i.

a message from a boy i don’t know
that begins with, “i’m J’s cousin, i’m trying to locate her, can you....”
i don’t know how to deal with those
who promise death,
so i don’t finish reading it,
bile mixed with guilt building in my throat.

last night J told me her body was falling apart.
i didn’t know how to respond.
i know bodies without bones too well
but i don’t know how to talk about them.
i don’t know how to parse away
the skin from the bone of a pig
when i’m standing in the middle of a cold barn,
more naked than i was when i was born.

ii.

i am naked with boys who i don’t know,
but who fold me in half anyway, then fold me apart,
then spit me out like i am
the bitter taste of a dead dog.

iii.

keeseville, ny is upstate is a place
for stained dresses & burnt milk & spoiled prayers,
where i spent every summer in a body
made for somebody smaller.

i’m realizing now that i’m not small,
everyday i’m the opposite of small,
but these boys still look at me
with frightening scrutiny like i’m a goat who belongs in a bed
& if i’m not pet, not fed, i will give out.

iv.

sun hangs across the sky
like blood across my underwear.
yours or mine?
from which part of the body?

1.
a dream about a boy & his bicycle,
which is red, & coated in winter
& in frost. a dream about a boy
with freckles trailing his hands like layers
of bad teeth. a dream about a boy
whose bones match mine,
but i can’t love him.
2.
more than anything mother
likes to sleep. second to that she likes
having a body that is much, much smaller
than mine is. still there are times
when i pretend that our sleeping is the same.
her nightmares creep into her graveled skin
the same way they creep into mine.
she will keep sleeping,
her bones will keep shrinking.
what does she know about boys,
about a boy?
3.
this is the story of the family of deer
that once lined the lawn
of the house down the street
from where mother & i live without anybody but walls
white as the faces of monks.
they lined the lawn for ten minutes, then were shot.

this is the story of a boy & his bicycle,
& bicycle tracks that line the bodies of dead deer.
a boy who doesn’t know how to cry unless
there’s been a fire.
a dream about a boy & his bike
burning like penances, like ancient worlds.
forest fires line my dreams. forest fires
do not make me love people. battered dogs
do not make me love people. there is a boy
& a bike & he has a dog & the dog too
has been bruised by flame.

4.
how to cure: a dry mouth?
how to cure: what has been lived in?
how to cure: a fire?
if only my mother could step out of her bed
now. she would see me shivering with the skin
of somebody who should never look like me.

boys **** me & then tell me
all about the bible classes they’re taking.
boys' breaths usually smell
of how they're thinking about
the girl with short brown hair & bangs
as no more than a girl
with short brown hair & bangs.
i am not angry with them.
this is not me angry.
i am not angry at any boy.
this is me trying to forget about boys
with hands like the teeth of fake gods.

(when the first bird crashes & dies into a fainting sun
a second bird comes to take over the first bird’s place.)

(songs about mountains are the most important)*

i wonder if birds listen to mountains, if they think
about mountains. do you think
about mountains?
in the dead of summer
(death of july)
the two of us climbed a mountain
& you saw a snake
& i vomited.
it was then, after i vomited,
that you started to become
less & less the boy
with a face like sweet fabric,

there was this way
in which we tied ourselves together
dangerously to your bedpost
for an entire year.
you were good for something
but don’t ask me exactly what.

i want to make a friend soon, who also
has trouble with missing
& very much not missing
a boy:
hello, friend!
if you ever want to ride a carousel,
you can!
come with me.
we’ll claim two horses as our own,
forget that they ever belonged
to those who touched our bodies unapologetically.

My flesh is freshly skinned, because of my father’s
nails. My father is brushing out the tangles in my

hair. He is used to the brushing, he says, because he
used to have a sister. I don’t think to ask him where

his sister is now, although I picture her with hair
perfectly tangled, like an extended family, like ancestry.

My family tree is knotted and webbed, but every member
has a place, and if you’re lucky, a purpose. My mother’s

purpose is to cook soup for the Passover Seder. I picture
Passover as ****** as when the planets forget to flash

across the sky. This happens. I have seen it the way I’ve
seen a boy look at me from across a wooden table.

The boy feels like my cousin, even though he is not my
cousin. He just happens to have a gaze that calculates,

like the gazes of the old men that sit together in my town,
on the corner of the two streets whose names I can never

remember. When I walk by them I make sure to shuffle my
feet even quicker than I usually do, because I want to forget

about my body. I don’t look in mirrors anymore. I don’t even
look into my favorite lake anymore. The way it wrinkles together

hurts as much as my father’s nails do: my father’s nails against
my scalp and against my skin. My father picking me up out of the bath.

