She stood in the wheat field at the golden hour. She saw the melting horizon in all directions. No mountains, no hills, no fences, no walls. The wheat flicking her thighs and behind-her-knees, she stood frozen like she would fall up into the sky or roll down the edges and right off. She had come for a walk among the wheat, for ideas, for answers.
She left with less than she thought she had.

As a kid, I kept eating things that weren’t food –
fingernails, scabs, hair, staples, rocks, marbles.

Sometimes I still wonder if there’s a Lego head
floating around in my intestines.

I’m anxious about my two loose front teeth.
Every time I lick them, they get looser and looser.


I keep checking with my tongue if they’re still loose and each time I do, I make them looser and looser.


I close my mouth tight to stop.
But the clenching is a catalyst for two soft, dull snap snaps and the teeth are out,
lying on my tongue

and so I swallow them.


All that night, I’m sick,
imagining the two teeth chomping and chewing up my insides.

The tooth fairy comes anyway.

I stretch forward, elongating my neck, making the hairs that grow down onto my nape prickle,
envisioning
my true horse-nature.

I’m hooves clopping on river rocks. My mane combed to one side, my angular muzzle huffing.

I’m strong and sturdy – muscle and a soft steel kind of strength. And yet at the
whistle of a windblown reed,

I’m gone,
scattered and spooked.

I trace the angles that connect weakly on my rawboned face. Strong lines
never broken never snapped,
just shifted and sifted easily.

I stand before others, pulled loosely together, unsettled in my people-clothes.
Loyal – love me.
Wild – but not too tightly.

I sit for sketches  
sometimes hours sometimes minutes sometimes seconds sometimes months.

I look like a human,
solid to the fingertips of others pressing in – but  

I’m a ghost.

I’m burned by the red clay of a canyon wall, shiny from the sun. My sweat reflects ribbons of
wet diamonds
at the bottom of a cold, fast river.

During construction on our house,
both toilets were taken out.
And I had to **** so bad.
I held a trash bag to my **** and **** a long snake in it.







I’d never seen my **** out of water before.

The inside edge of a cattle skull,
left in the middle of the desert
for as long as it took the wind
to blow soft dust through it until
it was white bone
with pulsing shadows.

The underside of a mallard’s wing – stretching
out for flight across an emerald
algae green manmade pond
behind a leaning trailer, where
a man with cancer and a beer
lives.

The inner curve of “Class of 1972”
carved into the cement
outside a tiny school where
an old man walks by
for the thousandth time,
wondering

I ran over a squirrel that was already dead.