i want to dye
my hair and tattoo my skin
so that the changes
you’ve been noticing in me
look like they’re
on purpose.

Silently lie in the grass,
On the hill above the lights.
Steal a kiss,
In between ,
Each drag on this cigarette.
And
Let's
Take bets on which is more
Dangerous.

i have found what you are like
the rain,

            (Who feathers frightened fields
with the superior dust-of-sleep. wields

easily the pale club of the wind
and swirled justly souls of flower strike

the air in utterable coolness

deeds of green thrilling light
                                  with thinned

newfragile yellows

                      lurch and.press

—in the woods
                      which
                              stutter
                                        and

                                              sing
And the coolness of your smile is
stirringofbirds between my arms;but
i should rather than anything
have(almost when hugeness will shut
quietly)almost,
                  your kiss

i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite new a thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body.  i like what it does,
i like its hows.  i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones,and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
i like, slowly stroking the,shocking fuzz
of your electric furr,and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh….And eyes big love-crumbs,

and possibly i like the thrill

of under me you so quite new

i.
There is a small bruise
spreading across your forehead
like wine across the body of a saint.
Your forehead is resting on my sheets,
cotton and white like sinners. Our bellies
are sweaty and naked. My belly has been bloated,
spread out and looking like a high peak, for over
a week, and I’ve never not wanted you here,
in my bed, on top of my bed, more than now:
our shirts are both blue, our shirts are both
lying on my floor. I am shivering, trembling
like moths in a burning house.

ii.
In a dream we are walking through
a train station that looks like an
alleyway and you are letting go of my hand
slowly and I am feeling like a church
made of grass and my limbs are feeling
like graves and across the train station
that looks like an alleyway there is a girl
in long clothes beckoning to you and you
come and I am sprung up drenched
in pools of my own sweat as though it were
July all over again.

Driving there the trees start to look like my old baby teeth  
and my skin starts to feel like the bruises of a mother I have not
spoken to in three years. There people sit in their striped foldout
beach chairs in the parking lots of gas stations and watch the cars
go by and the women wear dresses covered in flowers that swell
like skeletons down to their ankles and the dogs when they bark
sound like stretched out skies.

Summers until I was 17 spent there in the lake,
the lake where for the first time I held my breath for ten whole seconds
and where Tommy from across the street drowned himself and where
for two weeks I couldn’t swim without crying from the panic
that bloated and ballooned out in the cryptic wells of my chest. Until I

was 17 there within the walls of the house painted white as a
canker sore and in my bedroom lying on the wooden floors
my belly the first time you came was too bare and too large
and after that I did not speak to you for a week and when
I finally opened my mouth I couldn’t stop crying, my face
swollen as fish roe, and I never loved you more, and then

I never loved you more than I did on my porch for the last time,
you standing there looking gauntly and saintly as a bruise and me
with hunched shoulders, I couldn’t stop shaking, I never stopped
shaking, here I am in this car and it is air-conditioned and I am
still shaking.

Neighborhood boy dies this summer.
Now you are in love with a ghost.
At the funeral you hate your body. There
you realize that your thighs have been
growing rapidly, like an infant’s breath,
and your stomach looks mountain ranges.
The boy in the casket is thin as ember. You
swell with jealousy. You do not cry. The last
funeral you went to was for your grandfather
and you didn’t stop asking questions,
about where he was going and who he’d be
living with. Now you are all silent stuffed animal.
You have not gone to church in two years, have
only prayed when the boy has been listening.
You could not love Christ if you tried; you haven’t
tried. You only drink his blood to feel as though
you are being touched by hands that aren’t yours,
or your parents, or the boy’s. Your hands look
like pet birds, always. Your hands are trembling
underneath your dress, pinching at your stomach.

A shallow lake off of I-95. My mouth was a water fountain. My back was arched the way my mother’s was the day she gave birth to me. My belly was round and steep like the high peaks that circled our watery bodies like branches of snakes. By the lake there were woods and in the deep mouth of those woods we lay with sweaty arms and burnt legs. You groaned as though your mouth were full of wolves. My eyes were tightly sealed. I thought mostly of my father and of the bed that I slept in when I was three years old. I thought about my grandfather’s hands, too, stained with beer and old milk. It was like I was leaving my mother’s womb all over again. Thought: this is what it will be like the day I give birth. Thought: the trees are bent at their waists the way my brother always is; he sinks into himself like ocean. Back at the lake you unwrapped a pack of cigarettes and I unwrapped my mouth, vomiting into the sand. Nobody else was there. I remember you always smelling like smoke. That entire time we were awful drivers.

you sit here weaving words into stories like the sea;
while i fumble with alphabet soup in the corner.