The car will edge past the truck maybe
and maybe we'll survive this message
playing on repeat, apologies like daft lilies
and then you go ahead and tell me that you've never
learnt from your mistakes, or my mistakes.
That mistakes are only bad unless you change the order
of analogy. This experiment has been contaminated.
Now a fresh batch. Trust me, there's a point to this.
I'm counting back from a hundred and two
and you've got me standing in the middle of the highway,
blindfolded; this is what loving you felt like,
you said. But I think it was more dramatic in my head.
Nuclear fission and the seige of Dresden dressed
up playing Adagio in D minor; I'm dust. I'm dust.
I've become ash and misery and I'm trying to stay inside you
but you've been coughing a lot, and who's to say
you were holding your breath for something exciting,
I just know for a fact that at the end of this beep,
you'll know what to do and yet
you're not going to leave another message.

earlier today during service
I was struck by a strange vision--

that I was running breathlessly
through a misty field, terribly
afraid and naked with a .69 caliber
flintlock musket bucking against my
hip, and the mud did no justice, neither
did the deep grass stains on my belly,
to hide how truly piteous and terrified
I was.

As if somehow during the battle I had lost
my company or else deserted, been stripped
and cashiered--left to my own to roam the empty
wilderness that creaked and cracked
the air that shivered in my supposed dissolution
my feet caught in the dense mire, the very ground
that used to be so resolute, firm to touch
was giving in,
swallowing me without mercy,
I had been separated from my regiment, I thought.
But only deserters would think such a thing,
I had left and was lost and

the congregation began to rise to sing
but I was still there with burning lungs
desperate to find the colonel or captain
the leader or teacher
the father or
God.

I am not strong
as synaptic junctions
stutter and fail
and blood pulses hot
against thin arterial walls.

I cram sticky little secrets
into the space between
the mirror and the wall
and put on my best
**** eating grin-
hiding behind words
that slip and lukewarm
nihilism.

I am not strong
as outlines blur into
shimmering watercolor
and my hands grip the railing
for a fleeting sense of
functional equilibrium.

I give you only the things
that I deem worthy of letting go-
only the meek and sickening
remembrances of insanity,
the things that I can
romanticize aloud.

I am not strong
as my brain fills with
black thoughts and
death wishes like saccharine.

I am not strong
but you've never asked me to be.
You know that muscles pull
and that I only have the strength
to push.
You haven't tried to iron out
the lines of my smile yet
nor made demands
or promises that lie unkept.

I am not strong,
but perhaps
there is something
more.

it's abut 9pm and I decide I don't want to be alone



there was a car crash earlier that day up west towards Salida--
some Kansas man who was killed by a driver trying to pass
in the right lane, declared deceased on scene, another man
from Monument who was air-lifted to St. Thomas Moore,
no critical injuries.

I tend to ask God for these big signs, signs that I'll recognize. I tell him
that they need to be something I'll notice because you know me, sometimes I can't hear you. Anyway, signs, crashes. A Kansas man died.  It's 9pm and I pull on some jeans and leave the house.

I'm supposed to be at a rodeo dancing, but maybe I wasn't supposed to be there after all. I have this white dress in my closet that you can't even see, tucked between everything else because it's so thin, lays flat beneath the aztec smocks and cream cardigans. I take it out and brush it off, thread my fingers through the open lace--

10pm. When I breathe soft enough the stars look like they're hanging on strings, like I could reach up and snap them off,
they'd be no bigger than dew drops on a spider web
so light they'd drift up in the night breeze and
set up in my own natural atmosphere.

What good would it have done me to be there? I only ask
myself to assuage the warm fear i've been feeling since Friday
night, a lingering umbrage I did not think would stay--
I can see the white stitches in my jeans that look
like they're glowing,
smells like rain out here.
I wish I was out at Chaffey
for a quick moment, enveloping
someone else in this chanel perfume
makin' someone else envious of the
way another man got to spin me out--

I'm trying to be all these people at once, an  
audience of crowd pleasers piled into one body
It's so quiet, I'm so quiet up on the sideways knoll in
Florence, tired of letting people down easy off the sidewalk
curb and being tossed off the bridge over the state highway myself,
I can't help it, I want to say aloud.

I can't help that I am this way, collected.
calm in hearty hysterics, anxious to tell
you about how I've been fixed,
that warm fear growin' hotter
a coal for every man who suggested
I be less than who I am by pourin' more
into my cup,

I'm trying. I'm trying.

we're standing outside the grounds and
i notice how my forearms look remarkably
tan against the white bars, darker than the
loose wet sand out in the arena, a calf trots
by and darts off when a young boy flips a beer
cap at its head--

Ben looks out to the bleachers and goes so, I gotta ask
and I know what's comin' before it leaves his mouth,
know it's something about you, something that's probably
gonna sting a bit so I say, yeah? and I smile real nice like
I don't expect a bad thing--

and he peels a layer of skin from his knuckles and says that he went and asked Alan about me, about what kind of person I was--
that you up and told him I was real ****** churchy all full bore and what have you...so I go quiet and he looks over and gets this startled
expression, like I've gone pale. Which is funny, all things considered.
but he bumps my shoulder and says I won't bring it up again,
i just was curious

I shake my head because I know I'm good at hiding an
erratic heartbeat. I can see you leaned back somewhere with a
*** of copenhagen nestled into your front lip, real ****** churchy
comin' out of you sharp and smooth like a blade,
I imagine you might be hurt about it all,
what business have I got with a Rusher?
twice as crazy as you, probably.

