I’ve never swallowed
this type of burning before,
but now here I am, late at night,
with my skin bridling itself open
like chalked lungs.

The hardest parts about this are:
learning what it means to no longer
be half of myself and waiting
for the day when I can look
into the mirror without firing
apart the deep wells of my gut.

Now I am carefully inspecting
my casualties, teaching myself
that I cannot be casual without
turning away pieces of myself
until I am small tornadoes, i.e.,
no waist and no fire.

On February 5th :
I am learning
how to drive
in between
metamorphoses
of snowy colors.

On February 5th :
If you look closely
you can see my
mother with her
legs firmly planted
onto the passenger
seat; she is silent
until we pass
a collection of deer.

We pass a collection
of deer and my mother’s
arms look the same
as mine do when I
am angry. Her face
is the Atlantic, full
of irritable little wrinkles.
(My mother’s face is always
the Atlantic, full of irritable
little wrinkles.)

When I was younger
her wrinkles screamed
at me with over-used lungs
until my body grew limp
like radish roots -- it’s just that

when I was younger
I had trouble seeing
the large gap between
snow and static no matter
how many times my mother
would try to emphasize
their differences.

But both dripped onto my
prickly face like newborn wine
onto sidewalks; both looked
just like my mother’s old wedding dress.

I get an email from you January 10th also known as the day on which we were supposed to drive to PetSmart together to buy a fish. We were going to name the fish Wendy, we were going to buy Wendy a bowl with a small castle, a moat, even a footbridge; her lifestyle was going to fit so eloquently with the color of her scales. You sent an email to me January 10th. The email was empty space, like the air that sometimes curls itself between teeth and moons; your email against the screen; the screen glowing like some faraway whispered death prayer. I don’t remember what you wrote but I remember feeling like a forgotten alphabet; not once in your email did you use the word “adore.”

There is a line that curves across
the middle of my stomach like the kitchen
of newly weds. Its twin is only two inches
above, rests right below my *******, which hang
like empty carcasses. I am still embarrassed
by them, even after a girl told me that it is ok
if they are not so full or small, in fact it is normal.
I remember that hers were full and small, I remember
that all of the boys loved her. I remember her complaining,
too; it was her skin, I think (its color). My skin falls from
the wrong bones like sinks or manmade waterfalls, both
of which I have learned are the same only nobody will
ever admit it, least of all my father. My eyes are the same
as my father’s, my hands are his hands, and then there is my face,
which rounds like a mountain range. My nails grow dirt easily.
My belly is the most vulnerable in that it corkscrews out
like the bottles of wine that my family drinks at holiday
dinners. Last night in the basement a boy touched
his hand to my gut and I had to move it away, I had to move
it again after he let it ground onto my waist. Today I
am afraid that this is why he hasn’t asked to see me tonight.

You: but without the face or the stomach.
You have hands made of baby teeth. I keep my baby teeth
in a jar like glassy coins. Here, you may take them. Here,
you may give them to your daughter. She is six
years old. She is clamping down on your fingers and telling you
how sharp they are and telling you that you need
to shave. You are thinking about how the last time you
shaved you began collecting bits of your fifteen-year old skin.
You are with her for another three hours. You spoke your
first word when you were two years old. You have never
worn a wedding dress. You are thinking about her mother, you
are watching your daughter drink a milkshake; chocolate. She has
bones that look just like your face. Everything now is so full of salt, even her small body.
She looks folded in half like a mantle piece. She lacks certain fire.

There is a wooden church and we
have just dusted our way into a funeral
and we are trying to be sad for this corpse
but really we are sad for each other, only
we are not even sad. See you are smiling
like a cobweb, all draped and dangled, then
your hand is on my (bare) arm as though you
have never touched my skin before, which
then I realize you haven’t and there I am suddenly
shivering like a clock. Looking back on it now
I am realizing that at that point we should have
started to drive away but we stayed seated with
your hand on my arm and you grew much, much
older and I grew much, much younger. Think:
a parent. Think: a child. Think: a parent teaching
a child how to swim in a lake full of bees.

