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.

our bellies stretch like animal carcasses. our flesh some new cartography. i still remember when we dug those foxholes at the beach. so many holes dotting the sand. we made time to curl up inside of each one. maybe because mother was always telling us to “make time for family.” you sang to me every night in my bedroom before i went to sleep. sang to me and hushed me and held me the way you held your organs, perfectly and in place. i was always so impressed by you. impressed by the way you ate and stood. i stood just like you, i remember. always slightly hunched over, always slightly bent, but ever so slightly.

it started with just one night. i was so young, lying on the carpet shivering. i had just had one of those dreams again. one of those flying dreams where i’m flying over woods and water and places i’ve never even been to and then i see a parent and a child and suddenly i am falling so quickly. suddenly i am landing flushed and naked on the floor. then i guess you came, so silently, standing in the doorway like a ghost. i wish i could remember you well enough. part of me wishes i could remember you holding me but at the same time my stomach is dark with so many moths, just trying to remember. not wanting to remember, really.

later in life it is summer and dark and i am at a party and i am hot and sweaty and sticky and there is a boy there and his thumb is on my left cheek, so close to the corner of my mouth, and his lips won’t stop leaning into mine. my eyes are closed. i am trying to remember his face, but i keep thinking about yours and am overwhelmed with the needles that are suddenly springing to the corners of my eyes. it is all i can do not to find a bed and start rocking back and forth, or if not a bed, at least the tiled floor of a bathroom. i love tiled floors so much, especially when they have been lit by winter. i lie on them when i am sick and getting out of the bath. baths drain so much energy. i picture you stroking my hair and letting me ***** and picking me up out of the tub and everything seems so familiar that i start shivering compulsively. the boy (addled mind keeps me from even remembering his name) looks at me. you are so strange, he is thinking, it is summer and you are shivering, why are you shivering, but he is also nice enough, i guess, and gives me his sweatshirt, which i don’t even need, because i am not shivering out of coldness. i don’t tell him that, though. i just take the sweatshirt and close it to my neck and let my body sweat. i want to lie on the grass. i want to be o.k. with letting my head spin.

a week later the boy is at home. you seem unnervingly fine. i begin to wonder if maybe i’m crazy.

I.

It begins with a couch and with me thinking
that I’ll feel better if we sit together. The couch
is as brown as my knees were when I was six and playing
with dead worms and building statues out of the bones
of grey soft birds.

I am thinking mostly of your hands and of your lips
and of my mother: in a few hours when I return to the house
she will be yelling, shrieking in a voice
like warm alcohol.

II.

If I told you I loved you, you would cry; it’s only
been a week, maybe, or a day, or three weeks, or two months
(here time stretches and then is collapsed, is sometimes
flattened and thin and other times curls thickly as the hair
of one of your former lovers). If I let my head fall
into your shoulder, gently, maybe then you will let your hands
rifle through my hair.

III.

My head is too heavy for your body, your body light
the way I think a girl’s ought to be, the way I think
mine ought to be. My bones feel shadows, they press
into your backside like a birthing womb.

IV.

Tonight we are in a womb together. Tonight we are birthed
together like Christ and dog. Tonight I do not miss you anymore,
tonight I could not miss you more.

Nyack, NY: a naked man sits cross-legged in the middle of a road
with a dead dog sprawled across his lap, next to him there is a woman
with an empty mouth (no ice & no teeth). Nyack, NY: I am not one of them.
At night I hold scissors to my feet the way bottles were once held
to my young newborn face. Mother, Mother, in 1995, 19 years later,
did you think I’d be in a hospital?


White Plains, New York Presbyterian Hospital, Westchester Division: there
is a boy there who loves football & tells me that the two of us were born like twins.
I have never seen a football game in my life.

White Plains, New York Presbyterian Hospital, Westchester Division: there is a girl who at dinner time hides the bread rolls in her fleece, her fleece is purple like my father’s face was the day he proposed to my mother in a restaurant
in Woodstock, NY.  

Upstate NY I do not cry. Upstate NY I am folded into mountains
like the comforter of a child, it is summer & my stomach expands
like boiling eggs. During the egg toss I break the egg in my hands
like a crack of thunder & my partner gets mad at me & I do not move,

like a boy I do not move. I kiss five boys in 12 months, & for each one
I feel like I am kissing my hand. For each one I feel like I am kissing
sidewalk or a magazine & I want to apologize. I let each one of them
bite my tongue until I can’t feel my stomach. I never want to feel my stomach again.

