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.

1                                                                ­    4
she offers me,                                             a spot of dust
she raises me                                              under the couch,
on platitudes and warm bread                I know it’s
in return for my devotion                         there

she loves me like the boats                       today, I start spring-cleaning,
she keeps out on the ocean                      (this alone
she loves me to be molded,                      should receive
not to be unfolded                                     more recognition than it will)
                                                           ­           I pull out the couch
she bore me bones                                     the vacuum doesn’t quite
the lacrimal bone                                       reach the dust lying
the breastbone                                            on unused carpet,
all the cervical vertebrae                          the head
I use them to simulate                              keeps hitting the wall
her expectations                                        unproductive
­
                                                                ­     I put the furniture back
2                                                           ­        in place
I have names,                                             no one will see the lack
I wear them like badges                           of progress
inspired by something not quite
earned yet                                                   5
         ­                                                            while­ lucid dreaming
I assigned                                                   conste­llations were on
each name                                                  my skin
a compartment                                          and freckles in
of me                                                           the night sky
If I name them maybe
they will become                                       pollution drowned out
real, not just necessary                             two thirds
                                                          ­           even if most imploded
                                                        ­             before they were seen

3                                                          ­         6
with enough necessity                             were it not for shadows
anyone can tell a lie                                  I would surely learn to
                                                              ­       hate the light

we are carbon,
ashes,
craters,
two towers,
after.

rubble,
mist and manholes.
your eyes on a
cloudy day.
the aftermath of destruction.

we are leftover scratches
on gas chamber walls,
corpses,
cremations, and gravestones.

vision without glasses,
abandoned buildings,
the residual newspaper ink on
your palms.

we are static, crumbling nihilism,
aged hair, and dust sifting through
frost bitten fingers.

cavities, apathies,
blank television screens,
sketches, ghosts, absence,
dust, collapse,
driftwood.

we are driftwood, not enough
for a life-raft,
sometimes, where there is smoke,
there is no fire.

i guess it’s where we were always heading,
dulling, deconstructing, disintegrating.
after all, every thing
reduces to this.

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.

I

in the dark starvation is real.
In dark, the emesis that fills my
cheeks is a currency I soak inside, animal
coinage, the fine
bulbous talons of Sepiidae.

Savagely, pelagically
starving made me rich when
Muskrat’s claws pull apart delicate meat.
Sad Spanish blood, I would like you
to panic about what has been lost.
No body, no crime—we are all cannibals; so the muskrat ate
flesh from the dugong-heavy remora

a parallax of sorts occurs
when I cannot find my own entrails—
perhaps they are ruminating in my gut—
boiling in my optic nerve.

But–I found little boys betting quarters for eating bowels
of goat. I was small enough to fit through
playground gates so I could swing
swing in earthquakes, and portents
ride out this day on the waves—to succeed

foothills, grasses, and bath salts
by the creek. I got my quarters.
They asked me who made me as Mountain
Dew dribbled down my chest.
Infant teeth shattered my infant

fists and I did not eat divvied livers and
Victim watchers.
I wrote on
my protruding
viscera
proverbs from my ancient days


–extraordinary porch things, depleted
Phosphorus, and, on bendable limbs
I catalogued my windscraped knees.

How does one so young
become
so fed up with
hunger.

II

Starving made me easier to tie.
easier to lift.
my ancient autopsy of starvation
made me feel gutted out
like Finished
ice-cream containers.
Made me able to hold my breath for
up to six minutes—starving
made me full of Household Gods and rickety
rosaries,

small brown globular clusters,
1 arcsecond of stress
capable of aligning me
with spring-loaded washers

I pop one nut—two—
Dental Work can be a rhizome,
ordering wee-soldiers from
its tethered nodes without
lactation, laceration, infection into
my sleep-deprived throat,
Choking on bird chirps
and x-ray bursts

below the cradle where
my android sleeps. I
have named him The Alabaster.
(Synching The Alabaster.)
The Alabaster–Allie–is a kind of boat
that I have hole-punched into; like
children of the deep I have hurled
nearby rocks into its lungs.
I have wrenched crumbs of my honeymoon
sidewalk, for a beast that panics.
I would trade
the last of the dugongs
for a muskrat’s smile–
now there exists a cult for Plastic
that the spotlights started,

and in the night it will not
end with the filter feeder sinking
to the depth of the imagined water column,
spinning in the Gyre disposal.
There isn’t a colander large enough
to sift through the pejorative waste.