My father only likes what is made of wood.
Every night I am trying to find my carpenter.
Every night the heater’s breath-teeth are
full of ambulances -- there is a bang
and I am startled out of these sheets that are still
all drawn with your flesh and guts. Yesterday
in the car there was a Golden Fleece floating
in the sky and I thought about your skin, about
how it looks best when painted or fragmented.
These days I am fragmenting everything,
even trees’ branches, even your cheeks’ bones --
i.e., everything belongs to somebody else, i.e., at
18 yrs old am I a body yet? Once you called my
body beautiful, once you called me cute. Murmur
in your sleep that I am beautiful and hopefully
this time I won’t spill out my organs. This time
my organs will remain intact inside of myself like wooden
piano keys, only I am still trying to find a proper forest
to spin inside of and to be built from.

I. clay and ice

In the bed: sheets white
as a faceless whisper. Think
dark and unwashed hair. Also,
eyes shot with too much blush.

II. eyes

It’s too easy for me
to look into the mirror
when I’m brushing my
teeth. Lips paired with
a dark sigh. Lights bright
as the careful hands
of somebody newly pregnant.  

III. dna

In the evening, I mean
very late at night, often
you are there so split into
two. Get into this bed, then
clench your muscles one
by one like soldiers’ play.
Your arms rest on the windowsill
like smoky moths. It isn’t until
you clasp your hands like a bird
falling midflight that I realize: you
are so much less than our fathers.
My mouth will be resting inside
of your neck but you won’t be
able to hear me begging
like a cancerous womb.

I touched your spine and it bent
like a tree angry with the river angry
with the train that passes every morning
at 2:43 am and wakes the young sleeping boy

Once it came at 2:42 am and it woke
up everybody in the town because none
of their dreams had prepared themselves
for this startling event.

i bruise my knees on wintered floors. you can
tell so much about a person just by being  
in their bathroom. now i know why your hair always smells like
coconut. is there a holiday that you spend taken away by
isolation? what’s it called? that’s what i want to name you, maybe. you told me
to come up with a nickname for you in your last letter. i haven’t yet, though,
because nicknames remind me too much of skyscrapers --
too permanent, you can’t move them, our limbs
should move more from this bed.

i spend two hours in bathrooms, leafing myself open.

i spend two hours missing you, swerving from full
to empty, back to full again. you’re giving my honesty back to me now.
there’s too much of it, stop it, stop this, i don’t want to eat any more of it.

last year, i lied to the beard-strewn man
on the subway. the subway seats were too pale. i called him
my grandfather when he left. he looked the way my grandfather
looks in the scarred photographs my parents keep underneath dust.
my grandfather looks like a tombstone, still, but i’m waiting for that to change.

i’m being too honest with you again. i swallowed saltwater this morning.
look at how elegant it looks leaving my eyelids. look at how horrid.
but it leaves and i thank you for doing this to me. i thank you,

kneeling in a bathroom. kneeling in your bathroom.
i think i’ve started to pray to a toilet.

The baby is born to the death walls
that line the cellar. The cellar is dark
and musty like the inside of a mouth
that has seen every forest in the world
that needs to be seen. There is animal
screaming and cheeks wailing and blood
smashed. There is the floor: cold as bath
water or lungs or teeth or healing. She
wanted a midwife. The midwife looks
ashes of change, her hands shake  
like a pale fire. Her hands shouldn’t
be shaking, I want to say please, leave
the shaking hands to us, we are only
a professional family, but you are really
a professional, your brain is snowed with
palms that knead proper parturition. But
my mouth is tight with breath and ash.

