Now alone in February,
little ghosts roam in your nuclei
as warm honey swelling from down to up
and shaped into circles just as so.

They wear you like a coat –
they make babies on the linen.

When you talk to other red-faced girls,
phantoms spread their legs
and replicate the words
into antennae that thaw your lone chest.

I apologize for having supposedly left,
but see, it is me you’re feeling
when you cannot breathe.

Girls have beautiful legs and men have beautiful hearts,
both I love to squeeze, both I love to open
hide my gold locket inside like a ticking bomb:
I use the chain to lasso arteries and muscles for me to chew on
but the necklace unbolts for a souvenir collected inside.

It could be the curly hair of his shin, one wisp from her neck
I previously tugged on with my teeth. I performed
open-heart surgery on a man and open-leg surgery on a woman
both called me back to say a second goodbye
and I wonder, I wonder which farewell will be the final.

When will the mementos be massacred
glued to a comatose form, deceased into an emotionless resin?
I could amputate their limbs and turn off the pacemaker.

Twenty seven months of sunlight showers,
and I am still white –
can he pull me into vinegar?
Make my skin peel into another shade?

No one will recognize.
Our relationship is an oasis, not on a map
but I can spread like an ancient one –

used to being fingered and opened,
garden is a home of myriad wedding vows
when the wind gusts, he feels a promise
touching concealed cartilage

of his ear. No one has spoken so low and
has been heard by anyone even if
the feeling hangs like ferns from a rooftop.

And our body, our single form
hums in a similar silhouette with him above.
No one can amputate his seed from me:
I keep growing into last December

open a stitch, in you go
find places others do not know
we are in a cardboard box or emergency room
but it does not matter, I want to *******

and so we will, we do
like two siblings figuring out body parts –
without meaning to be, you end up hard

something like this has to be okay
burying remnants of yourself inside me before
the rest withers away

and even when you’re old
I will let you have me on the floor

Babies in buckets, I would give them a penny
for every drop of blood that trickles
into the drain. An infant’s length is a wheelbarrow
standing on its tippy-toes to see into crawl spaces

and they barely squeeze between. Yesterday,
I touched inside the tawny dwellings of myself.  
I tell everyone that this is where the children grow.

Up and maturing like wine, like fine honey beads:
this is the foster home where they’re safe
not abused by bowels. I coil my intestines to
frail wrists, around the neck expanding
giraffe legs held straight through my esophagus. If

babies in buckets require kisses or cuddles,
these folds will mother them.

How the starlight will keep heat inside, I watch a
moon protracted at night and hold it to my
fingertips so the newborns can see
what eyes sacrifice for a ***-hole person & place.

cement galaxy,
moments stuck in you today
will be lived later.

muddy lungs
death flickered a coal light inside you
this morning as I separated from

the moon, my crater
my coffin

stars eat from the palm of my hand
festering caterpillars
from the stomach’s boiling acid

only the freshest babe
I selected from within an evening sky

will I *****
to not swallow, but choke on
and become as noxious as my lungs

African poesies will not awaken there
kneel, wilt, flowerlike.

He called me his little good girl:
it was less of a compliment, more a command
that if I did not follow every order,
he would tell on us. I had to walk with his limp
so he would not derail my secrets, make

my boyfriend mad. It only worked because
I was acting like a bad, bad girl
with someone old enough to be my dad.

I remembered he could put a gun
down my throat if I misbehaved or wore a skirt
too long or too short, too pink or too black
or if I seemed too happy or too sad –
good girls have no emotions, just let men take

their breath away. I panted under my sheets
and I came to the thought once,
soon after, this man, he made me bleed.

Satan is a bird at the end of a twig
I picked up from a peach-colored lane just last year.
A dry morn, though the day was April or May
like he knew he would be fanning cherry flames soon.

The men are always in power: God and Satan.
I made a pact that I would be both –
goddess and femme fatale, bite the ears of egg shells.

He broke from one a ghost and had a beautiful voice –
high in the tide of treetops waving goodnight,
opened like an abscess on pores
and gave the terrain a kick. I mothered him,
over time Satan became my library pianist, my kid.

Girls taught him everything there is about
astronomy, little did we know he was a citizen of the
moon and pushed everyone else off the side
or into a yellowing crater. He looked so small.

No one believed his voice could be
so thunderous even when he created storms himself –
including the one that drew me to his feather
glued to moss and maggots in an attractive place,
froze and lone, Satan’s existence is my fate.