I am still wearing my organs. I don’t think I’m three years old anymore,
but I’m not quite sure. I can never remember what it is like to age.

i. do they exist
ii. do we know that they exist
iii. how do we know that they exist
iv. how do we see (our) bodies (properly)

how to write a manifesto for a body! for the body! bodies sink like the breaths of a baby when a baby is held by a tired mother whose face is gaunt and whose ribs are the sharpest leaves anybody has ever seen.

i want to walk through a body of woods. i want the woods to be full of leaves. i don’t want to have any limbs.

in my head i can taste the trees that are in this body of woods (and this body of woods is full of leaves). the trees stretch out the way your body does atop my bed. i still don’t know if you belong atop my bed. when we walk i’m jealous of your calves, of how puffed out they are. when we walk i want to pick you a cactus. i want to pick my body something. i want to pick it apart. i want to pick it lying in the grass.

i’m sorry but my mouth is too full of candles for it to touch yours;
i’m hoping that doing this will make me quick-witted, the way you are.
i’m sorry too that i’m not quick-witted already.

the way a body is: it’s a road, like this one that i’m on now, visiting you. i’m taking a bus again, like the last time i went to see you. the last time i saw you you had a bruise on your left cheek. i never asked why. you never told me why. whenever i picture you i picture you with the bruise on your left cheek (sometimes though i forget and instead it ends up on your right cheek). when i see you i think i will be disappointed because you will not have the bruise on either one of your cheeks. in an ideal world there would be one long bruise trailing all across your body. maybe this would make you mysterious.

i am trying to picture our bodies together again, trampled by our flesh in the rain. where you live there is so much rain.

[WE HAVE NICE BONES / YOU HAVE NICE BONES / I HAVE UGLY BONES BUT WITH YOU THEY FEEL NICER / OR AT LEAST LESS UGLY / DO GHOSTS HAVE BONES?]

1.

we don't love our bodies properly.
mostly we just listen to the sky
as it changes colors
over the river
outside of my bedroom window.

i don't like thinking about the way
my body looks like next
to yours. there is so much flesh on mine
that i'm not sure who it belongs to,
or where it is supposed to go.

the sun mixes with your face
to reveal just enough
of your tongue
and your teeth.
there are some nights when i picture
a wolf in my bed,
but tonight
is not one of those nights.

you are making me the wolf.

2.

in the morning
you cut yourself
trying to open up a bottle of wine.

there is blood.

we see it, for a second,
but cannot picture it ever coming
from either one of our bodies.

(My fingers won’t stop growing like shells!
My fingers won’t stop growing,

but without water, just with food!)*

As I stand in this bathroom stall
in this congested church
I can’t stop thinking
about how much I hate my fingers, about how much larger
they suddenly seem. This stall is stained
in blood and *****
and graffiti that reads, “girls day 11/13/14.”
Nothing seems so sad and so dry as this stall does.

I think of you sitting in the pew
with your hand on the thigh of the girl
whose hair is sheared short as though
it were Judgment Day and she were an apple tree,
its branches cut into small, fragile pieces.

On Judgment Day
my grandfather died
and everybody in my family
and everybody in my town
went to the funeral

except for me

who cried
and cried and cried

and I’m still crying

for the way his skin used to fold over
like a moon violent in its softness:

1. he’s a dead man with a body like a fish
who has just ripped off its scales.

2. he’s a dead man who before he died liked to stand
on top of the one cliff that looks out onto town  
and yell, “I will not spill my guts!”
But he died anyway.

Would I be lying if I said I loved my grandfather? Would I be lying
if I told you who I loved?

Here: I will tell you who I love, for a dare (triple doggy dare style)
Here: this is an experiment
Here: on Judgment Day (on the day my grandfather died)
we’re all experiments; we’re all experimenting with those we love
in terms of the way we kiss them:

we go into the woods
just to touch each other’s chests.

We lie on tops of rocks and I kiss you
as though I still need more fat on my huge body.

This feels like coming home from the moon
the way ghosts do. Do not tell me you love me
on the days that you don’t. Winters here are
far too heavy with snow, make me feel sick
inside. I will always remember sleeping with
you beneath your comforter, and I will always
hate it. We stick our fingers into slices of lemon.
When we pull them out, we see blood. This belongs
to us. I am sorry, but I am not small enough to faint.
I am sorry, but I am terrified of the boys who
lock their doors & love their mothers without realizing
what it is that they are doing.