also, why is this so usual for me
i’d like to say that now is when
i think about everything
monumental, like the economy
or my parents hurling pebbles at
each other’s backs or watching
“iron man” with my cousin on christmas,
feeling like some kind of tourist in my cousin’s bed,
i.e., is this what christmas is supposed to feel like?
i don’t know, i celebrate chanukah, please let me know.
sometimes i think about my brother
in the woods,
is there smoke lingering on his palm?
i don’t realize how much i care about him until i do, until
my eyes are dark out, until my eyes match
the insides of my stomach.
but usually i am thinking about you, or us, or we, last year, sitting
together like static tucked softly into our houses. you were
always digging graves inside of my neck because,
we’ll die soon but before that we’ll get married,
except wait i’m 18. my stomach still lines my throat
when i swallow pills and i don’t know how to cradle
anything else other than my knuckles and there are plants
in the windowsill and i water them, sometimes, when i feel
like it. when i was 13 i saw blood streaming my underwear
and i told myself, this is it, i’m with death, i knew the doctor
was lying when he said i was so healthy.
when i was 13 my mother came into my room
and said, “look, now you can have children.” i was 13, now i am five years
older, i still cry when i think about mothers. how easy it is for them
to lose their children. like once i watched “boy in the striped pajamas”
(on my birthday) (how stupid) and i cried for three hours afterwards because
i felt like the mother, or just a mother, or my mother and her mother
and her mother and how we could all easily pull away from each other like thread.
once a boy from my school died and another time a girl from my
camp hung herself and i cried for their parents, mostly. i didn’t
know how to cry for myself yet and i still don’t. i’m tangling
other people’s emotions around my throat, i’m still trying
to find mine. mother tells me, you’ll find them if you clean your room.
mother says, look at how much you’ve grown. i am churches of guilt
when i don’t believe her. there are always people praying
inside of me. nobody should ever pray inside of me, least
of all you. if anything my hands are two skyscrapers
but that’s the only kind of building i know how to be.
i’m sorry, i’m in bed googling ways to leave somebody
without hurting them and also without being selfish. i am so
selfish, like leaves covering sidewalks, i am so selfish and i am
so sorry and i am crumpled but also i think i’ll be okay and
maybe one day i’ll think of you without feeling so sorry for myself.

please stop writing letters to me,
and by that i just mean, please stop
being so nice to me always. when i can’t sleep, also,
when i cry, which is the same thing, really,
i tell myself that it is because the night is
the wrong size. i used to sleep with your
sweatshirt tucked underneath my head as though
it had been your stomach. i don’t do that anymore.
i don’t remember what your stomach tastes like
anymore. i wear my father’s old sweaters and sit
like an electric storm on my bed and cry. i never close
the blinds. i think part of me wants my neighbors
to see that i’m not very strong after all. it’s like
i think that that’s some kind of hot secret. in therapy
i am told that i am strong and smart and part of me
wants to laugh  because if only she knew. when you
come back, you’ll be so happy to see me, you wrote. when
you come back, you’ll be so happy to see me that you’ll start crying,
you wrote. when you come back, maybe you can electrocute me open.

I never glow, although sometimes, I shiver. But you knew that. Vermont (1997):
my nose bled tiled floors, I was shelled up in the bathtub, my body fled into ice,
or at least it felt that way. We both watched my flesh melt like some bundle
of broken bees. Your eyes pooled like moths, your mouth held open by keys.
You looked just like our fathers that day, only you were so much less a chain of boys.
Today I stretch over the windowsill and bless the sky for that. Sometimes I wish I went to church.

Toothpaste caps line my desk like the speckled tongues of my grandparents.
My cheeks swell every night before I go to bed, like drawers
of babies, like the cheeks of those who spend their lives
with their faces tucked into pipes and gutters and grills.
I am chopping off a bit of the tooth that sticks out of the gum
that lines the far left corner of my mouth and I am giving it to you.

She says throw out the dishes she says go to sleep she says
we’re definitely getting older everyday you’re getting older
everyday she says how does my skin look she says where is the moon
she says no she says buy me a water, unlock the door for me,
the bus is here she says I’m ten minutes late twenty fifteen thirty
thirteen the astronaut is here and he’s about to leave without you
goodbye rocket ship she says I’m a rocket ship she says you’ll never
be a rocket ship she says your face is tarnished ruined like
knives left unsharpened like blackberries creamed on the walls remember
the deathwalls

she says look at us

we’re talking in rhythm now.