I knew the night would be fraught.
It makes my fusiform body necessary for
transport. Makes Monophyletic solid consumption
trucks and ACE arms reach for
well-behaved spearfish bodies.
Makes days disappear and cold
seem like simmering.
Makes staying out of sight
a trim.

And I told them,
the Fusiforms and Balusters, that
the spearfish would devour the hero who comes
from afar bearing the gift of travel–
Tully-Fisher, with his cottonseed oil
“Manufactured in USA” in
compounding pharmacies.
He made me.
And I told him:

to Tell me to trawl for something less
plastic than my second
self–that I which exists
in Mary Poppins cannons, compact
intimacies, medical and portable–

to dig within my throat, discover a nurdle
that failed to photodegrade during the the day
the Sirenia sang,
the Muskrat gnawed off his leg and hand
fed it to the remora.
III

My mouth is parched
for diagnosis of rickets, for
my un-mineralized bones.
I need RR Lyrae, Statistical π,
population “II”s
to stand in for my night.
I need Sweetened,
Spoonfuls of BB pellets and
Spoonfuls of cepheids to help
the tetany go down,

myopathic infants and
ricket Rosary symbols only work
in sacrifice–In this sense,
I have constructed a panic
architecture–Craniotabes are too
vast. Prions and viroids have seeped
through,

Infections more than dreams,
for injured muskrats who yearn for
the last real mermaid’s smile,
or tears if that would smash open
the cluttered ocean and scatter
the unwanted hosts multiplying
in my spinal fluid.

In day there is no more starvation–
the remora bring me
Libations and admire
my six pack rings mobile.
My connective obligatory.

Under my fingernails are thin
crisps that may somehow create equilibrium.
Although I nibble them regularly
I can’t always swallow.
Surrounded by a dense fog of fleas
my tongue is itching.
My teeth are scratching, scraping
away the space that will always be there.


The antique aisle at the local international
superstore is handing out shriveled
heads of past didactic patients.
But I tell them it’s not what’s there that matters
it’s what’s not there. And in my case
there’s a surplus of nothing that
I can live without.

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.

You cannot just give up religion for lent,
and expect no consequences.
I am in every moment you discard.

You run on insistent consistency,
analytical calculations,
scraps of math equations
pieced together to
form your
functioning

But, you cannot rationalize away my
emotions.
My heart and my affection.
You cannot compartmentalize me,
shave off my soft curved edges
with a butter knife to fit the
labeled angular box you have created for yourself.
I still count even if you’re
making things even.

But I understand,
sometimes my hugs last 3
seconds too long.

--

Luke,
There is no picture
on a box to tell you what you’re
supposed to look like
when all this is over.

You might have built yourself,
but I was born.
I am more than a body.
I am your past,
your perspective
your platelets
your pacemaker
I will never truly
leave.

First things first,
you’ll have to remove your hat and
the plank strapped to your limbs.
Your body will be used to thumb-wrestle with
gravity.

Please remove the staples from your chest.
Find your new set of lungs.
There is space to breathe here.
Take this new heart.
You’ll beat slower, suspended.
Circadian rhythms will not help you.

Your body will become a willow in a storm,
never breaking.
There are no mistakes here.

You’ll learn to drink silence for sustenance,
washed down with madness and tepid water.
You’ll learn to compensate for lacking conversation, hold secret meetings
in the basement of your mind.
You’ll learn how to disappear in a room.

No matter how hard you pound against walls
they remain padded,
concealed behind billowing drapery.
No one will hear you.

