1) I walk five miles deep into the woods in the back of the yellow house with my brother so that we can watch the flies circle around the bodies of the dead cows: their hanging limbs, their loose tongues. The air hangs like a boy’s arms around my shoulders. My brother and I both wear shorts.
2) Inventory: one tractor in the yard. One truck in the driveway. One driveway, gravely like the throats of my father and grandfather. They both live in the yellow house. At night I stay up late listening to their screams. They sound like owls’ heads or hurricanes.
3) Father sees a different woman each day. They all have blonde hair like mine. Eyes brown and crumbling and whiney like mine, too. Mother left when I was three years old. Brother and I still aren’t sure if Father means she’s dead or if she just ran away, but we’ve yet to see a tombstone.
4) We go to church every Sunday. The pews press against the back of my sticky legs and white dress. Charlie eyes me from across the aisle and I do my best to focus on the head in front of mine.

Summer like a newly born body              Our sheets are sticky & white

Legs knotted on the floor of my bedroom closet              (Except: I don’t have legs)

(I’m afraid of wearing shorts)              We sit on the floor of this closet breathing heat

& eating each other’s bones like Chinese food              (We don’t like Chinese food)

I tell you that my body doesn’t exist              Except at night in dreams & nightmares

We stay in this closet because it is small & dark             & we know each other

We know each other in these              Sheets, white & sticky (like the wedding dress

of a nervous bride)              This summer is built like a hospital

This summer               We are born again like *****, only without water

We drink water              And then we die like church bells

We drink water             And then we die like our parents do,

In cycles              The way we brush our teeth

(Next summer              We will be back on the floor of this closet)

Home again I hid underneath blankets
like a kingfisher and waited for you
for hours, until eventually the clock
stopped working and my father had
to come in to get me up and turn on
the light and put on the air conditioning.

It was 83 degrees the day I came back,
heat swelling from the ground the way
your cigarettes did, dangling from
the fingers of your left hand like old puppets.
Later that hand would find its way into
my body and I’d go numb. That first night back

you read to me the way my father always
did; you were best at making me feel
like I was three years old all over again,
vulnerable as the rats quietly roaming
our ghostly wet basement. You read Narnia
until I began to sleep. I hated my snores
but you pressed my face to your stomach
so that I could hear the beestings that roamed there.

Look, they’re like yours, you wanted to say, but you
never knew how. You could never hammer
words the way most could, but you still
made me ache like the high school chorus:
goose bumps against arms against desks,
shivering all over again underneath ceilings
instead of skies.

A:

I have been waiting 10 years
for father to stop hiding
underneath the wooden table
that rests hunched and gauntly
in the living room.

B:

It took father three days after I was born
for him to finally hold me; now he tells me
that his hands were splintering too much,
but I’ve seen enough of his palms, covered
in plant & ash & soil, to know better.
.

C:

July of 2000 we sat tucked away
like old wolves’ fur
into a blue station wagon. I refused
to talk to anybody but my father.
I sat the way he did, shoulders crooked
like the gardens of elderly women. I talked
the way he did, too, drawn out and low,
like swirling concrete.  

D:

Now I stay alone in his apartment
and sit out on the fire escape
and annoy the neighbors with my smoke
and watch the cars go by and wail
the way the city does at night.
I think less about my father
and more about being alone; I think less
about being alone and more about
how I can take away this skin, this body.
My body looks just like my father’s
and I hate him for it.

A shallow lake off of I-95. My mouth was a water fountain. My back was arched the way my mother’s was the day she gave birth to me. My belly was round and steep like the high peaks that circled our watery bodies like branches of snakes. By the lake there were woods and in the deep mouth of those woods we lay with sweaty arms and burnt legs. You groaned as though your mouth were full of wolves. My eyes were tightly sealed. I thought mostly of my father and of the bed that I slept in when I was three years old. I thought about my grandfather’s hands, too, stained with beer and old milk. It was like I was leaving my mother’s womb all over again. Thought: this is what it will be like the day I give birth. Thought: the trees are bent at their waists the way my brother always is; he sinks into himself like ocean. Back at the lake you unwrapped a pack of cigarettes and I unwrapped my mouth, vomiting into the sand. Nobody else was there. I remember you always smelling like smoke. That entire time we were awful drivers.

Somewhere it is 1942 and Grandfather is alone
in uniformed dark hair, flying over mountain ranges
that look more like steep moonlight than anything else.  

Today the sun is sharp and pronounced.
Today the car is warm as wrinkled skin.

I come close to crashing five times, thinking about
Grandfather’s cool bald spot and about the time
he took me for ice cream. Three years old
and he told me about money and afterwards
Father yelled at him while I played with blue chalk.

Two years later Father watches his father’s ashes dangle
into the Hudson River and two years after that
I see a puppet with the same bald spot as Grandfather’s. I tell Mother
that they are now making puppets out of the dead
and Mother just smiles down at my short body.

That night I dream of underwater graveyards and puppet shows.

The last time I was home I was 18 yrs old
& here I am again & there’s already
dirt in my bed. I like the tall tree in the backyard
the most: it is the only one free of snakes. Snakes
crawl around the others like crowns of teeth.

When grandfather was alive
he  took me to that tree & picked me
an apple & told me about family, i.e., mothers tied
to mothers tied to mothers; now I am
the only daughter. Grandfather told me
about my birth: my mother cried until her face turned
transparent like the thinned out wine that my
father drinks at dinners, the wine my mother tries
to ignore: she’s terrified of her ancestors, all

drunk like barrels of young boys. I had three
brothers & they are all dead now: an ocean,
a car, a burst of lightning.

I don't think about them anymore.

Instead,
in bed,
at home again, I listen to my sheets as they rub
against my legs like a child's chalk to sidewalk.

These days most of my dreams
are about my grandfathers: one was arrested &
the other an alcoholic but they knew how to love
the way ghosts do, all hushed & subtle & colored quietly.

One day I will learn how to sing
the way the women at the local church do.
I know nothing about Christ, but I still
stand outside the open stained glass window
with my eyes closed & pretend that I can feel
the pews pressing against my body like a boy’s hands.