The two of us pick chicken eggs
in heat sticky as a mother’s breath.
The heat that rises off of the lake
in the summer feels worse than any
awkward kiss. Your body is taller today, your hair
slightly lighter. We pick chicken eggs
for our mothers. Our mothers wear dresses red
as the entrails of flies, and sit out on porches, and drink ghostly milk
from sweaty glasses. We watch them drink the milk
and we picture them as newborns. I wonder if you sometimes
picture me as a newborn. This is the first day on which
I am afraid of you. My hands blanket my stomach (hands like wool);
my stomach is growing larger everyday, gutting itself out
the way the waves do off of the lake when it storms. It’s because I’m
feeding myself too much: this is what I get for being afraid of you.

In the summer we get too many bees. How many calories in a bee sting?
How many of them can line the inside of my mouth, all sharp and dangly,
before I die the way a snake might? How many calories
are in the shadow of a tree? Us and our eggs sit underneath the shadow
of the largest tree we can find, with me trembling, without tears, without *****,
just a wooly mouth. Today, I’ve never missed anything as much as I miss
my own ribs. Today, you look beautiful like the largest cow. Today, where
are my fingers? They used to be so long. You used to be too afraid to touch me.

The car we decide to drive looks
like a crooked body. When Leo and I stop at a gas station,
we enter the bathroom, look into the full-length
mirror. Even with him standing up, I can count
all 24 of his ribs, all of them poked out and looking
like nooses. I imagine witches dead and dangling
off of each one of them.

He is that thin.

The way he looks
reminds me of my father.
Right before my father died,
his face looked like cruel weather.
My father in a hospital bed,
my father in a coma.

Right after my father died I listened to “Wild Horses”
on repeat. The lyrics seemed to fit well with the white
of the hospital walls (I know I dreamed you a sin and a lie.)

When Leo and I get back into the car
I put on “Wild Horses” again.

Leo was not there the day my father died.
Leo did not come to the hospital once. Leo
has hands large as Vatican City. There have
been times in my dreams when Leo looks more
like the Pope than he does himself. Leo’s skin
is not nearly as wrinkled in real life.

In the car we eat cheese and peanut butter crackers,
drink cartons of orange juice. I eat and drink until
I feel sick. This is normal. In this heat, sticky and dry
as the corners of my mouth are, it is all I can do not to make
Leo stop the car so that I can stick my hands down my throat
and *****. The vomiting is normal, too. I have only

just met Leo. It was me who suggested this trip, my body
in his bed, me staring up at his ceiling, and it was me
who was surprised when he agreed to take it with me.

I have chapped lips, red skin, no bones, no blood.

Think of blood/think of hands.
Think of hands/think of blood.
Think of blood/think of hands/think of me,
with a cigarette in between my teeth like the corpse
of a puppet.

The two of us each smoke a cigarette for the first time
on streets dark as the water that leaks from a body
that has just fainted on a bathroom floor: There are times
when I picture myself fainting on a bathroom floor, with
a bit of blackish blood cornering from the tip of my mouth,
me nauseous and vomiting. I’ve never told you this and I won’t now,
even though it is night and I am lying in your bed once again,
once again my stomach feeling too much like I have just ****** an ex.  

A story about ******* my ex:
once after we smoked we tried to **** on the carpeted floor
of my father’s apartment, lots of sirens and taxis crowded
outside. I didn’t have any collarbones, any hipbones, panic
sweltered in the back of my throat like a cruel joke.

I am going to make mixed CDs for everybody I love.

I am going to let my hair down, I am going to forget to wear chapstick,
or worse I’ll remember, but my lips will still be chapped. A lot of the time
in my sleep I am asking you where my bones are. Or I am dreaming of old
women, old women who are either grandmothers or witches or both –
I can never figure it out. Neither can you, who are supposed to be so intelligent.

You are so exhausted, of everything, like a newborn.
You have never had a beard. My mouth tastes
like peanut butter. This is not a good thing, even though
I like peanut butter. My mouth tastes nauseous. Don’t you
dare kiss me. I am afraid to even kiss your cheek. You with
tall bones and lanky spine and the eyes of somebody who should be sad.

1.

WHENEVER I LOOK IN THE MIRROR IT IS THE SAME RED GHOST THE SAME RED GHOST THE SAME RED GHOST WHENEVER I LOOK IN THE MIRROR I AM CHANTING I AM CURSING AT YOU AT YOUR BODY WHICH IS REALLY MY BODY OR I WISH IT WAS MY BODY BECAUSE I WANT TO CURSE AT MY BODY & BECAUSE I WANT MY BODY TO BE YOUR BODY BECAUSE I WANT OUR BODIES TO BE TOGETHER ALWAYS OR NOT ALWAYS BUT A LOT OF THE TIME IN A WIDE, WIDE BED LIKE STACKS OF THE TEETH OF FOXES HAHA I THINK I LOVE YOU NO JUST KIDDING HAHA

2.

whenever I look in the mirror the mirror is red I am red my face is red

I think of you, of how beautiful you must look, were the sun to hit this mirror right here, just so, although it is night and I am alone

3.

