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.

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)

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.

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 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.”

[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 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

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.

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

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

The last time I was home I was 18 yrs old
& here I am again & there’s already
dirt in my bed. I like the tall tree in the backyard
the most: it is the only one free of snakes. Snakes
crawl around the others like crowns of teeth.

When grandfather was alive
he  took me to that tree & picked me
an apple & told me about family, i.e., mothers tied
to mothers tied to mothers; now I am
the only daughter. Grandfather told me
about my birth: my mother cried until her face turned
transparent like the thinned out wine that my
father drinks at dinners, the wine my mother tries
to ignore: she’s terrified of her ancestors, all

drunk like barrels of young boys. I had three
brothers & they are all dead now: an ocean,
a car, a burst of lightning.

I don't think about them anymore.

Instead,
in bed,
at home again, I listen to my sheets as they rub
against my legs like a child's chalk to sidewalk.

These days most of my dreams
are about my grandfathers: one was arrested &
the other an alcoholic but they knew how to love
the way ghosts do, all hushed & subtle & colored quietly.

One day I will learn how to sing
the way the women at the local church do.
I know nothing about Christ, but I still
stand outside the open stained glass window
with my eyes closed & pretend that I can feel
the pews pressing against my body like a boy’s hands.

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.

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.

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.
On February 5th I am told
that I am best when built
from spruces; later that day,
in the basement, I find
my father’s fingerprints
deep inside the wooden floors.

II.
The next day Mother
haunts my bedroom
like expired medicine.
Her arms are wide
and pregnant and encircle
my wrists like toothy wires.

III.
In my room hangs
a photograph from
camp: the girl’s body is an altar.
Highways line her arms. Small
green snakes weave through
her teeth the way my toes
now weave through salt.  

IV.
It was after that summer
that I turned spirals, that
the ridges in my throat
grew deeper. Now I am

V.
an icy church.

pt 1

i am very aware of skin & i am very aware of a ***** in my mouth. it feels like the basement light ought to be turned off, but instead the room is very bright, like the insides of your mouth.
quick, open up your hands & we’ll see what’s inside of them. you taste like lipstick. i laugh.
your **** tastes like light red lipstick — like, you know that one traffic light by that one intersection in town by the yellow house? yeah, your **** tastes like lipstick & the lipstick is the same shade of red as that light. i laugh again.
she belongs to the yellow house. the yellow house belongs to her, like a mutt. no other dog could ever belong to her the way that yellow house can.
(you: when you were gone i got mad at you because you accused me of something i didn’t do.)
before you left we stood on graveled driveway & i should have told you that you smelled like new paint.

pt 2*

help we’re in these woods & help i’m vomiting again & help this time it’s your hair that’s piling out of my mouth
help my teeth are still vicious around your waist & help yours are still wrapped around hers
(please help please i’m vomiting again)
i think i’m drunk; i think we’re drunk; i think she’s drunk:
we’re stumbling over roots & rocks as though there isn’t a sky perched above us, high & deep like your throat against my shoulder: *that’s going to leave a mark
i mostly leave marks in bathrooms & you mostly leave marks on me, i think i’m a road, i tell you
& you laugh & so does she & i ask why she’s here & her eyes go dark like children’s bedrooms & your eyes narrow & i shut up
the sky is still very large, very wide, less like a throat now, more like a tongue

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.

i.
I’ve known you a year
& only touched your back
once & when I did your spine
bent like metal or like dirt.
The best part about your body
is how easily it can be covered
by the soil of elderly mothers’ gardens.

ii.
Last night I dreamt that we were driving
through a city of old lakes (& we were, & we did).

iii.
Tonight my legs are wide & sprawled out
(& looking like a marriage bed) atop
a white blanket. You cannot mourn
what is not yet dead; you are like
a small baptism to me, all forgotten about.

(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 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.

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.

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.

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)

You wear gloves like they
are second hands or more

like a pair of ghosts either
way they are extra i.e.

not a part of you i.e. this
body (your body)
that you are in

should belong to a cow
but you have never stepped

onto a farm you imagine
a farm with soil black

and bitter with language (your
father worked on a farm

when you were younger you
did not know him but still

you grew a beard the way he did)
And now you wear gloves

they are secondhand

they are like graves
they span generations

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.