I tell him I've got to go--gotta go because it's late,
because the rodeo is over, because pluto is 4.6 billion
miles from earth and I can feel its gravity--I gotta go.
While I'm driving home, I'm tapping out the syllables
and counting the letters, whisperin' real ******' churchy
to myself, incredulously, in agreement, partially because
I can't think of much else



I didn't expect that, really.
Not from you.

i.
your hand on my elbow,
shoulder, wrist, and i
pretend not to
notice

ii.
you sing quietly on the
way home, like maybe i won't
hear you but
i always do

iii.
call me doll, and that's
okay,
i can be yours to
play with

iv.
we smoke together for the
first time, and you blow
rings, and i dance
for you

v.
chew me up, spit me
out, it's fine just as long as you
don't watch me clean my
messes

vi.
you mention your girlfriend's
name and i
crumble

all weekend i fed cucumber skins
and apple chunks to Minokie
and several times i thought the old
corpses of tree trunks were fallen calves
leant to and packed with damp soil, white
roots stretched out under the overcast sky
peeking out of the natural mulch and fern
soft and raw

If I walked past the rocks quick like, they
looked like shoulders or kneecaps, angel heads
that the earth washed out, pines keeled over with
their innards exposed, the sound of veins being ripped
from the bedrock still audible

I started thinking of things based on where you
could have been or would have been
with me--sleeping patterns we might have
discovered, the narrow places we find we fit,
the hollows too cold and mountains just right--
how the night flashed behind my eyelids
like a buoy in tumult and the rain sounded like the footsteps
of someone stopping at the edge of my tent over and over

I keep casually mentioning your name because
it still sounds right, but i'm cautious around the syllables
as if i've taken clay to fold around the ends, spoken secrets
into sego lily petals,
I'm a little more down in the earth as if
i've been too high up in the clouds, i've picked up
this strange way of speaking that the old folks are
drawn to--they touch my wrists and pray with me
over their anemic daughters and passed sons--

they hear me.


I keep thinkin' maybe we're meant to be or maybe
you were the catalyst to an end of a softer life i'd been
living, one without the smell of cow pats baking, the dense
grass giving off steam, uncomfortably humid but it makes your
sweat kind of sweet, and the bees think we're honeysuckle, foxglove
jim hill mustard, soaked up in truck exhaust at 5 am,
a dry cold that advances on your lungs--
almost hurts the way it unabashedly fills you up,
doesn't feel sheltered, feels saturated and heavy with
possibility. Feels like the amber grass, newborns, cold tin roofs,
stars in the back of your throat.

tell me, was that in your blood? and when i dug splinters out of your
palm, when you were staring around my earlobes, did it spread? Did the birds pick you up and scatter you like wildflower seeds? it jumped river, through our mouths or elsewhere

we're not talkin but you're still here
we're not talking but I'm still there.

Travis stands outside the grounds
with me and listens while I recount
the past two months, several times he
sighs and knocks his ball cap up, takes
a rough palm and wipes it down his face,
holding his jaw briefly,

he's smaller in frame, my height, makes eye contact
and holds it, takes you in when he speaks. He's been
treated pretty rough from what i hear but still keeps the
back porch open for visitors and I guess I am one--
twisting the cap on and off a tube of lip gloss, we
talk quietly about his brother who is in and out of
the swinging doors, there are so many men with
blue plaid shirts in here and I can hardly keep track--

and when we head for the Dome, I maneuver through the
old carousers and dark drunks who lurk in plain view, men who
murmur of course, hermosa when I gingerly place my hands
on their shoulders and inch past the doorway, I am searching for
you, for your blue sleeve,
but instead find Travis' and we dance a slow song--

I think he understands how I'm feeling, might be the lack of a poker face, we two-step and I trip over his boots, and when we're done he
kisses my shoulder lightly.

If I wasn't so affected by the warmheartedness I'd tell you I'd barely
noticed, but I am, when people are good, they are much softer. Their
intentions are palpable and tender--
and maybe I find comfort in touching people which i don't do too
often--and for a moment that was all i needed was a hint of
kindness after being handed off
from man to man, from feeling
intensely right with your arms
looped around my waist
with my fingers loosely settled
in your palm--to stranded with a memory
too many times where
you walked off and
i still had so much
more to say, like,
I truly love you,
maybe.