All the bricks I have thrown at cars in the past week
seem to be transparent
and as weightless as an opal –

I wonder how it is that something so
beautiful and alive
can feel so light, hardly existing except to the eye

but
then again, I have known too much death to believe
anything good is meant to last.

I think that candlesticks
grow from out of the ground and believe that

I can reach starvation by not going
out dancing
for two nights in a row. The sunlight makes me *****
and undeserving of his love
because now everyone can see why I am

not good enough.
I created this loneliness all on my own,
there is a gap between the ring and my finger
second farthest from the left –

men put so much weight on whether or
not my ring finger
is metal plated. I guess I do, too. My hands purge

after they have binged on him
and when I promised

all my lovers that
I would get lighter for them if they wanted,
he bought me a white dress
which lights me up like a match or shooting star.

His naked hands, so cold
I become lavender

sticks poking from lace sheaths, wanting to
be a wedding dress
or just a piece of someone in love

the powder, aroma of a man
who forsook his lover last spring.

Her tomb is just a box filled with earth
that opens to the pearly
gate of heaven

and each of her legs have grown
stiff because god so desperately needed to

shape a marble mold of the most
perfect being he
ever created and killed way, way too soon.

(the road has ended as
many stories as it has begun)

Hot concrete pried her mouth open
and I will be the one to
sing through it until she gets her voice back

like using sugarcane
to lure clouds into leaving the sky.

two dimples, not perfectly round

teeth yellowed and
paws brown
from graves dug for small dead things
she wanted to hold, to keep

her nose
like a wet autumn
cool rain in the days before winter

(I will not remember it as
two nostrils
submerged in blood, taking her air)

she sung the way other
dogs would bark

her gifts
were always bigger than her

her toes still have their imprints
on my skin, sharp like
the needles
I hoped someone could save her with

but only she could do that.

she sleeps where she always did
barely underground

the earthworms
give her new whiskers, caterpillars
will share their fur

because hers is in a plastic bag
on my dresser and
her skin is where she
would want it, she dug her own grave

so I would know
she is always going to stay safe.

When they ask you to identify
my body, it is okay
if you reveal our secret –

how you move the hair from my eyes
with paper clips
and melt them into my skin
to try to make me indestructible.

all I want for christmas
is a jealous lover who will wrap me up
in bows and paper
for no one else to touch (i mean
                                          hurt)

The biggest lesson in nothingness I have ever received
was your hands clamped down on her ***
expecting me to still be able to breathe, six hundred miles to the east
when all my insides were insects
feeding off my feelings and trust in your love.

I did not even have a phantom of a thought
that could touch you or flow like autumn wind in spring. There
was nothing as far as I knew
and so there was nothing, although
her mouth around you should have left a bruise.

I thought of you as something as isolated as the moon, except more
beautiful, less haunting to a girl with nightmares
because you stayed still during the
night when it’s too scary for me to open my eyes –
I believed there was nothing to see (I was wrong I was wrong).