The two of us in a bed with sheets pulled taut as a sore throat. My underwear
was wet with your spit. We woke up everyday, early, to climb to the tops
of cliffs and scream, “THIS IS AMERICA!”

These are our highways, this is our weather, this our honor.

Our whole world was wet and shivery as a cool dream.
Your chest was covered in goosebumps, your chest was tight, your chest
was chattering. Every night I kissed your teeth with my sticky
and gummy tongue. We made love, once, atop a wooden dining room table
that lacked a tablecloth. It was the hottest day in August -- the 21st --
and we’d forgotten to go skinny dipping, but still we were stripped naked,
like newborns, or parents. Your back was arched like a boring joke.

Afterwards, we drank coke from silver cans. Still, us, on a porch, still:
“THIS IS AMERICA!” We often pretended that our house looked out
onto an ocean. We missed the waves, what they did with our bodies.
If I could have I would have stood in a field of wheat with you, mountains all long
and curved and ripened behind us. I never had the dream that I told you I’d have:
the one in which my nails claw at your face just because your face looks haunted,
like hunting grounds. I’d had the dream about every other boyfriend. It is no
longer summer, but I will have it anyway, and the next morning I will
wake up to a ****-soaked bed, sheets cooled without a fan.

The ghost boys howled like loons. The ghost boys
had bodies that twisted away without warning, bodies
that forgot to root themselves down anywhere,
unless they were rooting their hands down onto skin
without warning. When I was younger I scraped my hand
onto my pronounced clavicle. My initial reaction was to bleed.

You loved the girls that lined the public bathrooms. They had
brown hair that reached down to their jawlines and they
filled the gaps and the gums of their teeth with orange juice,
to raise their blood sugar, after they vomited, after the cuts
appeared on their faces (doctors’ orders). Their cuts
curved outwards like fields of orchids. Back then, standing with them,
my stomach was sharp as a state I’d never been to.

I’d never been to Georgia, with its strong heat.

Your face in a dramatic bed is not without heat. I am not cold. I was born
in the state far north of here, the state with the birds (flycatchers, kingbirds,
vireos) and the gas station. The gas station never caught on fire, although
I had a dream of you in my bed: in it you were on fire,

the fire mixed with heartburn. Quickly you turned into my grandfather.
My grandfather liked to sit in his brown wool armchair
and smoke pipes and eat black currant pie and listen to Merle Haggard
on the record player, in the wooden house, next to the lake that in late
December rippled with waves. Grandfather died in December.

I still don’t know how to have dreams in black and white.
I don’t know how to lucid dream, either.

Your body, no matter what, mixes with shadow.

Before I left home I had just cut my hair
too short and my neck was all too ******.

I ran past towns with a body
that looked like the ghost of a willow tree,
clawed at it the way mothers claw at fathers
during the births of their daughters.

Pictures of Father holding me up
to a willow tree each time
I cried. Nobody else could hold me

up the way he could, his arms gold
with too many storms. Pictures
of a boy who has been covered
in too many storms. Too many pictures
of a boy pasted to my face. After I left

I had dreams of my face covered in scrapes
that were deep with small soldiers and miniature colonial women;
I didn’t know any of them, but they all knew me.
They kissed me the way tangled up Christmas lights kiss arms
in the winter. When they did their mouths felt like the teeth of wolves.

I have stopped being the girl in the white dress,
with the pain in my stomach, the marks across my arm.

But there are still bruises topping my face, from a boy
heavy and dripping with his mother’s old gowns.

My legs in these hot and dusty new towns
are sore and happy.

In October we picked apples that tasted like the tops
of teenaged mountains, apples that were colored red
like teenaged brides.

In October, a reminder to self:
Don’t ever forget the teenaged years.
Don’t forget the boy with the tongue like slick arrow.