But, you’ll fit in fine.
You’ll stretch your skin as a tattooed leotard.
You won’t grow up,
You’ll grow inward
fortifying your lungs with weeds.
L’appel du vide, your distinctive urge to jump down from
high places will be quelled
by the grace in lifting.

Take respite,
There is nothing left to destroy here.
There are no checkpoints to neglect.
There is no need to be a hero.

Still,
you’re not convinced this is so much better.

I built a room out of keys and locked doors
for a steeple boy.
Still, he shuts out the eyes of the people.

He buried his twin sister
a generation ago.
No one knew he killed
“her”
He wrecked her being with the weight of his tears
He tore apart her womb and *******
with the inconsistencies in his mind.

She went willingly,
quietly.
She never existed for him.

Yet, he keeps her
in the hazy recesses of his thoughts.
Reluctantly, necessarily.
A tethered reminder.

His mind is just as broken
just as fickle
just as full as hers.
His/(her)
clenched fists
sentimental soul
conflicted body
bittersweet existence

Maybe today will be the day he is
born
without the mask of his sister.
A coward
(not a fraud)
no longer.

May he speak unwaveringly
even as his spirit wavers.
May his chest be flat and strong
May he sit wider than his mother permits
May his wrists stay unmarred
May his body
be painted blue
and his eyes
(pink).

Though his flesh may be
Change(able),
remember it contains
his heart
his soul
his mind,
that knows and is unsure
…
his throat, that speaks, even as it betrays his deepness
his breath, that fills his well-worn lungs
his spine, that remains s despite crushing ribs
                                                t
                                                r
                                                a
                                                i
                                                g
                                                h
                                                t
his blood, that flows cleanly through veins
his organs, that run amid the ruin of his subsistence.

Now,
his hands open with the creak
of strained muscles.
No longer fading, he fills this space.
Showered, his arms extend into sleeves of a suit.
His fingers pull pants in place
His fingers secure buttons
His fingers knot his tie
His fingers fasten his laces
and,
he remembers his sister.
He chips at her mortar around his heart
His eyes, once covered in cypress flowers,
change to lilies.
He fists the correct key, using his voice,
          “This ain’t no sham.
            I am what I am”

Steeple boy,
choose life.
Change life.
You’ll be alright.

Relearned human being,
believe.

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.

The answer is nothing uplifting.

                                                           I’ve lived
better and absolute moments. Promised, with a demeanor of stagnation.
Better or polite moments within the stained glass, all for
that best end order.

                                                           I’ve attended.
Listened to the kind of Man who throws rocks with gossamer thread
and religious meaning.
                                                           I was here, Mom.
                                                                                            See?

Then summer brought something of meaning to movement. Attendance?
He sent un-movement to all of us. He can’t bear movement at all.


God, Your gurney has this man scarred. Mine was all for bits of someone else?
Or trading not-a-little darkening for something constant?

Before, soaked in ‘nice’, I blocked it. Fill us of this cup.
Blood yellow hold. Epic. Lyric.
It soaked in perfect, the clots forming.
Father, that best rest is never.
Father, but here You guard us?
                                                         Father, in your confession, fault.

                         In the end I chose opposition,
more like exsanguination.

Gone are the means to emulate. On a vetted day,
the err of all my sins shot me this red herring body.
So, let me go to assimilate never.

I was shut, locked in. But as the sore closet gains some more light,
now, with skinned knees
a brisk passing. Something for the retreat:
“Forgivers” or crosswalks?
Yes! – of course I choose crosswalks.

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.

A few nights ago I thought I heard my neighbor slap his girlfriend after I heard indiscriminate muffled yells through my apartment walls. I couldn’t be certain what actually happened, so after listening for a while and hearing no more sounds, I did nothing. For three days I haven’t left my apartment. I didn’t go to class yesterday and have no intention of going today. I’ve had moments of numbness that dissolve into crying for no apparent reason. Then this morning I put make-up on for the first time in over two years just to see what I would feel like. I looked in the mirror and felt more masculine than I ever felt.