I talk a lot about vomiting and blood

4.

WARNING: DO NOT LOVE ME BECAUSE I TALK A LOT ABOUT VOMITING AND BLOOD AND I HATE MY BODY AND MIGHT END UP HATING YOU, TOO, AND WILL BE JEALOUS

Warning: I love being soft I do not know how to be loud except for right now

Warning: sometimes I like to imagine us both with headaches, the romance of it all

We would eat rice together, and soup, and drink water, and share stories about the little visions we see with our hurt brains

I sit on your brown and ***** couch with my legs
folded underneath my ever-growing body.
Your house makes me want to *****, but I’m too afraid
to ***** inside of your house. You never *****: you’re too
tall and lanky, your spine too well-dressed. You never bleed, either.

I always do; always when I’m with you
there is blood on my big toe, blood soaking up
the skin that sighs in between my large legs.
Do not touch my legs, or my stomach. I used to know
when to stop with you, how to stop with you.

I stopped feeling safe with you this summer.
We both had chapped lips. The states we visited
were as dry as your dusty and battered car. We spent
this summer sleeping together atop unfamiliar grounds.

Not once did we have *** in your house, but still,
now that I’m here, my stomach is in pain as though we did.

I still want to *****. My mouth still tastes like your car, like exhaust.

Somewhere in the background you are calling me beautiful,
somewhere my eyes are closing, then everything is yelling
the way a father does. I am trying to remember being three years old again,
everything pink dresses against grey houses. How much would you
take care of me if I told you I was sick? What would you do
with my hair? I have dreams of you in which your body
looks like that of a still born’s, your face like cancer of the bone.

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.

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

My parents when they slept they slept with snakes.
My parents when they slept they died, every night, in cycles, like monthly blood:
the first time I got my period I was 12 years old and wearing jeans
newly stained and thought that I’d killed a man.

There are still times when I think that I’m killing men, or boys, by accident,
because of all the milk swirling around inside of my collarbones

(there are still times when I think that I’ve killed you)

When you sleep you whisper to your parents. Did you already know that?
Have you already told somebody else about the way
your body looks when you sleep, all stretched out like the legs of a newborn?

You’re a boy with hair as red as emergencies,
a boy who belongs best on subways, with your body lanky,
with your hands like skies gripping onto the metal pole.

Later after dinner I am that metal pole, only with a larger stomach. My stomach
is always largest after eating dinner. Your hands are always the most over a girl’s body – your hands the most like skies – after dinner: this is the worst horror movie:
my stomach popping like a mountain or an ear high in the sky (or, worse,
my stomach never pops, it is always there).

In November we are in a parking lot
(it is late
it is full of rain) and you don’t know my voice, a voice sounding
like ****** up broken jewelry.
For my birthday you gave me a bracelet you found in your mother’s bedroom
and it broke two days later, beneath a softly lit streetlamp.

Somewhere in the middle of a sidewalk somewhere near the east river I am holding the bracelet and crying water from littered water bottles but nobody sees me (or:
it’s all a dream, and it happens over and over again, cyclical, the way my parents used to sleep, used to die).

The two times that you’ve rejected me:

once: my parents with banged up bruised bodies in the hospital // when I saw them lying in between sheets cotton like your t-shirts I fainted
twice: the funeral is back home. I fly there and my ears won’t stop popping,
like a mountain, like a too full stomach. At the funeral I forget hands
like skies at the funeral I fall in love with everybody I see at the funeral I forget that
I am no longer in the city (I can trust people)

I see you now as a ghost: when two ghosts **** we are horizon over a snaky river when two ghosts **** we are flying back to the state of my birth
when two ghosts **** (in ghost parents’ bed) we sound like car crashes

my childhood bed had too many sheets piled tall
as a strange boy. I stopped sleeping there at 10.
I stopped talking to mother at 12.
At 12 years old my hair is short and layered as my stomach.
At 12 years old there is a phone call from my father:
I picture him standing then, at the hospital window with his burnt eyes
pleading to clouds that were beginning to shape themselves into gods
he’d never believed in. I picture my father and the nurse, I picture the phone call, I picture me with short and layered hair and a teacher with soft face in a classroom door. Dying mothers I now know are the most loved.
Dying mothers I now know do not use bathtubs and they
do not have wrists. I picture mother with face white like cow spots.
I picture mother with no more milk from her cruel breast to spare (She didn’t want children anyway). I haven’t slept in my childhood bed eight years.
Sometimes when I’m brave I’ll sleep in mother’s bed. Sometimes when I’m brave
boys touch my chest and my stomach and their hands never flicker.

in winter it is my first time home in three years.