The school was painted white with green trim, and the two of us
stood behind it like a pair of stag deer.
Remember: there is a difference between grey and white,
and I am not colorblind. Remember: this boy’s face was grey as the robe of a young monk,
and I am not colorblind.
(Remember: This boy is not a monk.)

Don’t forget being thirteen with hair licked short like a small body.
I stood with five other girls, I was flat chested, I was lying
about a trembling kiss. When one girl cried I should have remembered
to mean well, when mother called I should have answered, even
after she died, even if sometimes

mothers **** children. It’s just that they do so without realizing it (usually).

(Remember that mothers often lack bodies).

Reminder to self: bathe,
wash behind the ears: the chalk that still rests there from grade school.
The teacher made me write
I WILL NOT ****** BODIES, then, I WILL NOT ****** MY BODY, then,
I WILL NOT ****** THE BODIES OF BOYS OR MOTHERS,
each statement ten times over on the green chalkboard.

There was a hunger in my stomach back then,
rooted down like a pit of shaking guilt.
We ate apples covered in teenaged blood.
I could not shake it, the hunger. I still cannot shake it,
the hunger. We continue to pick apples with bodies
that are meant to be sorrowful.

The worn out backseat of Benny’s car is where I end up
when ***** piles up at the back of my throat, my head
scratched as the hooves of a dead cow. The worn out backseat
is the best place to lie still, but only when it’s dark out,
the moon finally comfortable with people being out
underneath the broken streetlamps. At night, when it’s too dark
for us to even remember the faces of our parents, the broken streetlamps
are all that remind us that we’re still in a suburban town
(anywhere else and the streetlamps wouldn’t flicker).

When I’m with Benny it’s as though my head is bald again
and I’m crowning my way out from my mother’s womb for a second time.
The first time I was born I clawed my way out like a violent rat. With Benny it’s always summer, with Benny it’s always summer in the worst of ways: heat flashed across my palms, my throat bitter with god, the word “gorgeous” all around my teeth. Benny has hair

that is too short for his lanky body. Benny drives awkwardly. I see him
best driving across bridges built for rivers. The last night of July I dreamt about
all of us from the line of painted white houses, everybody still 19 years old, running
crookedly into ocean. Our bodies shook with salty water. In the dream I cried because
nobody drowned and I woke up still crying.

I’ll never get over the word “teen”; it sounds too much like a curse, like “gorgeous.”

i.

Kathy tells me about god in the bathroom stall.
She tells me about the time when he told her
that we’re really all just suffering together.
“I was at Harry’s basement party,
drunk leaning against a wall, standing by myself,” she says.  

She says she can taste the suffering the most when she’s standing in church,
eating one of those **** communion wafers.
I laugh without knowing; I’ve yet to eat a communion wafer.

ii.

When Kathy gets really drunk
she grapples at my hand
and forces it to her skin.
She says my hand sobers her up
more than water does. When I touch her forearm
it is as though I am touching a dead infant.

When I touch skin I am thinking about standing outside
in air that could only be so cold in the summer,
my body all bare, my body standing outside
of a loud and lit up house
with me whispering,  “please don’t touch me, just let me shiver,
just let me faint here peacefully.”

When I think of skin I think of my grandmother and her wrinkles,
of generations of wrinkles.
Looking into the bathroom mirror
I see the body of my grandmother and the face of my mother.
I am desperate for a toilet.

iii.

Kathy knows about the days when all I do is eat.
She knows about how much I like peanut butter,
about how my skin sags from my ankles,
hangs around my wrists. But still
she holds me when I must *****.

Today the air inside of the C train
is as cold as a stillborn. Today
is the first day in a week that I am
riding the subway desperate to meet nobody.
A row of faces across from me,
some thin like my mother’s and some
swelling with ghosts the way yours
does. I do not love any of them.
Picture: us standing with snow pale
as the body of a grandmother beneath
our feet. Picture: bruises and teeth marks
lining my body like the passengers of this subway
lining the orange and yellow seats.
Your hands were strong enough to break gods.