Pebbles and pistachios wrinkle in our pockets
like my mother’s attic wedding dress. From the side your nose
looks like an oil well. The gas station is 2.5 miles
away from here. We’re walking there for bottles that we’ll empty
and then leave next to churches in place of slaughtered lamb.
Sky punctures our wrists. You tell me the weather will be painting itself bruised
fireworks for the next week; I tell you about yawning.
It is summer and I am thinking about your hand overwhelmed
by sweat and how two years ago it was winter and your hand
was still broken but I made you hold my wrists anyway. Last
time we were in the park we drank like muskrats. Corporeal *****
stained the grass like knees: varnish for the ink that grappled
the insides of our tenderly wired bodies.

in response to matthew zapruder's "come on all you ghosts," section ii*

I.

I see what you mean about fathers; lately
my father has been the only ghost I know. He
mostly stands in doorways, mostly to say goodnight.

II.

Please tell me more about what it’s like to listen
to your father cough. Mine never has; I wasn’t even born yet
when someone stole his lungs, hid them away in a graveyard.

III.

I think I want a keychain like yours. No not
a keychain, but something just as much a corpse. Mostly
just a portrait of my father, maybe I’ll take your keychain
and onto it I’ll paint the portraits of everybody’s fathers.

IV.

I know I’m being called, but I don’t
feel quite like my father yet. There is
still so much pavement left for me to see,
and one day I want to be able to list all
of the names of places that I’ve lived in.

V.

I’ve lived mostly in wombs. Also
there was the taxi, and then the apartment skewed
with a crib and rats and some gunshots
from down the street. Later there was the house
by the river, and there was upstate, where
they sat in beach chairs in the parking lots
of gas stations and watched the cars drive by.

You see, my skin peels cold moths.
No, no it’s not like that, it’s more like
the feeling you get when you miss
the teeth you had before the fever.
No, you don’t know about that? Ok, I was
three years old and suddenly my
teeth were like bees. Never mind I’ll
tell you about the girl down the street. She’s
like me in that we both run even when it is as snowy
as the bottom of someone’s foot. Sometimes when
we run I’ll wave to her but I don’t think she ever
sees me because she never waves back. You’d like her
because she is like wires, also she is
more of a house than I am. She is the kind of person who
you can tell when she is cold. Oh and she doesn’t hug
streetlamps. But hold on let me explain:
it’s just that whenever I am marking myself
down pavement, whenever I am leaving my house,
I look at all of those streetlamps and look
at all of those brilliant lights creaking out of apartment windows
and pray into my knees that they are all
there for the plucking. That is to say I want
to stand on clasped hands and turn them into gods.
That is to say I am trying to be as bold as a mirror.

danger
lies in the teeth.
also the hands. we are
mostly made of roads in that we
are marked.

Knees paved like the tooth
of a dog. Mothers only trying
their best. I never knew what
that meant until my belly swelled
like radish gums with myself
holed inside. Right now I 
am just waiting for a neatly
wrinkled wave.

We never ****** on anybody’s ticking bed.
We didn’t even **** up, although we did. Who gives a **** about romance?
These days I am letting my mouth slide right off my face. Letting my fingers bleed
onto bathroom walls. Peeling my skin into the bathroom sink. My
brother complains about it. Tells me I need to be cleaner. I shower
everyday for two hours. You’re still sleeping in my hair, my
flesh is still crawling with your sweat. Please don’t think that I
ever held a door open for you. “Write about me.” Well, ok, *******,
I’m not crying. I’ve never cried, except for that one time when my mother
threw my lunchbox at the wall. The lunchbox was shaped like a spaceship.
Now I know that she wasn’t mad at me, just at the sky
and how quickly it could change and how she wasn’t ready for it to change,
wasn’t ever ready for it to change. But I still liked that lunchbox. I don’t
eat much these days maybe because she broke it. I mean I no longer
have a home for my food, so what’s the point? Two weeks ago
the kitchen was dark and my feet were undressed and I was scooping
peanut butter out of the jar like a nightlight. It’s one of my top five
embarrassing moments even though nobody was there to watch me.
I watch myself so well. Also not well enough. Please tell me what I
look like. I want details, sometimes I think I want your face but
then I remember you’re still climbing the stairs like a ghost. I
almost let you be my ghost.