I am in my bed again with a body full of volcanic acid
and a throat nervously full of phlegm as repulsively sweet
as the water of the river that I swam in when I was still young
and naked and fleshy. I have not been  
young and naked and fleshy in three years.

My bed is as hard as I picture your body being tomorrow
when we are both in your car again
and your face
still crumbles open like a basket of bread.

My mother has never baked bread.
My mother at night lies alone on sheets cold as the light from a moon.
Her voice wails like a pair of haunted hands.

Last time I saw you your voice broke apart
atop your final word to me.
Before that your hands were on my thighs like a new curse.
Since then I’ve pictured you standing with raw hands
cursing into brisk air. There are times when I try
to picture my body into something smaller, like a ******
raccoon against the side of a highway strip.

There are no tall trees
in the yard anymore, nothing
to compare my body to. (Mother cries about them all falling
in past storms.)

When my father sees me in my bed he says nothing. He’s
best at walking with his hands sour as bees.

Boys with faces
like beds full of bloodstains.
Boys with faces
that drown best during winter,
when all the wolves in the town have just been killed.
Father every day goes out with his gun
to see what he can shoot. He leaves the house quietly,
leaves through the screen door, through the porch, his footsteps
soft as my old nightgown:

I was young, then, in that nightgown. Young, but
I remember the small bathroom downstairs
and a weathered hand ****** deep underneath the tight skin
of my chest. Everything seemed ****** then.
Everything seemed six years old vision then and he was my father’s age.

A week later the same weathered hand was on television,
this time dead, this time run over by a drunk boy.  

Tonight I love drunk boys, tonight they are the only boys
I could ever love. With their eyes blank and white, they look just like my mother.
Neither of my parents know about the nightgown. My mother
does not know about my father’s shooting. My father
does not know that I know about his shooting. At night once I was awake
and heard a gunshot and pictured a car belonging to another drunk boy.
In my dreams the same man is dying, his body crushed by a car, over
and over again. In my dream there are no drunk boys (no boys), there is just me.
In my dream I have never had parents and father has no hands
with which to shoot.

The way there are stripes of light that cross my wall like small bodies
of jesus; the way a boy once dampened me into his chest
and then spit me out again, like spoiled goat; the way the crumbs
that have spilled onto my bed remind me of your body; the way
there are flocks of geese here instead of blocks of concrete

(The way I am not a wolf like you think I am, the way there is no fur to cover
my belly)

These days I have felt much more related to my father
than to my mother – these days there is wine in my system
the same color as the blood from my first period

these days I am looking at my body the way a man with a gun
looks at deer ****

I picture a beach covered in deer ****
with you somewhere in the middle of a pile of gory antlers

On this beach it is winter, my hips shivering with ice,
your hands over my skin – skin like the walls of a slaughterhouse.
Your hands are somehow not trembling; but somewhere
I smell jellyfish as though it were a corpse and somewhere
my body is as brutal as another boy’s bed

For a week I was sleeping in another boy’s bed and proud
to tell you --

Some nights it is as though there are no streetlamps on this campus:
“I am no longer in the city, stop talking to me.”

there is rain and there is lightning and there are trees
and in one corner of the field there are two women
with wrinkled faces and long white skirts, making
their presences known the way you wish your grandmothers,
both dead, would. they are picking flowers just for you
(for your hair); hydrangeas and lupines.

in this dream you do not have a name – in this dream nobody has 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 –
old blue dress curled carefully around your knees – are dry
as your lips. you notice your stomach churning. you are standing
in this field and you notice your stomach churning as though
you love a boy. you do love a boy, but not like this: your boy is quiet
as your childhood house, and so your love for him
is quiet as well (it never churns). you dream about the boy,
but he is the wrong boy: a boy suddenly in the corner
of the field, a boy with a face too loud, like the flickering
of a dying light bulb in a darkening closet. this boy has replaced
the women with wrinkled faces and long white skirts;
they have disappeared the way grandmothers so often do.

now you are ready to wake up.
in bed next to you is a boy
and he is sleeping
with a body soft as the entrails of a mother.