This year I am deer this year I become barbecue this year I am Christ I do not
go to church & until tonight I forget to remember my grandmother.

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!

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.

i. I consume your body
until it burns.

ii. White sheets, white tiles.
I think of you when I *****.
Mother sits & cries in the corner
of her bedroom. I call for her
until I am thinned out & pale,
my body large & expanding.

iii. My body is the lake from last summer.

iv. Last summer three boys drowned.
I was too afraid to attend the funeral.

v. Now I am too afraid to wear my body.
My hands are hurricanes when I realize
that I am loved.

the gas station
down the street
is never dry of fire

this is where
the neighborhood boys go,
usually, when they are tired of being
viewed as cliffs
on the sides of highways.

(when i was younger
i had a brother.
sometimes
at night
i can hear my mom
bruising apart
in his old room.
i stand in the doorway
& watch her
& wait.)

(her medication
works best
when she sleeps.)

I don’t ever want to sleep with you
in a hotel bed in white sheets
in white sheets with you I feel death
I don’t want to ever feel ghost with you
I spend all summer with you in lakes
water makes me feel
more ghost than anything else does
you hold me in the water & love me
& I keep thinking
is this really what your body looks like when it’s sunny out
(like a mountain range like a museum of moths)
you have a face like a moth
& I have a stomach like a moth
how fitting
my stomach is so large in this water
& in this water I am ghost
& in this water you are holding a funeral & in this water
everybody is holding a funeral
for somebody else
I am not the most important ghost anymore
I am just a simple ghost floating
through gentle mists
like a child

The day we broke fast it was late July & your body tasted like heat
& rain, even though it hadn’t rained all month. That July
the grass died, & then our parents died, & then the neighborhood dogs,
& the cows, too, out in the large fields, & there were flies everywhere,
buzzing like the wrinkles of the elderly. You died last, the day we broke fast,
along with every other boy from the neighborhood. Your bodies
were all empty corpses, sprawled out together flat & open & with hanging tongues,
like a high school football field.

The last night of July I had a dream in which you were the devil,
all red skin & hair like a bucket of moon ***** & missing eyes.
I woke up screaming, but very quietly, because it was still early, 6am,
your eyes were missing & so were you. The last night of July I tried
sneaking out of the house & into the small graveyard next to the small church
that rested up the hill by the small school, but your tombstone was missing
& I cried until I didn’t have a throat anymore, until I was just one large body,
very empty, very carved out, like the pool
down the street
that Grandmother used to take me to.

I am born in the springtime, underneath a moon
swollen as the abdomen of a rat. My body
out of the womb looks like the shape
of my mother’s wedding dress. From there

I grow like the belly of a pregnant cow, only
with no milk to offer; there is nothing pale
about me: later my parents will call me names
that translate into nighttime and I will hear them

and I will go to them, mindlessly, like a bucket
of breathless water. Today is my sixteenth year forty-sixth day
and they still call to me and I still go to them, but this time
with a face like red seas. This time they look at me

with fear knuckled through their voices: I look like the raw
and sore underside of a cold nose, the kind you get
from enough crying and not enough sleep, and also: I
am too thin, my bones stick out from my body like the stripes of a bee.

Days like today I wish for somebody to sink into like tissue paper.  
Days like today I think about being in trees with my brother,
the world dark enough to make the two of us look
like scratched mirrors or splintered eyes. We do

not speak to each other, do not look at each other, but
our breathing is identical, both of us shadowed away
from whatever screaming sounds the house may make
when it is late and my mother and father do not know

what to do with the worries that take over their bodies.
My seventeenth year forty-sixth day I will go to them
and I will apologize, my voice whispery like a soft limb,
my bones less visible, more hidden, more like ghosts.

My family
rents a house
on a lake.
My first day there
I sit cross-legged in the water
until I have completely finished
picking apart my bones
as though I am a fish.
I hear my mother screaming
from behind the screen-door,
but I ignore her.
I shut my eyes.
When my eyes close terrifying shapes
flash across their lids: the first time a boy calls me beautiful
I run 6 miles,
because it is easier than turning my legs into trees.

late at night the kitchen 
sheds its skin for you 

outside your bedroom door
kneels your mother, flat & round
like a subway 

later you will kneel, too,
then sleep in your bed
as though nothing is wrong but

your hair grows thin & ***** 
as beestings & your body 
won't stop tearing itself & ballooning
out at the seams 
& sometimes on the bus your throat 
is as full & tight as a hot lake 
& you're hoping that you'll 
have nightmares that will 
make you cry in your sleep

it starts in a bathroom with me feeling
sliced open, like a bird that has just
been gunshot-down from the sky: this boy
does not belong to me. I do not belong
to myself. nobody belongs in my skin.
it is all I can do not to cry into his mouth.
I will not cry into his mouth (I refuse to cry into his mouth).
instead this boy will press his palms into my body as though
I were something smaller, something holier. I like him mostly
because his wrists do not bend the way yours do.

