Bees buzz like sirens,
I walk around them like a marriage bed
no one sleeps in me but empty shells.

What their stringers did was carve a
cavity right into the center of me. Summer is
not a time, but a place for sweat on chests
and hiding **** under leaves wet with dew.

I am a child, I eavesdrop.
Sunlight does not betray my fabric
soiled from conversations ending in rain.

Then, there are the warning animals:
go home everyone says.
But I have not a home, I have just places for
my sagging hips to lay until discovered.

And most of the time, I am invisible
hiding beyond clouds like snowed mountains.

If it sounds soft, it is not.
Villages are made from mattresses like me:
underground, the world loves tugging
on damp springs and spines while bees sing.

the grass dreams of a little girl
who will lay on its blades
again, shaking her small bottom

it feels much like warm wind
& baby bugs crawl into her hair
home, they whisper her name so

home is hope until the mom
kills every single one with soap
baby bugs do not know the

thoughts of tiny children, death
eats her skin & will turn grass
           brunette as she grows up

baby makes flowers
grow in my brain and my heart
all of my sad parts

My bones are crying on you, my eyes are
suffering from the weight of the skin –
we are the wrong man and woman to be in love,
I think and ask why you cannot just want me
when her body is the closest thing to a
beach without waves, mine a Rainy Sunday.

Oh, everything drags and pulls –
I will long for you through every hole I have
until there is a funeral for my sexuality,
a snuffing rose petal cradled close to my soul.

She is asking why you cannot only love her
but I just ask why you cannot want me –
an answer ends in Macintosh red, the final bite.

After an attempt, I will probably lay
like a god either in Heaven or the hospital –
no matter what I will no longer be human or alive,
rather a piece of air held under pond-water
and drifting to family members with soggy eyes.

No matter what the man I loved will not
be there to greet me: he, too, is kind of in between
timelessness and *** positions and breathing.

Should I ignore the rabid plea for that reason
or let it brush against my genitals?
The tensing muscles, the ******* goes high & low
like the mood of a tide confused by morning.

No matter what it will not feel pleasant
and pain will accidentally touch my shoulderblade
ignited from the palm of Father God himself –
my mother ate from it, then she died
so she could welcome me like an ambulance.

I remember how you could kiss me
with your body and face
even when your lips were across
the room.

I weave my fingers around
strings of yarn and grass their length
pretending it is your hair again –

I love the way wind shakes nature
just the way your curls
bounce when you ****** into me.

I remember how I hoped that you &
I have just one existence
so we will not forget our ocean
of saliva.

I tripped on a forest of roots & lost my clothes.
When this happened, I felt less a lady
in shame of uncovering from pink, frilly things

the shelter like feathers on a peacock or
ribbons track-marking a braid –

I was enclosed in such a house that I must have
become it myself. ****, I saw tiger-stripes
eating their way from my hips to bottom
and made a big taproot, a radix to the physical

me, as rosy as a flower in the dead of spring
even billowing as petals will for wedding vows –
the single, womanly cavity I concealed

how together we became such a dollhouse
for nature and its ***** hair:
I, taught to play with my own frilly, pink thing.

I would want you to have these machines
breathe for me if I forgot your name
and spill memories back into the blank spaces
from which you ebb and flow, going home –
because it could not have been I who
destroyed the person that I require so close.

In every language, I love you
and te amo
and je t’aime and
ich liebe dich and jag älskar dig and miluji tě:
let your city flood my insides, then bleed.

If I could, I would shout from the moon
to make sure the other men know I love you
and though they are beautiful,
their names do not matter nearly as much
to my brain, nor bring goosebumps to
the small of my back and top of my bottom.

My ******* fill your shirts just right –
they do, they do.
I am meant to be inside them
and you are meant to be within me, like air
******* from a windpipe to areolas’ pink.

I would throw my head forward like I do
when I am sad and settle in your lap
entombing my five senses in an aroma of love
we just made. I would lay myself in that
coffin again and again until I recalled
the exact elocution I used to form your name.

You are beating onto me like a wave
and sand shakes from my coast with each hit:
one day a man dived into me, now
he is a photograph honey-dewed with age.

I loved his language. It twirled as a song
forms dynamics, rhythm up high to a ceiling
a flood gathering from the floor –

I wanted him to make me buoyant like that
but he just spit in my mouth and made me
swallow, like I could swig a tongue
or gather hope from salty strings of saliva.
Did he know I felt the ocean crashing again?

It must have been a lucky guess unless
girls can appear as aquamarine as it,
starfish and seashells, their pale pinks desire
something brighter than Miami’s going air.

But I did not, only more than a portrait
that can be stolen away by high tide and sea –
how rough water gets, striking you and me.

You had me at least five times
none of which were ordinary & all of which were
in love. I stepped from my bedroom that night
to be handed you in a cup, the thing I want,
and when you said I was yours, you also said you
could be mine. Because we were in a garden
the scenery was made of grapes –
purple, needy, I should have known it was a lie.