1:

i am very much done w/ the way
my body feels
up all night
lying flat in bed
thinking of how u might look
carved into soft moonlight

#2:

ur face reminds me
of my chest from when
i was 13 yrs old & waiting
in agony for something
more mountainous to seize
what was flat

#3:

i see the way u look
at me when we r at
a friend’s n-w that i have
stopped paying attention 2 u
pls stop looking at me as tho
there were nettles in ur
throat, beestings in ur lap!

Your face like a stomach in winter, all
nauseous with snow.

Your face vulnerable as Hades and you drinking
until your abdomen cramps up
like a manmade lake.

Your face is not at all shadow.

Your face is wide and open as summer curtains.
and hurt as shot wolf.

Dead wolf.
My uncle eats wolf for breakfast.
I take you to meet my uncle on a Sunday morning.
He prays before we eat.
Your face is cratered with doubt.
I take your hand
and I squeeze it underneath the table,
hard as the statue of a god.

Later in winter our hands are squeezing gods
underneath a blanket in somebody else’s living
room. After that outside with dark and ice and sidewalk.
Your mouth and my mouth and your arms and my
arms and we are trying to stand up straight.

You are the wrong boy. Every boy is the wrong boy.
I go to sleep in mornings and wake up late
afternoons, in dreams I am screaming to gods I’ve never
prayed to. When I wake up I am sick to my stomach.
Always with a bloated stomach, my body always
part of a ****** battle that you seem no longer to want
to be a part of.

desecrating the bathroom floor of a home that’s barely my home with blood or *****, what’s the difference? it’s not even my bathroom. my bathroom is one flight up. a boy I barely remember is talking to me & somehow I’m talking to him back, or am I? feeling dizzy like a sunburn with plenty of ***** left to go around still in my throat, plenty of food still in my stomach. 15 liters of food in somebody’s stomach could make that person’s stomach explode. sometimes I have dreams about stomachs exploding the way the sky does just before nightfall, like it has a virus or something. a girl walks into the bathroom & I’m still sitting cross-legged on the floor of this stall wanting to throw up but trying not to, a plastic bag next to me, and an open wallet, purple water bottle. every bit of me wanting to tighten up like a small dog. I picture bruises opening up across the backs of my legs. I picture grandmother commenting on the size of my stomach when I see her tomorrow. my grandmother has wrinkles deep as the belly of a pregnant cow. something about the way I interact with my grandmother reminds me of the skeleton of a dead bird. like the dead robin I saw walking to the bus stop from my house, on broadway, next to the old synagogue; dead robin reminded me of a ****** up crying infant & I wanted to bury it like one. (a girl walks in on me in the bathroom & I squeeze up, hush up, she sees you, it’s too late, swallow your skin.) everything these days reminds me of a ****** I saw once on T.V. with some boy I can no longer remember the name of.

it hurts to breathe it hurts to breathe screaming ‘oh god it hurts to breathe’//this feels like a birth this feels like I’m giving birth//everything hurts to breathe & to move my stomach feels like piles of childhood beestings & my throat like tired eyes//it feels like your body is on top of mine again & I want to scream & I am screaming so why does nobody hear me//my roommate is right next to me in her bed yet she does not hear me//everybody is on top of me & I am screaming prayers again ‘it hurts to breathe it hurts to breathe’//it hurts to breathe so much I am not pregnant but oh god it feels like I am//like I am giving birth to the antlers of road ****//my belly pulsing like the abdominal region of a manta ray//ghostghostghostghost everybody jeering ‘ you are a ghost’ everybody making fun of me ‘you are a ghost’ & it hurts to breathe but I am not pregnant & you are not on top of me you will never be on top of me bruising me or my neck or my collar bones (which don’t always feel there)//us in cars listening to sad songs//us in cars listening to ‘i’m never going to understand’ listening to elvis depressedly all summer long//something seems so ****** up about that like I’m trying desperately to sound hip but I’m not I swear to ******* god I’m not (**** me **** me over **** me//but don’t//because I never want to feel your hip bones scraping against mine again//your hip bones were so sharp your hip bones they ******* hurt I was in so much pain back then)//your car in the summer felt like a desert church

We drink foul fluid from plastic water bottles to forget
about our mothers all tucked alone into their beds like
forgotten puppet shows. We want to forget about
the boys with faces all black & vulnerable
like barbecued hooves of deer & about our stomachs
swollen as skinned water. Summers like this
in towns like this during nights like this would be
better if we could drive. We sit together with knees
bare & bruised in short grass. We’re drawn to one another
like widows to cemeteries. We’re convinced that we
would look good in white wedding dresses. We grow
our hair out that summer, our hair long as piles
of dead snakes. The boys pretend to laugh at us. They
have ribs like cores of apples, ribs that would look better
discarded into the earth. The boys remind us of our
fathers, the ones busy building lakes as though they
were clocks. Our fathers are the same as us in that they
are constantly filling themselves up with water so
as not to get hurt. & at night they are not with our mothers.

