A decade of trains that lost track
have just turned up in my esophagus,
they are all bile as I am all hands.

This is why I was never frightened by ghosts
and sea specters:

they have been inside of me
the whole time.  

Sometimes, hot coal would hit my cuticles,
I could see the steam.
I could feel something like wheels
spinning a web on my nail-beds;
something sat in me like I were a flowerpot.

All that remained were the sticks
of my skin, blood bubbling from below.

But they have been there
the whole time.
I have been a ship in a bottle,
I have been a conductor without knowing.

Fever outlined my spine with its fingers
and I felt I was being kicked by
a fetus.

I was a hallway for phantoms
that believed they still have their limbs
and if not, quills
or a fish with gills and a fin
or locomotive. Mechanical movement still.

How could I not realize
they were inside of me the whole time,

soaking up the nutrition from my throat
shifting the razor while I shave?
Thousands of train-ghosts
crawled from me by an engine of *****.

Not one knows where they are.

Everyone knows what my name is
In this little **** town
And I'd really like to give them
More to talk about
The drop outs
The tattoos
The break-ups
And the people-making-excuses-for-me-just-because-my-mom-died
Will never be enough
Gossip
So here goes
Every barn from Freeburg to Smithton
Up in smoke
No more kindling left to burn
In the middle of the night
And here goes
Every corn field
All the sorghum
All the wheat mowed
Cut down before its prime
Grain-based livelihoods
Grain-based lives
Gone.
And here's to all the old-timers
With their shot guns out
Sitting on the porch
Here's to all the life savings
All the small town banks
I'm about to knock down
Here's to cops who are
Terrible shots
And here's to getting out
Freeburg Famous
My name on everybody's lips
Giving the lifers
Something real to talk about

This afternoon, I smell like a hungry gardener
a green thumb with a wart attached:
both perfumes of a rose are discernible. The soil, the falsetto sweet
reaching up onto your nostril fur as monkey bars
until it can scatter seeds, some wild and collected by fruit.

Mother asks why my knees are shaded.
I have been on them, I say, breathing life into green berries.

Free them from that cage, their wire straitjacket
and breed breed breed:
this afternoon, everything I touch will stay alive, including me.

I am about to go down again,
like the creaking old elevator                            into
                                                                ­               the
                                                                ­               basement.

I know it
because I see it                    in my eyes                      gone dull.
In my lips drawn tight                    instead of                        smile         it was there for a while.
                                                          ­                       my usual

For a time         it felt nice           to feel nice.
For a while                                                            ­ I was happy.

I know this feeling
like I know myself                        because this is me

                                                             ­         depression.

Here, I am interrupted by being the only woman in the room –
the seventeen year old woman in a lace gown
that strays from her kneecaps, untouched but by air
and launching in the breeze for twenty sets of interested eyes.

Give me their heads on a platter
so that no one will ever finish watching me waltz.
I am a bachelorette, but taken by all these mouths that tell me
who else I am or could be, supposed to be in this ether.

Heel, he says. I am a dog. Roll onto your back. I am his *****.
But we shed our skin like snakes in a corner no one sees.

Log-trucks reel these houseplants.
The dog will bark, weeds flood a window –
tires resonate as though in a metal pencil box
                  but at least I am not alone.