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

The desperate are animals under the moon
howling infrequently, ******-breeders. I, a part of
the thousand fragrances they simmer upon –
my mouth around a tree trunk that rots
in summer, boiling like eggs or water for tea.

God loves me, he loves me not.
I know I have broken my promises to Heaven –
disappointment lavishes me in aches so velvet
I swear I could make a coat from them.

We scream for womanly voices and pictures on a
wall of mothers kissing or showing a breast,
the ****** is pink. I melt inside my head.
Every morning we scavenge for the same sun –
bright under the glass, soon no one is loved.

Not even my brother hands me his tongue –
when he does, it parishes to black soil
and I pretend it is my child. She has hair just like
us, when she is happy, when she is well.

I rock her until the wolf-hollers halt,
my skin is her mansion. Her sprinkles on me are
as thick as grime doused the door for company
welcome here, she is warm as she is alive
though she didn’t come from inside me, my eggs.

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.

Men grow on my fingers
and I assault them when I write
until each becomes impotent,
I will never let anyone hurt me.

Their pulses stutter and echo
as if I keep them in a barn
but they’re hard under my skin,
their erections like callouses.

Some get restless and none cry
because they know I watch:
I am not here to be present, I
am not here to let people inside.

Never were you made of Earth
you live alone inside me

and somewhere the December still exists
and the moments in which we kissed
and felt each other melt into liquid pouring down

our throats
my heart is a rocking chair it sleeps in

a child, too, your name whispered
the language of foreign
countries
and these women have no word for goodbye

or terrain or sunrises or seasons
so babes do not age  

until streets wind to the mound of mine
you changed, loosened
our two halves make a hole

Where
I eat the breeze

that your lean lips propel
and it flows from my clavicles to toes so
you exist everywhere
but everything’s as solid as gold or teeth marks.

The shelter sleeps like a ghost at night
and I walk with him during the
day, his one shoe on my right foot –

I barely look like a woman,
or if anything, a ******* waiting for
someone to provide her a second
glass slipper & slip off her ball gown.

She will lay on her back in a motel –
beautiful as a tulip’s head
nursing on fertilizer for sustenance
but largely agreeable with champagne.

Even lying on pillows like a pubescent
chest, perky and barely touched,
she is a **** alone with leather boots.

No one knows his name but
he comes and goes and feels like home,
the fuzz still in her eyes from sleep
still collected from a previous divorce.

I visit the shadow with my tongue
and only mothballs when the sun sets –
an uncomfortable rat in the soles too.

Your bones are trying to capture me
like a cage –

I supposed I should let myself gape open
the way you do, and swallow the
whole city’s disappointment

as a pill. It turns acid in my stomach,
I imagine the bile is scarlet
but the powder is a faint green –
wrinkled up and dissolved into my drink  

I become the same
locked, aging inside your hay fever.

Until I can plead for you to not separate –
do not open yourself up or
let me slip once I’ve gotten warm.

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.

Everyone draws me as a different girl –
one in a white sheet, or as pale as one
but only you make me out to be
something carnal, alive under blankets.

The first to view me as a thick piece of
stationary, written on and dirtied.

And I say the same words, but only
you consider them something to drink –
a voice broadcasting for my open body.

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.

I am still breathing
and parts of you are so black –

looking asleep on a pile of cigarettes
the tobacco tied into rings
kept wrapped around your finger,
I’ve kept you tied close to me

so that every particle
you ingest, everything you can think
lets me know you are living.

my beautiful charred
angel, do not break your stings.

why don’t you open me up & sip from my heart
then glance towards your landscape
and pull it towards you with an umbilical cord
stolen from one of my countless holes, gaps in me

why don’t you open the sun up & let it breathe
just the way my pancreas pumps, sinking in
                      and spitting up
little shards of glass you wedged inside

gathered from tree-babies, lifted from the sky
the world’s so green but you would rather separate  
                                           my thighs
         see the realm that grows in my body

give the fauna a wet kiss & sip the gore stringing
from the core of it, pure poreless skin
i tell you what to do but i really just want you
to want me the way naïve terrain curls around life

I think I want to be with you everywhere
and not just somewhere

as though the moss is our carpet,
rain sculpts a feeling of growth in my bones
I am a tree. A meadow.  But you lie still –
wait for my breeze, you simmer away
a dandelion.