Television screen flashing. She’d drowned beautifully and balanced. Officials said she had a beautiful body. Officials said your
family will become your favorite T.V. show: family dissected
to display ****** systems. Santa Barbara. August 20th. Your
sister apparently killed. Welcome to the site of the endangered
bodies. Her body handed to police. We are excited to release answers.
Body believed to have belonged to your sister has been found buried
in a river bank in mountainous Santa Barbara. This is where you live,
in mountainous Santa Barbara. Authorities say that you should
look forward to what your future holds.

DAUGHTER
I look in the mirror and I see you
and I’ve never hated you more --

                        MOTHER
you’re whining again

DAUGHTER
sorry

MOTHER
I’ve made stew for dinner

DAUGHTER
o.k.

MOTHER
you’re being very incommunicative
you’re being like your father these days

DAUGHTER
good

MOTHER
I’m sorry?

DAUGHTER
nothing; can I have some more stew?
(can I have the car can you
take away my mirror actually can you
give me more mirrors I don’t know
who I hate more you or myself I don’t know
who I want to hate more you or myself I don’t know
if I want more mirrors or no mirrors)

i.

I’m into you like moons. I’m sorry.
That’s not what you want to hear. I’m
into you like how my shoulders make waves.
There is a river tearing down from my neck.  
I think maybe you think that you are inside
of me like a second burden. No, but see, I
have so many souls all taped to my gutters,
to my insides. I think that’s why I’m always
holding doors open for strangers.

ii.

I went to my father like clay.
He melted my hands and told me
not to worry and told me not to snow.

iii.

I’m always so very strangerly. Especially
with people on subways. We’ve been on a subway
together once. In fifty years we will be on a subway
together again but it will be by accident like when
you bruise your temples on the corner of the bathroom
sink.

iv.

I’m mostly singing a lot mostly
because it makes my throat disappear
mostly because all of the windows are breaking
anyway so what does it matter. Windows breaking
from some storm. The snow is supposed
to last for five days.

v.

Hello, father, I have disobeyed you.
Look I am falling to the ground,
look I can’t get up, how exciting.

my hands are stained brown & contrast well with the bright whiteness of my quilt: white & cool as her tennis shoes, as the tennis shoes of the girl whose name I know you think of when we lie in bed & you press your hand to my stomach as though it were some kind of important holy grail, but it’s not (my stomach isn’t small enough to be holy). I tell myself that the brown is blood, from a bad ****** nose, but I know better. my roommate knows better, too, so do my suitemates. they notice when the food goes missing & they notice when the tiles of the bathroom floor ***** up like the face of a vulnerable boy. I’m getting better, though, & I’m constantly telling them that. my hands are getting less marked, less *****, less covered in *****. I do it usually, claw my body usually, when I see pictures of her (or when you reject me or worse when you reject me for her), which is why I usually don’t let myself see pictures of her. there are days when I see her being all-beautiful out in a large field with hair long like a glass of fresh milk & teeth clean as a never-worn hospital gown. that’s when I’m on the bathroom floor wishing you’d call me or ] thinking about another boy (a boy like you: a boy I once told myself I liked or loved, but didn’t, just wanted him to love me). the boys come when my body turns lonely like a mosquito bite on the sole of a child’s foot. my body turns lonely & I see my eyes burning at the beach with my body all self-conscious in a blue one-piece bathing suit. I love to swim but I hate my body (something seems so ****** up about that). I wish I loved tennis. I see her tennis shoes in my head & I picture her body smoothly across the court. I see her body playing like a sailboat with her hands gripping the racket like a new set of clean teeth.

A boy’s foldout couch : three of us tangled together, me whispering I HATE MY BODY  
(5 Artopee Way
Nyack, NY 10960
845-353-5555)



(Do not) Refill                                            Dr. Come Help Me Now I
   Am Pinching At My Skin
                                                                       Waiting For It To Shed Away Like Baby’s Hair
                              (I HATE MY BODY)
                (I WANT IT TO DISAPPEAR THE WAY THE SKIES IN JULY DISAPPEAR INTO SIDEWALK)
                (I SPEND HOURS WITH MY FACE OVER TOILET BOWLS & NOW MY HANDS LOOK LIKE ROADS, ALL CUT UP & BRUISED)  





FENICHELL, LOISA
120 CASTLE HEIGHTS AVE





TAKE 1 TABLET DAILY : CROSS OUT : READ: DO NOT TAKE AGAIN
(he has been kissing her all night do not kiss him do not kiss him three bodies all tangled together on a foldout couch DO NOT TAKE AGAIN)