Through mountains in August was the first time
in 19 years that I felt by myself: no chest

just
one large body.

You were there next to me, all fists
steering your car like a giant squid.
I would have turned to a saint
before pressing my palm to your knee
but I put my palm there anyway

and there it stayed like a lightly-held song.

Sitting behind a dark bush with you
your left shoulder looked like a small city
while my eyes turned damp like a mother’s new crown.

Your body is still next to mine like a large corpse in the sky:
goodnight, I am dying circles as though I were a priest;
goodnight, I am fainting thinking about the bruises on my upper thighs
that you did not give me; goodnight, my body feels like some sort
of gutted deer all heavy with gore; goodnight,
you are stuck with blood
in the back of my cruel throat.

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

We are driving across this bridge
the way wolves move through hills. I’m too afraid
to ask you to stop here, too afraid to look up
and hold the moon’s light in the back of my throat,
also too afraid to look down at the river.
I know what the river looks like
already: ashed like my mother’s hands the night I was born.

I was born to new parents;
sometimes I think that this is the first mistake
I ever made. 5 years before I was born my mother
had a miscarriage, sobbed and vomited throats for 5 weeks & 5 days.
I am no light for her yet, but I am trying, also I am trying
to drive for you across this bridge, across this highway:
my feet & hands are no more than wheels.

1

The boy dies after staying awake all night
reading "The Plague." He drowns himself in a lake. This is summer of '94. 
We all attend the funeral. Nobody talks, except for the priest, as the body is being lowered into wet grounds. The rest of the time it is as silent as the boy's body was in the moments
after drowning.

2

Summer of '94 I am eighteen, lying in bed in between sheets that are as white and as cotton as my mother's wedding dress. The moon's face is as cruel and as yellow as that of a boy's. I dream up my first nightmare: I am a widow and I am being strangled by my corpse of a husband until my skin is dark blue, the color of the lake the boy drowned in. 

3

Summer of '94 is the hottest summer. Billy The Neighbor takes me to behind the yellow house. We are both barefooted, our toes grassy and sticky with sweat. He seems to love me, he tells me he does, before having me lie beneath him on the ground. It is night and I can barely see his face, but I know that it is tinged with glistening pink. I touch his back and it feels like a childhood fever.

4

There are days when Mother thinks
that she is her mother, who died before I was born, or at least pretends to be her:
dresses in her mother's clothes that we keep
in the attic, talks poorly about herself. I have to hold her until she begins 
to whimper and then is herself again. 

5

The last night of summer the dog dies. The vet tells us that it is a natural death. 

6

The last night of summer the moon is as bright as an old ghost and I do not get any sleep. In my head I am the boy drowning himself in the lake.

When we were younger
there was not a single day
that we did not scrape open our knees
against the metal pails that Mother kept
in the kitchen.

“To ward off spirits,”
she would tell us at night
as we lay in bed
with our breaths hushed
as the body of a stillborn child.  

The day I was born
(in white hospital
in white sheets,
everything white
as the face of a choked casket)
Mother told me about the first child
she’d given birth to:
a child birthed and then dead within an hour.

Ever since then there were
the metal pails, all of them
lined up carefully
along the wooden kitchen
like a crowd of empty stomachs.

There we slit our knees
and there we waited for Mother
to come stitch us up;
there we were ignored.

Our bodies looked
like ghosts’ bodies,
only our knees
were more overtly bleeding.    

2.

Growing older means:
less ghost and more large stomach.

The metal pails are still in the kitchen, only
Mother’s body is now curled up and dead
inside of one of them, her body curled up
right next to that of the child, the one dead
within the hour. Growing older means:

more summers sticky with sweat  
between our touching bellies,

our bellies dead and vulnerable
like the loose faces of paled grandparents
who are close to dying in nursing homes.  