1) I walk five miles deep into the woods in the back of the yellow house with my brother so that we can watch the flies circle around the bodies of the dead cows: their hanging limbs, their loose tongues. The air hangs like a boy’s arms around my shoulders. My brother and I both wear shorts.
2) Inventory: one tractor in the yard. One truck in the driveway. One driveway, gravely like the throats of my father and grandfather. They both live in the yellow house. At night I stay up late listening to their screams. They sound like owls’ heads or hurricanes.
3) Father sees a different woman each day. They all have blonde hair like mine. Eyes brown and crumbling and whiney like mine, too. Mother left when I was three years old. Brother and I still aren’t sure if Father means she’s dead or if she just ran away, but we’ve yet to see a tombstone.
4) We go to church every Sunday. The pews press against the back of my sticky legs and white dress. Charlie eyes me from across the aisle and I do my best to focus on the head in front of mine.

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.

alcohol that tastes like fathers:
stay awake and smell like boy
three nights in a row.
days consist
of waning kitchens, toilet bowls
that look like wedding dresses
or miniature gods,
******* (like highways)
strung down
inside of my mouth,
throat scratched like roadkill,
belly swollen like fish eggs.

sad news this morning from mars: first baby to be born there died that same day. miscarriage, very ******, parents named her rosie, i think. picture rosie older with hair long & black like the dress of a widow. picture rosie older: going to church; giving birth & screaming. there’s a picture of her in this morning’s newspaper: a picture of her in her mother’s lap, both of them lying in the hospital bed. i say black hair, long hair, because her mother’s hair is long & black, too. her mother is all dark, dark, dark like the feet of a child after a long & grueling day at the beach (spent with no friends, just family). her mother is beautiful, even in hospital gowns, even having just given birth. when i gave birth i couldn’t stop screaming.

~deleting this 4 now 4 reasons but if u buy a copy of the next issue of 'winter tangerine review' .....~

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.

Home again I hid underneath blankets
like a kingfisher and waited for you
for hours, until eventually the clock
stopped working and my father had
to come in to get me up and turn on
the light and put on the air conditioning.

It was 83 degrees the day I came back,
heat swelling from the ground the way
your cigarettes did, dangling from
the fingers of your left hand like old puppets.
Later that hand would find its way into
my body and I’d go numb. That first night back

you read to me the way my father always
did; you were best at making me feel
like I was three years old all over again,
vulnerable as the rats quietly roaming
our ghostly wet basement. You read Narnia
until I began to sleep. I hated my snores
but you pressed my face to your stomach
so that I could hear the beestings that roamed there.

Look, they’re like yours, you wanted to say, but you
never knew how. You could never hammer
words the way most could, but you still
made me ache like the high school chorus:
goose bumps against arms against desks,
shivering all over again underneath ceilings
instead of skies.

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

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

was the same night I
ran around in circles waiting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

in the eyes of my father
i am only stained in water
and i am sawing off my *******
i love the way a boy might
quietly like the insides of a womb

in the eyes of my father
i am doing well in my body
he can’t see that i am bleeding my hands
that i am sawing off my *******
my father is a careful man

reliable like window shades
in the eyes of my father
i don’t need a body
i don’t have a body
and i am sawing off my *******

i am large like a supermarket
my belly moves like worms
in the eyes of my father
i am sawing off my *******

A:

I have been waiting 10 years
for father to stop hiding
underneath the wooden table
that rests hunched and gauntly
in the living room.

B:

It took father three days after I was born
for him to finally hold me; now he tells me
that his hands were splintering too much,
but I’ve seen enough of his palms, covered
in plant & ash & soil, to know better.
.

C:

July of 2000 we sat tucked away
like old wolves’ fur
into a blue station wagon. I refused
to talk to anybody but my father.
I sat the way he did, shoulders crooked
like the gardens of elderly women. I talked
the way he did, too, drawn out and low,
like swirling concrete.  

D:

Now I stay alone in his apartment
and sit out on the fire escape
and annoy the neighbors with my smoke
and watch the cars go by and wail
the way the city does at night.
I think less about my father
and more about being alone; I think less
about being alone and more about
how I can take away this skin, this body.
My body looks just like my father’s
and I hate him for it.

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.