BUPROPHION HCL XL 300 MG TAB
GENERIC FOR: WELLBUTRIN XL 300 MG TABLET

Drug Exp: 8/19/14

On a Saturday night in September
I am wrapped up with a boy
in between sheets that look
like photographs of my parents’
wedding. The next morning I flee
to his bathroom, look in the mirror,
see bruises like rats’ heads trailing
my too soft abdomen, come close
to fainting on his bed with my head
in his lap and ***** stuck in my throat,
strong sweat pasted to my forehead.
His palm is on my head.
He is calling me by another girl’s name
and I am feeling like 12 years old again,
like 12 years old I am fainting
after somebody talks about ****.

Another night in October the moon
is bright and full like the belly of a pregnant
woman. I find myself alone again in a
bathroom with eyes red as the breath
of a newborn. I hate myself in cycles,
the way water does, my flesh like
the skin of moths. This boy is still
calling me by another girl’s name, if
he calls me at all. But his voice when I hear
it sounds like my old baby teeth.

November I should not let anybody
hold me in the way that I am. November
I find my body lying flat against hard pavement
listening to songs about roads and graveyards
and driving. I still don’t know how to drive.
This boy does, though, and I tell him that this
is why I still talk to him. But he sees the way
my fingers tear at the crooks of my knees
as if they were cadavers. He offers
up his body to me like a lamb’s head.
But I am no god, no saint, and he knows this.
He does not come for me.

Your legs are not mine/these legs are not mine

There is a girl somewhere (on my bed) and she is crying in me
with me
when I see you I see

flesh and her
and three people entangled like meaningless holidays
on a rough and broken couch

my body stretched out
my face wet with newborn sweat

you compared what happened with us to a birth
but this is cold stinging your throat

we are like childhood beestings

we will always be
like childhood beestings

I tell myself that it is worse being in his car than it is being in his bedroom. His bedroom walls are yellow like sick ****** face. His car is green as childhood woods (I remember a man in those woods, all old and covered in beard. He was cradling me like hard ******* candy).

This boy is a boy with a body like a mountain of beady snakes. This boy is a boy I am telling myself is touching me (cradling me like hard ******* candy). In his bed I am hiding in between his sheets and they are white and I am trying to turn into a saint, trying to forget that his face is somewhere between my legs, his face like a cruel song. It takes me two months to realize that he is never going to call me saintly, never going to view me  as a god. I am just shot deer, all leftover entrails, all spillage; somewhere in a suburban town, past some quick trees, on a quick paved grey road, I am being run over by a black Schwinn bicycle the way this boy runs over my body on nights when his face is feeling soft and pudgy and vulnerable and drunk, full of aging beer.

This boy lying in between my sheets
has a body like a ****** nose. If it
were up to me his teeth would be bruised,
but instead his shins are covered in broken
thunder. Last night lying next to him was dark
as damp childhood hair (from getting out
of the pool, from just learning how to swim, from just
learning how to feel ashamed of my body, all
wet like fresh lips). Last night was so dark I had
to hold my breath: held it for 7 seconds before
I yelped for air.

This boy is not mine. This boy
is like somebody else’s death: he is hardly with me.
This boy sits still and cross-legged in between
my sheets like a black crab. He looks all skewed
and crooked, all out of place. When he touches me
I kick him, my legs flustering out and then recoiling
back in like dying ancestors.

Lately it’s felt like I’m dying over and over again,
like I am dying with him. This morning I wait
for him to leave, and then to die, and then to wake up
again, spring up like small new gravestones.

Every boy I have ever loved has killed himself.
Murmur the word “suicide” to me before I sleep
and I will dream about the days when I used to feel
dizzy, always, when I used to faint, always, when
I used to peck at my mosquito bites, always.

The first time I ride the subway by myself
I am 14 and expecting ghosts: I wait for them
to appear in the train windows like strong clusters

of wind but instead everything is still and crowded
with nothing but ripples of people. The first time I

ride the subway by myself I am 14 and expecting
some sort of suicide. Once I read about a woman

who hung herself from the metal bars that line
the ceilings of the trains, hung herself

like a constellation dragging down from
a lit-up sky. I drew a picture of the woman

and then a picture of her family but then
realized she probably didn’t have a family

and quickly threw the picture away.
My mother found it, saved it, it hangs
on the fridge now. The first time I ride the subway

by myself I am 14 and I want to kiss someone. (I come close
to touching a stranger’s hand, then his waist, then I recoil.)

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.