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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

My grandmother was born in Long Island
on the 5th of May, in a house as large
and as white as my parents’ wedding.

September of 2013
I scratched my eyes until they bled,
and then scratched them again
until they looked like the petals of flowers
my mother once tried to plant
in our backyard.  

These days my mother tells me stories
about growing up with my grandmother:
they’re stories of death, mostly: death resting
in the space between mothers & fathers
who sprawl atop their marriage beds
without speaking to one another.

Mother tells me that her parents were together for 23 years
before the divorce, or before her father died, she can’t
remember anymore.

I do my best never to think of her childhood,
but there’s research being done now
about how memories tend
to move from generation to generation,
very quickly and without warning.

Most of the time I feel like
a very poor animal in Mother’s eyes: I don’t move
the way I used to; not as much and not
as quickly. Now I sit still on my bed with my nails
clamped in between my teeth and listen to echoes
of me whispering that I love you, echoes of me
whispering that if I could I would talk
to you about how little I remember: I remember
women pretending not to know each other
and I remember them breathing into the spaces
where they didn’t belong.

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

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.

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.

A shallow lake off of I-95. My mouth was a water fountain. My back was arched the way my mother’s was the day she gave birth to me. My belly was round and steep like the high peaks that circled our watery bodies like branches of snakes. By the lake there were woods and in the deep mouth of those woods we lay with sweaty arms and burnt legs. You groaned as though your mouth were full of wolves. My eyes were tightly sealed. I thought mostly of my father and of the bed that I slept in when I was three years old. I thought about my grandfather’s hands, too, stained with beer and old milk. It was like I was leaving my mother’s womb all over again. Thought: this is what it will be like the day I give birth. Thought: the trees are bent at their waists the way my brother always is; he sinks into himself like ocean. Back at the lake you unwrapped a pack of cigarettes and I unwrapped my mouth, vomiting into the sand. Nobody else was there. I remember you always smelling like smoke. That entire time we were awful drivers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

Your face is not at all shadow.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

i've started to pray
to the toilets of public bathrooms again.
on busses & on trains travelers
can watch me turn dizzy, faint, or,
even better, turn ghostly
like a grandfather.

i've been buying travel tickets
to my brothers again.
lately in my dreams they did not die,
they never died.

there was a joint funeral
& my parents hired a soul singer
to perform cover songs of elliott smith
& i stood still as ash, doing my best
to rip open my face & my palms
& my wrists.

that day was the first day in a week
that i did not eat,
that i did not make myself *****.

in dreams my brothers did not die,
but i still wait for their funeral.

my hands are roads again, or wheels,
all marked & nailed & bruised.
if you turn me into a river
then i will share my secrets with you.

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.

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 first story I ever heard was from Grandfather,
about a boy & his dog. Grandfather looked pale
as ash that day. It was December & I was still
a small wrinkle in a bassinet. Mother & Father
were still new parents. They never listened to Grandfather,
just cradled me like a bundle of empty beer bottles.

Even now I’ve never seen either of my parents
drink, but I can hear them screaming, at night, about me,
mostly, sounding like whorls of fingerprints
being rubbed together in the wrong direction. My body is so often

being rubbed together in the wrong direction: a stomach that feels like moths
or eggs boiled incorrectly, too soft or too hard. My stomach growls, often.
Tightens, often, like thousands of screwdrivers in my throat.

If Grandfather could see me now he would cry. In the story
the boy & his dog are having trouble moving their sled down
a steep & snowy mountain but in the end they succeed, sliding
down the mountain the way hands do across large bellies. I am not a boy,
I do not own a dog, or a sled. Nights I stay up late
curled on the floor of the kitchen or the bathroom,
clutching at my body,
at the swole of my abdomen,
as though it were a large pile of greasy, brown rats.

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.

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.

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)

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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.

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

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

ii.

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

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

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

iii.

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

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.

with a boy whose palms seemed constantly marked
with calendars. lying next to him
in his twin bed covered in blue sheets
I made the mistake of asking him to sing
me psalms -- neither of us

were religious. I told him
that his room smelled like an old church
and that I’d only been to a church once
with a childhood friend
and that everybody there drank the blood of Christ
except for me because my family
has a history of alcoholism

the first time I saw his stomach I saw his
whole body and his knees looked tombstones

the first time he saw my stomach he saw my whole body and I whispered
over and over again silently underneath my breath
silently like an anxious fire ‘do not look at me’ the first time
he looked at me he told me I fainted: that night I
had dreams
of cutup magazines,
of hands that only bleed in playgrounds. somewhere that night
lying atop his stomach we heard a girl next door
screaming the way owls do. I’d seen her the morning before
and she’d been beautiful like an old wedding dress.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)