blake said something
interesting, prefaced by
i told you i'm not educated
as if he's begun every sentence
with that since he could believe
himself--

i just thought ya'll had
to be in the same book, maybe
not on the same page--

and he laid his hands out on his
lap as if he were tryin' to read himself

and ya'll are just different books
and i figured
maybe that was so
maybe we were two
fictions in the wrong
section--maybe I was
paperback, maybe I am
prose, maybe I am an anthology
of asides, of footnotes and maybe
you weren't even a book
just a slip of sheet music
to mark my chapter--


dunno, I say, laughing.
but I should go home now.




I should go home now.

there is more to it all
than running away,
which i have always
and never done

i used to cap my
bones in steel
wash them over with
milk, stand at the river's
edge and feel myself sink
in the pierce,
without ever wading
out,
you could call it a somatic
symptom, as if blowing away
were a disorder--
and yet feeling heavy
enough to sink a thousand
ships but they
should know i'm
no Helen.

people only knock

for the warmth, outstay

their welcome,

i've never wanted to

love quickly

i want to lay each

brick, caulk every corner

and be

*sure

i wish i had figured out earlier
that it was not my secret to keep

the story of the mechanic's hands that only knew how to break things
starts small and quiet


a feverish night in june
reaching out for the first time
in balled up fists
then palms opened to the world
in demand

then, pressing into linoleum
then, gripping the handlebars of a bicycle
then, wrapped around yellow number 2 pencils illuminated by fluorescent light bouncing off white brick walls

then, for many years, nothing but the cold metal of a rusty wrench

i said, i like your filth
teach me how to be grimey
you're only allowed to touch me with dirt underneath your fingernails
i said, i'm young but i know what it's like to be covered in black grease


these hands have touched many
held onto some
left none clean and pure, or easy on the eyes
in their calloused glory, lifting the pleated skirts
two parts of a whole that's only purpose was to destroy

i wonder in the time i have spent
hands under sink
body in bubble baths
fingers down my throat
purging a gasoline stained, black grease, mangled-with-wrenches childhood

were the mechanic's hands pressed together in prayer

did they ever get scrubbed clean?

i want to know
who is more sorry
out of the two scared voices in the microphone, echoing through the court room

your lawyer clicks his pen
i don't know what to do with my hands
or my words
when they ask me how it feels to be a victim of the man sitting in front of me
man with rottweiler grin
man with my innocence wrapped in plastic and stuck in his pocket for later
man who's gun i've held in my hands but never shot

i watched you beg
but who's asking who for forgiveness?

there's a mess in the kitchen
an urge to fill the bathtub
a pack of pall malls emptying one by one by the hour
a display of constants, i wonder
*how do i sit so still?

if there were words to describe the past few months, i would cut them up, silver knife to granite, into lousy pieces and throw them in a *** to boil
turn the fire down when it starts to smell like bathwater, nail polish remover, and tobacco
if you're asking what it feels like to be nothing, i'll serve you this
abjection by the spoon full

I stand ankle deep
in the cool, rushing river
and watch the minnows
kissing my toes
with starlight quickness,
licking for some sort of
sustenance.

I listen to the siren song
of the forest,
slow and verdant
like the echo of fronds
unfurling delicately
in the mottled sunlight
and aching with longing.

I let the shadows move
through me,
leaving a human shaped
space
where maybe once
there beat a slow heart
lazily trickling blood
through intricate maps
of veins and capillaries.

I let the water rush past me
and I think of hands
folding and unfolding
and flowers wilting
and rejoining the dirt
in a poetic display
of circularity.

Time oozes forward
with a finite smirk,
leaving a lucent film
of memories
that haunt me,
of smiles that are
lost to me.

There is laughter now,
ringing eerily
amongst the trees
like a foreign language
in a land of silence
and shadow creatures.

The river runs through me
and I am paralyzed
by the singularity
of this moment.