Brother drowning
in a plastic bag in
a car driving west. 3
years old and face
turning bruised as
a forest’s march. It
was the first time I
realized that death
didn’t have to be so
cradled and rocked
by sticks of blood. I
don’t remember how
long it was before Mo-
ther noticed. But when
she did she turned pale
and ragged like old we-
dding dresses, or like
grandmothers’ feet.

ghost in a gutter in a sidewalk
once i taped my body
like dozens of wires now
i lie down palms flat
atop vessels of pavement

i can tell you so much about
wiring also about breathing
forests into your lungs, they
haunt your lungs like the child
my mother never gave birth to,
i’m not convinced that it’s not
still in her womb. they called
it a miscarriage but sometimes
i see the child when i’m taking
a bath; stare at my fingers
and the wrinkles are newly
discovered bodies coddled
by electric fences.

in the summer, go to the woods
find the softest shadow walk half
a mile. the baby is underneath featherings
of ice. there is talk of leaving the baby
in brown grass. parents name the baby
august. august pools to a close. we stand like spines,
use the baby’s ashes to paint “august” onto the sidewalk.
sidewalks as tombstones are all the rage these days.
ashes smell like birthing, nothing smells like birthing
quite the way ashes do.

My body is best
at disappearing when placed
underneath the sun.

There’s a five-hour
time difference between oceans
and my clay body.

Here all of the walls are dead.
Here I am a noose in the crowd,
and I am scalding in a puffed winter jacket.
On the subway there is a girl I recognize;
she looks like the nightgown I had
when I was three years old.
It was blue threaded with white.
I wore it like a second skeleton.

Sometimes now I have dreams in which I am
standing outside wearing nothing but the nightgown
and I am trying to find the moon, but it is gone,
it is not even night, it is not even anything. Then
it is morning and I am sprung up panting
like a motorcycle, my skin turned to waves.

I get off at Chambers Street, accidentally
bumping into the girl before graphing
my way onto the platform. I forget
to apologize, I forget how to speak,
mostly because the nightgown is still
stapled to my waist and won’t let me go.

a couple.
as in: two.
as in: let’s
share the bed
until our mouths
grow withered
like ancient apart-
ment buildings.

Let me writhe on pavement ripped
by sun. Rumor has it that that’s how
my mother was born.

Rumor has it that that’s how I was born, too.
I picture my birth the way I picture the bible,
happening between two gentle and soft fingertips. Reverent whispers,
because, not to brag, but I was the first child. The first child,
the hardest child.

I like to think that it stormed that night.
That the rumors are wrong.
That I wasn’t born in the sun.
That the night of my birth, the electricity went out,
and my parents were left without light.

I like to think that they wept when I was born.
That they wept again when they could finally turn on a lamp,
and watch its sparks burst the way I did from the womb.

My mother used to keep Lupines
in the cracks of her favorite book.
They bloomed into oblivion, and they bloomed
into the book, because they didn’t know any better, which is how
it is with all flowers, and not just Lupines (I think), and which
is like how I don’t know any better
than to whisper gratitude to strangers
I’ve seen a million times over sitting on the curbs
of sidewalks that run along every surface of the earth. It is one of my only
redeeming qualities, and it makes up for all of the times when
I’ve been petulant, even though
Little Brother tells me that I’m too sorry too often. My mother says that I’m just
“being (too) polite”  —
my mother has never known any better than to defend me
even when I should not be defended (which is always).
Instead of gullible, my mother calls me trusting, even though I didn’t trust

Billy The Neighbor on the other side of the street (in East of Eden)
when he told me he saw an alien, and the alien’s name
was Fred, and he was a nice enough alien, and he
was the size of a fingernail with pink and yellow skin. Aliens are what I cannot believe, because my mother said that before I was born,
I was an alien. I guess she just doesn’t know that the only alien is