If you sit and contemplate what you did today or yesterday or last week, all you can come up with are these seemingly unrelated discrete moments. Sometimes I think these moments of randomness must follow some sort of trajectory. I can just feel the connections and it haunts me until I can actually explain why I think domestic violence relates to me, a trans-man, putting make-up on after a spending several days retreating from my life.

time-limit me.
build a house of shelves,
shutters down, and
walls. make rooms yours to wrap, hold,
divide. but allow windows.
allow benediction, and a sadness
my parents never had
time for.

time-permit me
to be born, not re-
moved. my brother hasn’t formed
yet.
        
time-emit me.
emit depths,
so I can swallow
my own residue
until I can be
full.
yield me a clearing-through,
compose small
town inertia, and wake the moths.
scar something,
something burning
until I can pin it on
myself when I choose.

time-admit me.
make me small enough
to enter.
I exist. continue. bring light
to my lack, emit me.
admit me. accept me until I
remain.

MESSAGE GOES HERE
     BE BRIEF

Do your thoughts have limbs strong enough to choke you?
     THERE ARE ARMS HERE –STOP- THOUSANDS –STOP-

Can I see fragments fester in your dilated pupils?
      MY EYELIDS HAVE GROWN THICKER OVER TIME –STOP-
      CAPILLARIES ONCE BRANCHING OUT FROM LASHES HAVE ERODED –STOP-
      INDEPENDENT RUMINATIONS HAVE BEEN CARFULLY CONTAINED –STOP-

Then, at what point do your ‘ruminations’ make you colorblind?
      NOW –STOP-
      I WILL PAINT MYSELF BLUE TODAY –STOP- AT LEAST I THINK SO –STOP-
      I FIGURE LACERATIONS WILL LOOK NICE IN PURPLE –STOP-

After they bring brownness, are you fit enough to die?
      WITH LOVE
      –STOP-

The are fragments in the space
inside my father,

allocations of
belts and birchwood and driftwood, or
coin covered wishing trees,
safe as houses
without enough windows.

In shallow places, he tells me
'swallow your chewing gum
and limp into cemetery
grounds. I will forget you
as if you were alive"

Everything he says has
water under it.
It doesn't sit, or stay, or
take root in any meaningful sense.

I guess that's when this all started.
why I stuff an entire pieces of cake in
my mouth just to stay
silent.

I wonder if it's recessive,
this un-satiated need to fill

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.

I had this dream
you were there
clouds grew in the sky
above the wilderness-houses
safe, normal with windows, you were there
flower box gardens contained stand ins for flowers, mountain dew cans, red-shaped candy wrappers, you
were there
I could not buy green bananas, there is no
wait, you were there then I was born
smiling somehow, cotton stuck to my teeth,
vasoline,
but my face it melted, you were there,
it fell down to my
knees,
you were there you stole my ears, and then you stayed away

if you were here, if you were,
I wouldn’t lay down
awake to pray for me to
sleep

1
after she gave birth she walked
around the city imagining everyone
glistening, bordered with amniotic grit.

she worried about the dripping,
the wasteful shedding. former parts
of her body flowing into
the city storm drains. everything
reduced to run-off.

she always thought her soul
resided in her ******. now
she wonders if she'll find it
flowing though rusted pipes, swelling
in waves of excrement
and rain water.

2
there's a middled-aged woman sitting
next to her on an airplane.
every woman she sees
feels like her mother.

she wonders how many rooms she's never
been.
how many people she's never
met.

she can see the ripped scarf wrapped desperately
around the woman's head.
it's always the broken
who hold the universe in
place.

3
when i speak of my body's life
i know where it comes from.
how it exists now. i don't know
what it will
produce.

i'm still wondering if
a family can
break. or if it just
evaporates like water
into someone's exhale.

i'll never know
where the condensation lands.
perhaps i'll be a father
to a million different things.

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

The world is just
the right distance
away.