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.

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.

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.”

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

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

she says look at us

we’re talking in rhythm now.

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

who knows how it works?  
the way I end up like my mother
in a dining room at a wooden
table eating for two

2. the way I take baths now
my body wrinkles in the tub
the way hers always did when
I was two years old just learning
how to clench my fists I would
clench them around the wrinkles
of her belly, kiss her temples
all round and sharp like the caps
of beer bottles

3. when I was just two years old
I would drink the leftover bathwater
I still sometimes drink the leftover
bathwater in all of its murkiness I was
drinking her body now I am drinking yours

4. she called our house heaven
if our house was heaven then
heaven is made completely wooden
our front door was heavy and isolated

5..  dirt paths dirt roads matching dry dirt
buried into our matching dry hair
our matching dry mouths our chapped lips

6. with snow pushed to the side of the ground
covering our feet like threadbare blanket
like a lost husband’s lost hands

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.

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.

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 *******

In a picture of me at my parents’ house I am cradling my rib
and it looks bruised and boyish and apartment-like. In another:
I am sitting on kneecaps, praying to the first boy I see, a boy with
simple body, body like pinecone. When I was younger I listened
to radio stations with a snake in my lap. Looked out windows at
tops of buildings. Watched the tree branches falling onto concrete
ground when it stormed, my legs from top to bottom naked like smoke.
Cigarette smoke in my mouth but I never inhaled. My father and I
were the same in that we didn’t have lungs and both liked alcohol.
Every Saturday him taking me out and us drinking sake and my stomach
churning like a bathroom sink. My face like large sky always changing color,
always blushing. The first boy I kissed smelled like french fries
and in his mouth I licked heavy broken heart. The first boy I kissed
always wore white t-shirts so that whenever you saw him you could see
when it rained. Kissing him my stomach turned upside down like
a weighted storm. He touched my ribs and my stomach even when
I cried. Parents are a lot like a childhood boy. Parents and boy all standing
on my childhood porch. My childhood porch looks like a giant rib,
or squid in the sky. The first time I smoked I thought I saw a squid
or whale in the sky.

When 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.

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.

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

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

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

(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.

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.

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

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.

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

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 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.

[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 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.

My father sits in the corner of his
living room with his mouth curled
and ****** hair drooping like a ******
up angel. His body is just like mine.
I have never hated him more than
I do now, with his gut hanging over
his knees like hot solid fur.  

2.

I sit in the passenger seat of a green
Subaru Forrester. Father drives. I am
trying to sleep and he won’t stop
talking and I realize in his voice that
the two of us are the same: we have
the same throats, like two blue
bibles.

3.

Father in his rocking chair sleeps
stilly like paved whispering. I picture
him with a snake in his lap and it is only
then that I am willing to cover him
in the plaid blanket that drapes the living
room couch. I leave him with my shoulders
bent like rusty metal, my mouth shaped
like guilt or a glass of milk.  

4.  

My father dies in 2006 in between
line of highway and line of trees. Subaru
Forrester beaten against the side of the road.
His spine bends his waist twists as though
he has just slept with the devil.

my stomach in the bathtub
folded over and wrinkling
like the skeleton of my grandmother

hands that look too much like my father’s
blanketing my stomach like those of a cruel mother

on the best days the window next to the bathtub
is uncovered and I can see out but nobody can see in

on the best days I look down at a body
that is nothing but a pile of snow leftover
a week after the storm has past
somebody has forgotten to shovel me whole

there is a damp hole in my stomach and I am
staring at it unsure if I want it to melt
wondering who might fit shoveled inside

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.

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

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

The 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.”

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!