Billy The Neighbor, and that when he said he saw an alien,
what he really meant was that he saw himself.
Billy The Neighbor has long skin, and short hair, and tall eyes
that I don’t like to watch. Once, he called me a ghost, and maybe he’s right
(I believe in ghosts, even though I don’t – can’t – believe in aliens, unless you are
Billy The Neighbor): my skin is always too pale,
and my arms are always too far away, and I can stick my hand
through my cold leg, which I guess is not very normal. Sometimes,

I wish I could be the largest sea turtle in the world instead of being a ghost,
because I like being in water, even though I don’t like to drink it
(I only like fat-free milk, and on every other Sunday, I like orange juice). Also, it might be nice to have salty tears – mine
are usually too fresh (which is odd, because my tears should be salty,
even if I am not a turtle), but here’s a story for you: my eyes have never
actually drooped, except for when Billy The Neighbor told me I
was ***** after I finished loving his brother. So,

maybe it doesn’t matter how fresh my tears are. Or maybe I would
cry more if my tears were saltier, and maybe my crying
would be more fragile than it is now. I saw Billy The Neighbor’s brother

cry, because he had loved his dog too much. Also, I
saw his collarbones, and I guess Billy The Neighbor called me *****
soon after that. Billy The Neighbor’s brother once told me I
became too attached too easily, but there’s another word for it –
I just like people who are loyal, and who can be as loyal as I am. Also,
I like people who are like Billy The Neighbor’s brother, and who can
cry over everything, because when I was little I did cry, just not anymore.
When I was little, I fainted, because someone was talking about ****.
My mother called me sensitive, but everybody else called me
“mentally disturbed.” I started seeing a therapist after that. My therapist
told me to sing. She had a torn poster of Don McLean on her wall, and she
wanted to be his therapist. Or,
she wanted to sing dirges in the dark with him. I guess I was the next best thing,
but I didn’t know how to sing a dirge for her, and I
apologized to her for it – she didn’t know that I was actually

just too lonely to do so. Then I stopped crying, even though
my body still housed more tears.
Billy The Neighbor’s brother once cried over steeped tea,
and I wish I had, too, but I didn’t. Yesterday, Little Brother
cried tears of amethyst, and he stained the floor velvet. Nobody came
to clean the floor, or to lick the color away, so now the floors are velvet,
which is sad, but mother says it’s beautiful. Whenever she says “beautiful,” I want
to throw up, because that is the worst word. I’m sorry for that. I wish I could
call people beautiful, but I’m too kind to do so.

He’s 22 and still doesn’t know
the difference between
driving and dying. He thinks
a lot about how easy it is to
become road ****; if it is
winter will his parents ever
find his bones? He thinks
that it is always winter, mostly
because he is always so cold, mostly
because he never wears sweaters. His
parents tell him that winter and being cold
are really very different. His parents tell him to get a job.
His parents are lying on top of their duvet cover with
their mouths hanging open like empty parking lots.
He wants to tuck them into bed, because everybody
knows that going to sleep means digging trenches in quilts,
but he is scared. And anyway, they’re dying.
His parents die every night, so simply,
like brushing teeth or taking baths.

He’s only taken a bath once. He was so young
that his skin looked like a tumor, very pink
and very soft. His mother had been trying
to clean out his knees and was taking a very long time.
He was a battle wound. That same day, that very morning, he
had tried to climb a tree like a soldier but failed. Afterwards
his knees looked very much like rats. He remembers
the bathwater feeling like so many tests. He remembers his mother
telling him that making an effort to learn how to climb
anything is useless, unless it is because you’ve been buried
and you are climbing out of your grave with dirt filling your mouth like holy water.

Now he is sitting in his basement feeling very much
like bruised roads. He is thinking that soon he’ll drive all of the time
and each time he does he will have so much fun
driving by his parents’ bedroom window and waving
as though he is running away.

He tried running away once when he was younger, but
it took too long and he was tired and missed his bedroom.