i.
There is a small bruise
spreading across your forehead
like wine across the body of a saint.
Your forehead is resting on my sheets,
cotton and white like sinners. Our bellies
are sweaty and naked. My belly has been bloated,
spread out and looking like a high peak, for over
a week, and I’ve never not wanted you here,
in my bed, on top of my bed, more than now:
our shirts are both blue, our shirts are both
lying on my floor. I am shivering, trembling
like moths in a burning house.

ii.
In a dream we are walking through
a train station that looks like an
alleyway and you are letting go of my hand
slowly and I am feeling like a church
made of grass and my limbs are feeling
like graves and across the train station
that looks like an alleyway there is a girl
in long clothes beckoning to you and you
come and I am sprung up drenched
in pools of my own sweat as though it were
July all over again.

in the eyes of my father
i am only stained in water
and i am sawing off my *******
i love the way a boy might
quietly like the insides of a womb

in the eyes of my father
i am doing well in my body
he can’t see that i am bleeding my hands
that i am sawing off my *******
my father is a careful man

reliable like window shades
in the eyes of my father
i don’t need a body
i don’t have a body
and i am sawing off my *******

i am large like a supermarket
my belly moves like worms
in the eyes of my father
i am sawing off my *******

Boy sinking boy drowning this is not
the first boy I’ve kissed

boy walking across pavement like streetlamp
it is as if he has no mouth he is so light

boy in his car reminds me of Grandfather in
the nursing home we visited Grandfather
there every weekend until I was 6 years old
and then he died all of the boys I’ve ever loved
have died in one way or another I am sitting
in this car with this boy and my legs feel huge
like claps of thunder and I can’t stop eating
his skin as though it were a consummation of sorts

we are listening to a song with lots of piano
boy plays piano because the keys remind him
of bits of time (the way he presses down on them
lightly like buzzes of flies)

I want these boys to know that
the days on which I miss Grandfather grow further
and further apart like old magazine subscriptions
the days on which these boys remind me of Grandfather
are every morning they all drink their coffee black
they all eat cold pancakes they all die circles underneath
their eyes dark as their coffee dark as their mothers’ wombs

there is rain and there is lightning and there are trees
and in one corner of the field there are
two women
in long skirts, white like your boy's face. they are picking
flowers just for you (for your hair): hydrangeas and lupines. in this dream you do not have a name, just a mouth, to swallow the rain, and the clouds that hang
overhead like dead kingfishers are heavy and black and swole
with more water. your clothes are not wet in this dream. 
your skin is, your skin is pink and wet, looking the way it did
the day of your birth, but your clothes -- mother's old blue dress curled 
carefully around your knees (the dress is too small -- mother
has always been so tiny, so much tinier than you are) -- are dry as your lips. 
your stomach is churning, you are standing in this field you don't know,
and your stomach is churning as though you love a boy. you do
love a boy, but not like this. your boy is pale, your boy is quiet
as your childhood house, and so your love for him
is quiet as well, it never churns, but now your stomach is churning,
with rain, maybe, with this dream. you think about the boy,
but he is the wrong boy. you are ready to wake up.

I.

It begins with a couch and with me thinking
that I’ll feel better if we sit together. The couch
is as brown as my knees were when I was six and playing
with dead worms and building statues out of the bones
of grey soft birds.

I am thinking mostly of your hands and of your lips
and of my mother: in a few hours when I return to the house
she will be yelling, shrieking in a voice
like warm alcohol.

II.

If I told you I loved you, you would cry; it’s only
been a week, maybe, or a day, or three weeks, or two months
(here time stretches and then is collapsed, is sometimes
flattened and thin and other times curls thickly as the hair
of one of your former lovers). If I let my head fall
into your shoulder, gently, maybe then you will let your hands
rifle through my hair.

III.

My head is too heavy for your body, your body light
the way I think a girl’s ought to be, the way I think
mine ought to be. My bones feel shadows, they press
into your backside like a birthing womb.

IV.

Tonight we are in a womb together. Tonight we are birthed
together like Christ and dog. Tonight I do not miss you anymore,
tonight I could not miss you more.

This is both how it ends and how it begins:
I gave you two paperback novels and you forgot
to read both of them, they sat on your nightstand
for three months like the ghosts of grandfathers. The cover
of one is neon yellow, all bright like the insides
of your mouth, and the cover of the other
is greens and whites with the face of a small bird
coming out from the center. You hate to read. I knew
you wouldn’t like either book, but I loved them,
so I gave them to you anyway, then watched them
pool together in dust the way sweat pooled across
my body, my body underneath yours, yours a small
lightning rod and mine ever-expanding, corkscrewing
out like a mountain range or like a bottle of wine.
The first day we met we ended up in your car, I sat
in the passenger seat and was terrified of your hand,
but still mine crept to it like a fish to sand sprinkled
across beach by a child. At first you were there
lodged away in my left breast, your body I felt
form a small knot there, and the knot grew, slowly,
and then suddenly, gone, like a confession. First
my hands were deep in your chest and yours were edged
around my hips, everything felt careful and wooden,
and then our hands sawed away and disposed of. There
was one fleeting goodbye and then there was an empty room,
my body once again alone and standing underneath a sky
large and empty and flat as your cool tongue.

sad news this morning from mars: first baby to be born there died that same day. miscarriage, very ******, parents named her rosie, i think. picture rosie older with hair long & black like the dress of a widow. picture rosie older: going to church; giving birth & screaming. there’s a picture of her in this morning’s newspaper: a picture of her in her mother’s lap, both of them lying in the hospital bed. i say black hair, long hair, because her mother’s hair is long & black, too. her mother is all dark, dark, dark like the feet of a child after a long & grueling day at the beach (spent with no friends, just family). her mother is beautiful, even in hospital gowns, even having just given birth. when i gave birth i couldn’t stop screaming.