this morning.
look at how elegant it looks leaving my eyelids. look at how horrid.
but it leaves and i thank you for doing this to me. i thank you,

kneeling in a bathroom. kneeling in your bathroom.
i think i’ve started to pray to a toilet.

The baby is born to the death walls
that line the cellar. The cellar is dark
and musty like the inside of a mouth
that has seen every forest in the world
that needs to be seen. There is animal
screaming and cheeks wailing and blood
smashed. There is the floor: cold as bath
water or lungs or teeth or healing. She
wanted a midwife. The midwife looks
ashes of change, her hands shake  
like a pale fire. Her hands shouldn’t
be shaking, I want to say please, leave
the shaking hands to us, we are only
a professional family, but you are really
a professional, your brain is snowed with
palms that knead proper parturition. But
my mouth is tight with breath and ash.

also, why is this so usual for me
i’d like to say that now is when
i think about everything
monumental, like the economy
or my parents hurling pebbles at
each other’s backs or watching
“iron man” with my cousin on christmas,
feeling like some kind of tourist in my cousin’s bed,
i.e., is this what christmas is supposed to feel like?
i don’t know, i celebrate chanukah, please let me know.
sometimes i think about my brother
in the woods,
is there smoke lingering on his palm?
i don’t realize how much i care about him until i do, until
my eyes are dark out, until my eyes match
the insides of my stomach.
but usually i am thinking about you, or us, or we, last year, sitting
together like static tucked softly into our houses. you were
always digging graves inside of my neck because,
we’ll die soon but before that we’ll get married,
except wait i’m 18. my stomach still lines my throat
when i swallow pills and i don’t know how to cradle
anything else other than my knuckles and there are plants
in the windowsill and i water them, sometimes, when i feel
like it. when i was 13 i saw blood streaming my underwear
and i told myself, this is it, i’m with death, i knew the doctor
was lying when he said i was so healthy.
when i was 13 my mother came into my room
and said, “look, now you can have children.” i was 13, now i am five years
older, i still cry when i think about mothers. how easy it is for them
to lose their children. like once i watched “boy in the striped pajamas”
(on my birthday) (how stupid) and i cried for three hours afterwards because
i felt like the mother, or just a mother, or my mother and her mother
and her mother and how we could all easily pull away from each other like thread.
once a boy from my school died and another time a girl from my
camp hung herself and i cried for their parents, mostly. i didn’t
know how to cry for myself yet and i still don’t. i’m tangling
other people’s emotions around my throat, i’m still trying
to find mine. mother tells me, you’ll find them if you clean your room.
mother says, look at how much you’ve grown. i am churches of guilt
when i don’t believe her. there are always people praying
inside of me. nobody should ever pray inside of me, least
of all you. if anything my hands are two skyscrapers
but that’s the only kind of building i know how to be.
i’m sorry, i’m in bed googling ways to leave somebody
without hurting them and also without being selfish. i am so
selfish, like leaves covering sidewalks, i am so selfish and i am
so sorry and i am crumpled but also i think i’ll be okay and
maybe one day i’ll think of you without feeling so sorry for myself.