*(My fingers won’t stop growing like shells!
My fingers won’t stop growing,
but without water, just with food!)*
As I stand in this bathroom stall
in this congested church
I can’t stop thinking
about how much I hate my fingers, about how much larger
they suddenly seem. This stall is stained
in blood and vomit
and graffiti that reads, “girls day 11/13/14.”
Nothing seems so sad and so dry as this stall does.
I think of you sitting in the pew
with your hand on the thigh of the girl
whose hair is sheared short as though
it were Judgment Day and she were an apple tree,
its branches cut into small, fragile pieces.
On Judgment Day
my grandfather died
and everybody in my family
and everybody in my town
went to the funeral
except for me
who cried
and cried and cried
and I’m still crying
for the way his skin used to fold over
like a moon violent in its softness:
1. he’s a dead man with a body like a fish
who has just ripped off its scales.
2. he’s a dead man who before he died liked to stand
on top of the one cliff that looks out onto town
and yell, “I will not spill my guts!”
But he died anyway.
Would I be lying if I said I loved my grandfather? Would I be lying
if I told you who I loved?
Here: I will tell you who I love, for a dare (triple doggy dare style)
Here: this is an experiment
Here: on Judgment Day (on the day my grandfather died)
we’re all experiments; we’re all experimenting with those we love
in terms of the way we kiss them:
we go into the woods
just to touch each other’s chests.
We lie on tops of rocks and I kiss you
as though I still need more fat on my huge body.