my stomach in the bathtub
folded over and wrinkling
like the skeleton of my grandmother

hands that look too much like my father’s
blanketing my stomach like those of a cruel mother

on the best days the window next to the bathtub
is uncovered and I can see out but nobody can see in

on the best days I look down at a body
that is nothing but a pile of snow leftover
a week after the storm has past
somebody has forgotten to shovel me whole

there is a damp hole in my stomach and I am
staring at it unsure if I want it to melt
wondering who might fit shoveled inside

When I stand in the bathroom with these girls it is 4am and I see them as ghosts and my stomach is churning with too much salt (too many fritos), churning like the fields from back home that carry more wind than they can burden. My head feels like too much heavy space and all I can think about is a bathroom stall with a toilet bowl like a burial ground.

Lately it’s been getting haircuts and eating too much in a desperate attempt to keep the boys away, then food becoming the graveyard in a desperate attempt to draw them back. But my body still smells of ***** and my hands are still teethed and I wonder how many people know what I’ve done. I wonder how many people I can get away with telling.

Later when I sleep there are dreams of a mother dying with flies and the girl from camp hanging herself and the boy from down the street only 21 and dying in his sleep (and missing the memorial service). Every January it’s tallying up the deaths and every January it’s my brother asking me how many people will have to die in my poems before I’ll finally be able to make up my mind.

I can’t stop seeing blue faces against white lakes; a father who yells and then asks what’s wrong; a mother who takes baths with her daughter just to compare the way in which their bodies wrinkle like water.

Somewhere hanging up is a picture of us taken by some boy, in it we are singing songs to graves about breaking bones and bruising nail beds and now we wonder why we no longer speak to each other.

when was the last time you rode the subway without inhibition? there are city streetlights throbbing in your stomach that make you want to *****.
a father’s nightmare. a mother shrinking as you expand. a mother gives birth to three children all in the wrong places. a mother rides the subway. a mother rides the subway. a mother rides the subway.

a mother rides the subway & sees brown splotches dripping from the ceiling like crown from womb dripping onto pavement. hitting pavement like a cemetery. buried in a cemetery with grandparents. you knew your grandparents for a year before they died, or so you tell yourself; you did not know your grandparents at all before they died.

ribbons of newspaper cover the floor & litter your legs & your bulging stomach. stomach swollen like a stung ankle. stomach tastes bitter like rat’s blood. rats crawl around your feet, creating a set rhythm.
where is the f train & should i even be taking it. a subway rising in the dark like a mountain, like you driving to the adirondacks, catchy acoustic song playing on the radio. a song like the one you listened to when you were three years old on your parents’ bed, faces of peter paul & mary gleaming out from the television screen.

in this black jacket you are overheated but also you are too afraid to take it off. you are overheated & afraid & you imagine that this is what a death must feel (like). when a subway station roars it sounds like ocean.
(a body, a body, a body. bodies echoing in your head, your body all soft - too soft - your body crumpled on the floor)

In a picture of me at my parents’ house I am cradling my rib
and it looks bruised and boyish and apartment-like. In another:
I am sitting on kneecaps, praying to the first boy I see, a boy with
simple body, body like pinecone. When I was younger I listened
to radio stations with a snake in my lap. Looked out windows at
tops of buildings. Watched the tree branches falling onto concrete
ground when it stormed, my legs from top to bottom naked like smoke.
Cigarette smoke in my mouth but I never inhaled. My father and I
were the same in that we didn’t have lungs and both liked alcohol.
Every Saturday him taking me out and us drinking sake and my stomach
churning like a bathroom sink. My face like large sky always changing color,
always blushing. The first boy I kissed smelled like french fries
and in his mouth I licked heavy broken heart. The first boy I kissed
always wore white t-shirts so that whenever you saw him you could see
when it rained. Kissing him my stomach turned upside down like
a weighted storm. He touched my ribs and my stomach even when
I cried. Parents are a lot like a childhood boy. Parents and boy all standing
on my childhood porch. My childhood porch looks like a giant rib,
or squid in the sky. The first time I smoked I thought I saw a squid
or whale in the sky.

when brother sings he sounds like church bells.
when you sing you sound like the dark circles that rim my eyes.
today we are all drunk & today it is raining & today my father
is calling everything beautiful, then yelling at me.

it's like we're playing ring-around-the-rosy all over again, standing
& circling on dirt roads outside of white houses covered in pink flowers.
we're three years old & so far nobody has died.

I’m holding my father’s baby teeth in my hands. They’re pressing into my palms the way I wish your nails could. My mother through walls thin as her body is using the bathroom again. My mother has eyes like the antlers of a buck. When it snows my mother is outside with her fingers encircling a purple plant and the plant is now dead. When it snows my mother’s mouth can be seen disappearing into flesh, her face disappearing because it has no flesh. She is standing on the porch again watching you drive. “I Need My Girl” is a loud song and it is playing softly from your speakers.

The last time I held your hand in a car we drove for two hours like Magellan in circles around the outskirts of the town. The river coursing like the chest of a swan just about to take flight. The river coarse as childhood hair, hair without showering. I hadn’t showered in two days. This town would be better with large fields, more cows, some highway and cliffs. As it was: it felt too much like we were driving somewhere; it always does when you are in a small town. We drank from wine bottles shaped like our father’s heads and sat on straw chairs underneath strung-up white lights. The lights were there all year hanging from a tree that in that muddy heat should have been palm.

What it was: this summer your body reminded me of somebody else’s body all lanky, the one difference was that you were there and he wasn’t and now it is winter and neither of you are here and my body is in bed moored by hives the size of your large pale feet.

who knows how it works?  
the way I end up like my mother
in a dining room at a wooden
table eating for two

2. the way I take baths now
my body wrinkles in the tub
the way hers always did when
I was two years old just learning
how to clench my fists I would
clench them around the wrinkles
of her belly, kiss her temples
all round and sharp like the caps
of beer bottles

3. when I was just two years old
I would drink the leftover bathwater
I still sometimes drink the leftover
bathwater in all of its murkiness I was
drinking her body now I am drinking yours

4. she called our house heaven
if our house was heaven then
heaven is made completely wooden
our front door was heavy and isolated

5..  dirt paths dirt roads matching dry dirt
buried into our matching dry hair
our matching dry mouths our chapped lips

6. with snow pushed to the side of the ground
covering our feet like threadbare blanket
like a lost husband’s lost hands