neighborhood boy spends all night in the diner over by Main Street or in the stone library across the street. He can’t tell the difference. I am convinced that he is just like me: because of the way our eyes darken so easily, like a pile of dying moths. He likes places with booths where he can sip his coffee all slow and seductive. He doesn’t know how he’s like with his hair dark and falling over his eyes the way a mother drapes around her new child. He is surprising in that he has never touched me. Once we sat next to each other on a train with the windows foggy as steep mountain and he never touched me. We only spoke to each other once (he asked me if there was a bathroom somewhere). He was reading about a small town and his eyes were red like he’d just gotten back from war. He is the kind of boy who looks like he is always just getting back from war, who looks like he could only love his mother if she were dead. neighborhood boy has a chipped left tooth and ankles that look like they should be covered in blood. neighborhood boy is not my boy. neighborhood boy is not my boy. neighborhood boy will never be my boy but I will still watch him drink his coffee. That time when he talked to me he sounded like a lost wolf, like somebody who loves to live in car crashes.

the night the sky broke open
all purple and ******
like the bruises tiring my thighs

was the same night my father died
was the same night my mother cried

was the same night I
ran around in circles waiting

for my legs to fall off
for my body to disappear
like a bird shot away like a sad holiday  

I loved you that night
like a whispered ghost
like a poorly built church

that night you were at my father’s funeral
you were burying his body
holding the shovel between your hands
(calloused as a windy lake)

that night at my father’s funeral
my throat was damp with guilt

I was not like my mother
my face was not marked, not wet

My father sits in the corner of his
living room with his mouth curled
and ****** hair drooping like a ******
up angel. His body is just like mine.
I have never hated him more than
I do now, with his gut hanging over
his knees like hot solid fur.  

2.

I sit in the passenger seat of a green
Subaru Forrester. Father drives. I am
trying to sleep and he won’t stop
talking and I realize in his voice that
the two of us are the same: we have
the same throats, like two blue
bibles.

3.

Father in his rocking chair sleeps
stilly like paved whispering. I picture
him with a snake in his lap and it is only
then that I am willing to cover him
in the plaid blanket that drapes the living
room couch. I leave him with my shoulders
bent like rusty metal, my mouth shaped
like guilt or a glass of milk.  

4.  

My father dies in 2006 in between
line of highway and line of trees. Subaru
Forrester beaten against the side of the road.
His spine bends his waist twists as though
he has just slept with the devil.

When we were younger
there was not a single day
that we did not scrape open our knees
against the metal pails that Mother kept
in the kitchen.

“To ward off spirits,”
she would tell us at night
as we lay in bed
with our breaths hushed
as the body of a stillborn child.  

The day I was born
(in white hospital
in white sheets,
everything white
as the face of a choked casket)
Mother told me about the first child
she’d given birth to:
a child birthed and then dead within an hour.

Ever since then there were
the metal pails, all of them
lined up carefully
along the wooden kitchen
like a crowd of empty stomachs.

There we slit our knees
and there we waited for Mother
to come stitch us up;
there we were ignored.

Our bodies looked
like ghosts’ bodies,
only our knees
were more overtly bleeding.    

2.

Growing older means:
less ghost and more large stomach.

The metal pails are still in the kitchen, only
Mother’s body is now curled up and dead
inside of one of them, her body curled up
right next to that of the child, the one dead
within the hour. Growing older means:

more summers sticky with sweat  
between our touching bellies,

our bellies dead and vulnerable
like the loose faces of paled grandparents
who are close to dying in nursing homes.  

When I am standing in front of you
and when you are upstairs
and when it is nighttime
and when you are in my bedroom
(the bedroom where I used to live with my
five brothers, where mother used to tell us about warding
off spirits) standing in front of me with heavy abdomen
I am most excited to curl up against you, most excited
to cry like the gun of my grandmother
until I can no longer feel my belly.

Mother told us when we were younger not
to step foot into the woods or else our bodies
would disappear like birch tree into morning
sky.

At night in the dark with our hushed breathing
lying underneath soft blue quilt and the moon pale
as Mother’s face shining through the bedroom window
she told us stories about wolves with teeth sharp
and naked, sinister and still like a fresh mistake, or like
the stories themselves, the ones that lulled us into
hard-edged sleep.

Now at night in the dark with my hushed breathing
lying underneath trees tall as a father I’ve never met
I am breaking every law I’ve ever known, standing
with feet bare and rough like the body of a toddler
that’s been scratched by saltwater. Now the moon
is as rough and gold as a cruel boy’s face.

Here I am breaking every law I’ve ever known
but also here I no longer have a mother. Here
there are finally people I can learn how to miss
and the trees look more like tombstones; on one:
the name of a father long gone, another: mother dead
with age, a third: boy dead by drowning.

If somebody could see me now they would see
the body of somebody holy, soft and aching and wrinkled.

Through mountains in August was the first time
in 19 years that I felt by myself: no chest

just
one large body.

You were there next to me, all fists
steering your car like a giant squid.
I would have turned to a saint
before pressing my palm to your knee
but I put my palm there anyway

and there it stayed like a lightly-held song.

Sitting behind a dark bush with you
your left shoulder looked like a small city
while my eyes turned damp like a mother’s new crown.

Your body is still next to mine like a large corpse in the sky:
goodnight, I am dying circles as though I were a priest;
goodnight, I am fainting thinking about the bruises on my upper thighs
that you did not give me; goodnight, my body feels like some sort
of gutted deer all heavy with gore; goodnight,
you are stuck with blood
in the back of my cruel throat.

I am born in the springtime, underneath a moon
swollen as the abdomen of a rat. My body
out of the womb looks like the shape
of my mother’s wedding dress. From there

I grow like the belly of a pregnant cow, only
with no milk to offer; there is nothing pale
about me: later my parents will call me names
that translate into nighttime and I will hear them

and I will go to them, mindlessly, like a bucket
of breathless water. Today is my sixteenth year forty-sixth day
and they still call to me and I still go to them, but this time
with a face like red seas. This time they look at me

with fear knuckled through their voices: I look like the raw
and sore underside of a cold nose, the kind you get
from enough crying and not enough sleep, and also: I
am too thin, my bones stick out from my body like the stripes of a bee.

Days like today I wish for somebody to sink into like tissue paper.  
Days like today I think about being in trees with my brother,
the world dark enough to make the two of us look
like scratched mirrors or splintered eyes. We do

not speak to each other, do not look at each other, but
our breathing is identical, both of us shadowed away
from whatever screaming sounds the house may make
when it is late and my mother and father do not know

what to do with the worries that take over their bodies.
My seventeenth year forty-sixth day I will go to them
and I will apologize, my voice whispery like a soft limb,
my bones less visible, more hidden, more like ghosts.