It happens when you look outside and see paintings.
Paintings, instead of reality.

The world is just
the right distance
away.

My mother chewed her nails off, trying
to consume bones enough to
scrape away the
space that's always been
there.

She still remembers
from time to time when
she had to swallow
the whole earth
just to feel full.

She found herself afraid of her ribs.
So she built a panic architecture,
calcifying her lungs, breathing in
nearby rocks and tree branches,
scattering the animal hosts in
her spinal fluid.

By now the elephants
have multiplied,
stampeding through the open
cracks in her ventricles.
There could be time zones
in the cracks
but just the ones that are
still sleeping.

About once a month I worry
I'll turn into her.

I’ve diagnosed it with industrialized rickets,

stomach is open and distended

metal is bowed with greenstick

fractures, hard and bendable,

compensating with growth

disturbances and wider wrists.


If I squint enough

there is movement

in permanent metal, micro-movements

as the ants shape sand hills

far from half-buried

fire-hydrants and barely there

Red Hot Chili Peppers

laced with frat-boy yells.


I’ve named it insieme

just far enough away to be together.

It’s body isn’t big enough

for all the purpose that it has.

At some point it’s been welded,

Atomic number 29,

add tin and it becomes 79.


Gold. It’s on fire, comprised

of a thousand tiny synthetic

flames fused together by rust.

It’s too open a place.

It should be found in ignorant alleyways

where half smoked cigarette butts marry

pavement, where brash teenagers go to cry.

The ants make sense though.

I’ve whittled shelves into my body to try and bring an

order to things. All it did was make space.

So many shelves like staircases built in anger.

Winding forcefully

until they end right where I stand.


2. There are days I wash my face with vinegar

and soak my fists in horse *****. I use it to

conceal the musty smell of forgotten Bibles.


3. It’s while God is in my novels,

that I see my bedroom floor.

A junkyard of loose-leaf prayers,

my boots go out of their way to step on

dry crunchy ones.

I can hear the breaking, and it’s satisfying.

The acrid smell of fall

in my mouth,

I bite my lip just to feel the sting.


4. The phantom pain in my chest tastes like cotton

stuck to my teeth.


5. I am Leonid Rogozov in Antarctica, I’ve built my

staircase-shelves by cutting into myself,

only local-numbness needed.


6. No, my shelves are not staircases.

Shelves never extend forward. Just, upward.

A little too much like trees,

not permanent enough in the ground.


7. It all reduces to sawdust anyway, collected

on the bedroom floor.

I’ve been sweeping it up for 40 days now,

each day, a little more.

One day, the floor will be clean.


8. You say, “You are made of blessings.” I say, “No, I’m made of blood

and skeleton bones.”


9. I love You. You say you love me.

Some days, that’s enough.


10. Today, Just yellow-

brown pages and

nothing resembling gospels.


11. I wasn’t born, I just walked in

one quiet evening and started living


12. After every shelf I whittle I still ask,

What is numbered in my life?


13. Things will change, things will change.

Things will change.


14. I have layers and layers of papier-mâché skins you can thumb

through like pages.

You’ve peeled them away,

each becoming more raw and permanent.

The cleanliness worries me.


15. There are 17 different kinds of fractures:

non-displaced, complete, oblique, transverse, comminuted, greenstick,

simple, linear, incomplete, compound, compacted, avulsion,

compression, stress, impacted, displaced, spiral and fatigue.

Believing in You makes me tired.


16. ‘Post mortem nihil, ipsaque mors nihil’

Death built its own shelves

After My body was felled.


17. When it’s you resting on my tree-shelves,

I begin to see an end.

Books are the most efficient weapons in the world.

Sitting in labyrinths of cobblestone intestines
I’m learning to eat the entrails of sacrifice
only domestic, never hunted.
pick up spoon. put down
put down. put-down.
pick up. um . spoon.
um… putdown.
there are motions for eating and I do them.

soothsayer, look down
pay attention to positions, shapes
knife. butter. um…
bread. no. breadth.
better. no. butter-better.  focus.
knife. better. bread.
knife, knife of haruspex. knife breadth.
okay… deep breath.

I have divided the livers
and the watchers of victims.
I have written on
the anomalies in my bronze living,
what I should look for,
what they should allow for.
my protruding viscera,
my ancient autopsy of starving.

Starving made me easier to tie.
easier to lift. made me feel
gutted out like finished
ice-cream containers
but, starving made me
full of household gods.
made me divine. made sheeps fly.
made days disappear and made cold cold cold seem like
simmering. made staying out of sight a piece of cake.
cake. starving made me rich when I found little
boys betting quarters for eating bowels of
goats. made me small enough to fit through
playground gates so I could swing
swing in earthquakes, and portents.

now, I listen to Memor, a man
who knows nothing of starving
talk about how starving I am.
tomorrow I have to advise
tomorrow I have to weigh
tomorrow I have to swallow
tomorrow I have to
tomorrow I have
tomorrow I am half

and starving made me whole.

we are always on our way
we beat our chests,
broken clocks, we are honest twice a day.

our groundhogs overstay
in cuckoo nests
we are always on our way

in metric evenings led astray,
most of us have been recessed,
broken clocks, we are honest twice a day.

we are made to coil halfway,
beat those who love us best
we are always on our way.

we make time prepaid
and tendons compressed,
broken clocks, we are honest twice a day

we say
we are guests
we are always on our way
broken clocks, we are honest twice a day.

o hand grenade red bodies of loring park,
you paintings of hand grenade bodies, you bed
with bodies and kneading and needing red hand
grenade bodies you bed, o and you the
bed and bodies, I sleep on the paintings of red
beds and hand grenades and emptiness, you the
hand grenades of the attempting and the receptacles,
you the womb of emptiness, the emptiness
for the womb receptacles, you the kneader of the
accidents and bodies and non-wet matches and
wombs, and you the wombs and you the wet
empty bodies and me and wombs, and you the
attempting yet starving, and the feast and
wet match starving hand grenade bodies and you
rasping and grasping and wombs the accident
receptacles starving, and you the receptacles and
wombs, and her the one I love, and we who cannot
produce, and all starving emptiness, and all
the bodies and wombs and grenade hands on
the paintings starving of this accident.