When I am standing in front of you
and when you are upstairs
and when it is nighttime
and when you are in my bedroom
(the bedroom where I used to live with my
five brothers, where mother used to tell us about warding
off spirits) standing in front of me with heavy abdomen
I am most excited to curl up against you, most excited
to cry like the gun of my grandmother
until I can no longer feel my belly.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Driving there the trees start to look like my old baby teeth  
and my skin starts to feel like the bruises of a mother I have not
spoken to in three years. There people sit in their striped foldout
beach chairs in the parking lots of gas stations and watch the cars
go by and the women wear dresses covered in flowers that swell
like skeletons down to their ankles and the dogs when they bark
sound like stretched out skies.

Summers until I was 17 spent there in the lake,
the lake where for the first time I held my breath for ten whole seconds
and where Tommy from across the street drowned himself and where
for two weeks I couldn’t swim without crying from the panic
that bloated and ballooned out in the cryptic wells of my chest. Until I

was 17 there within the walls of the house painted white as a
canker sore and in my bedroom lying on the wooden floors
my belly the first time you came was too bare and too large
and after that I did not speak to you for a week and when
I finally opened my mouth I couldn’t stop crying, my face
swollen as fish roe, and I never loved you more, and then

I never loved you more than I did on my porch for the last time,
you standing there looking gauntly and saintly as a bruise and me
with hunched shoulders, I couldn’t stop shaking, I never stopped
shaking, here I am in this car and it is air-conditioned and I am
still shaking.

i've never seen anything more comforting
than the way the sky in ny changes colors
after a deer has just been killed in a car crash

we are not invincible, kissing in this attic,
inhaling bones like wolves' heads
or dimes.

i leave you to use the bathroom,
trip over a metal bucket --
i can slit open my knee so easily,
without trying,
as though it were a church.

i have never broken into a church.
i have never prayed in a church.
i have never been in a church:  
i have never been a teenager,
although i have kissed you,
quickly & clumsily,
with my tongue & with my teeth.

i have dreams
about you drowning in the lake
the way those boys did
last year. your face is etched
like a quarter. i would build
a dress for you, if i could.
when my tongue is in your mouth
someone else's voice is my head.

Here, this water is for you. Here,
you have a body all strung out
like a highway, cutting through
fields. Here, call your mother, she
still worries about you. Here, once
you died. Here, once you slept in my
bed, we slept together, we slept
together & we did not ****, even though
I wanted to ****: you slept curled
against me like a small bird meant
only for the palm of your hand, breath
warm as a new layer of skin.

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.

Boy sinking boy drowning this is not
the first boy I’ve kissed

boy walking across pavement like streetlamp
it is as if he has no mouth he is so light

boy in his car reminds me of Grandfather in
the nursing home we visited Grandfather
there every weekend until I was 6 years old
and then he died all of the boys I’ve ever loved
have died in one way or another I am sitting
in this car with this boy and my legs feel huge
like claps of thunder and I can’t stop eating
his skin as though it were a consummation of sorts

we are listening to a song with lots of piano
boy plays piano because the keys remind him
of bits of time (the way he presses down on them
lightly like buzzes of flies)

I want these boys to know that
the days on which I miss Grandfather grow further
and further apart like old magazine subscriptions
the days on which these boys remind me of Grandfather
are every morning they all drink their coffee black
they all eat cold pancakes they all die circles underneath
their eyes dark as their coffee dark as their mothers’ wombs

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.

This is both how it ends and how it begins:
I gave you two paperback novels and you forgot
to read both of them, they sat on your nightstand
for three months like the ghosts of grandfathers. The cover
of one is neon yellow, all bright like the insides
of your mouth, and the cover of the other
is greens and whites with the face of a small bird
coming out from the center. You hate to read. I knew
you wouldn’t like either book, but I loved them,
so I gave them to you anyway, then watched them
pool together in dust the way sweat pooled across
my body, my body underneath yours, yours a small
lightning rod and mine ever-expanding, corkscrewing
out like a mountain range or like a bottle of wine.
The first day we met we ended up in your car, I sat
in the passenger seat and was terrified of your hand,
but still mine crept to it like a fish to sand sprinkled
across beach by a child. At first you were there
lodged away in my left breast, your body I felt
form a small knot there, and the knot grew, slowly,
and then suddenly, gone, like a confession. First
my hands were deep in your chest and yours were edged
around my hips, everything felt careful and wooden,
and then our hands sawed away and disposed of. There
was one fleeting goodbye and then there was an empty room,
my body once again alone and standing underneath a sky
large and empty and flat as your cool tongue.