it starts in a bathroom with me feeling
sliced open, like a bird that has just
been gunshot-down from the sky: this boy
does not belong to me. I do not belong
to myself. nobody belongs in my skin.
it is all I can do not to cry into his mouth.
I will not cry into his mouth (I refuse to cry into his mouth).
instead this boy will press his palms into my body as though
I were something smaller, something holier. I like him mostly
because his wrists do not bend the way yours do.

with a boy whose palms seemed constantly marked
with calendars. lying next to him
in his twin bed covered in blue sheets
I made the mistake of asking him to sing
me psalms -- neither of us

were religious. I told him
that his room smelled like an old church
and that I’d only been to a church once
with a childhood friend
and that everybody there drank the blood of Christ
except for me because my family
has a history of alcoholism

the first time I saw his stomach I saw his
whole body and his knees looked tombstones

the first time he saw my stomach he saw my whole body and I whispered
over and over again silently underneath my breath
silently like an anxious fire ‘do not look at me’ the first time
he looked at me he told me I fainted: that night I
had dreams
of cutup magazines,
of hands that only bleed in playgrounds. somewhere that night
lying atop his stomach we heard a girl next door
screaming the way owls do. I’d seen her the morning before
and she’d been beautiful like an old wedding dress.

~deleting this 4 now 4 reasons but if u buy a copy of the next issue of 'winter tangerine review' .....~

You wear gloves like they
are second hands or more

like a pair of ghosts either
way they are extra i.e.

not a part of you i.e. this
body (your body)
that you are in

should belong to a cow
but you have never stepped

onto a farm you imagine
a farm with soil black

and bitter with language (your
father worked on a farm

when you were younger you
did not know him but still

you grew a beard the way he did)
And now you wear gloves

they are secondhand

they are like graves
they span generations

Neighborhood boy dies this summer.
Now you are in love with a ghost.
At the funeral you hate your body. There
you realize that your thighs have been
growing rapidly, like an infant’s breath,
and your stomach looks mountain ranges.
The boy in the casket is thin as ember. You
swell with jealousy. You do not cry. The last
funeral you went to was for your grandfather
and you didn’t stop asking questions,
about where he was going and who he’d be
living with. Now you are all silent stuffed animal.
You have not gone to church in two years, have
only prayed when the boy has been listening.
You could not love Christ if you tried; you haven’t
tried. You only drink his blood to feel as though
you are being touched by hands that aren’t yours,
or your parents, or the boy’s. Your hands look
like pet birds, always. Your hands are trembling
underneath your dress, pinching at your stomach.

Here, this water is for you. Here,
you have a body all strung out
like a highway, cutting through
fields. Here, call your mother, she
still worries about you. Here, once
you died. Here, once you slept in my
bed, we slept together, we slept
together & we did not ****, even though
I wanted to ****: you slept curled
against me like a small bird meant
only for the palm of your hand, breath
warm as a new layer of skin.

Driving there the trees start to look like my old baby teeth  
and my skin starts to feel like the bruises of a mother I have not
spoken to in three years. There people sit in their striped foldout
beach chairs in the parking lots of gas stations and watch the cars
go by and the women wear dresses covered in flowers that swell
like skeletons down to their ankles and the dogs when they bark
sound like stretched out skies.

Summers until I was 17 spent there in the lake,
the lake where for the first time I held my breath for ten whole seconds
and where Tommy from across the street drowned himself and where
for two weeks I couldn’t swim without crying from the panic
that bloated and ballooned out in the cryptic wells of my chest. Until I

was 17 there within the walls of the house painted white as a
canker sore and in my bedroom lying on the wooden floors
my belly the first time you came was too bare and too large
and after that I did not speak to you for a week and when
I finally opened my mouth I couldn’t stop crying, my face
swollen as fish roe, and I never loved you more, and then

I never loved you more than I did on my porch for the last time,
you standing there looking gauntly and saintly as a bruise and me
with hunched shoulders, I couldn’t stop shaking, I never stopped
shaking, here I am in this car and it is air-conditioned and I am
still shaking.