Your hundred florets spread like wings
and fly somewhere on me –
a promiscuous garden. Somewhere &
everywhere.

your hair is on my desk
it must have fallen out when I
found your comb and caressed it

with my nose, my fingertips
I gathered one last whiff
of your scent

your hair is on my desk
follicles of it are kind of dead
but I think I can feel your breath

thank you for leaving me this
small present.

Two are there, one is like a rail
a forget-me-not stem –
I forgot him. The memories were
dug from my girlish head yet

there is a fever in his grave
weeds severed his head, he looks
more dead the
farther I back away and the
garden is more & more beautiful.

I begin to stick up for
the bristles, the maggots I hid –
at least someone tastes him.
At least his ghost can lead on one

more smaller thing, barely
nothing. Yes, I realize I was not
anything but a parasite inside

something who was already so
close to dying, someone bigger –
someone darker than me. I
chose the second.

He had a fever about him, too
but it just lit up his cheeks
and his eyes, though they were
always closed. At least
I can remember they are brown.

Two are there, I am impressed
with one flushed man
while the other became too dead.

I met you, and you kissed me
with your words but not your body

you said I made your pulse speed
up and your heart explode
but I never could feel it

so we simmered down
slow until

we met again and you kissed me
with your words
but also your kinetic lips.

I think a fairy sprinkled sad dust on my face
to make dead things grow in the
wrong place, and now I walk around with
a belly full of tired leaves
thinking that I would rather not live, not be.

I tell my family that I am sorry but
no one understands what has possessed me –
just the sad fairy, I say.
She cast her sad spell and it won’t go away.

Your hands rap-tap-tapping on my thigh
the beat sounded like a rhyme –
I replay it in my head, it sounds again
like two bodies swaying across a city line
and wave the departing trains goodnight.

Neither moves to enter it. We just sit.
Your hair grazes a bone along my neck –
lays long enough to curl down my chest,
I count the seconds where we rest.

Everything has become a song to me
and the tune plays effervescent on repeat,
passing as buildings do from our seat in
this car strumming down December leaves –
seven days I had you from jaw to knees.

I kissed a man and he called me a *****
the name floated like a swan upon glass waves
but I tucked it into my nightgown,
I saved it away. Then one morning he said
it again and I wore it just like pearl feathers –
oh, such a shine that brightened my face!
I am a *****, I told him, but at least I get laid.

It is nice to see this apartment building from
the bottom, rather than your balcony
and swallow the again-stammer of jumping.

An elder still has her Christmas lights hung –
I wonder if I could get tangled in them.

There is also the question of garden lips
a daffodil and whether or not I could **** it.

Instead, I have a stutter of being so small
I could climb to your bedroom and not care
to swing loose, soft bones, to not need to fall.

I have known girls who can only be held quietly –
that if you speak, it destroys their bodies
so instead you step around her thoughts and
touch until she understands how to exhale again
only by word of action, our language of fingertips.

Sometimes I failed. The decibel meter
climaxes far too high, she does not breathe again.
She gets so plum-faced I know she wants to die
and those girls, sometimes they do anyway
even if you pet their ribs all through the night.

Or they become just a gap where words once
rose. Her name rolls off the tongue but
there are unnecessary spaces inside, melting like
snowflakes when rain isn’t quite cold enough –
to become nonexistent, a piece of evaporated dust.

She can kiss, can hug, but no longer can she love –
an embrace is nothing if it is quiet and girls’
are in silence. I have known these girls who do
not feel, but sometimes I wonder if they were
real and simply vaporized flake by flake like snow.

The man I fell in love with is tall and dark.
I want to center jewelry on his neck and fingers,
lace it between edges, pits. He is tall so
my lover has more acreage than I ever will –
I can hide my secrets in his head. I
can wrap my veins around his wrists, I can love
the scars in place of where a child once bit.
I will even show him where I am most
pink to make sure he knows what brightness is.

I felt more pure after I lost my innocence:
your breath on mine, the scent of angels
chorused from our neck to spine to cheek
and drifted to a southern ridge of my body –
I knew, I knew it was the best I’d ever be,
merged with a man who found my purity.

It was light on the skin, a delicate blend
of morning’s hellos and an evening’s rest –
you you you grabbed a ******’s pale breast
and I I I let you ******, handle, change it.

Then no longer a girl, I laid on my side –
oh, how I felt when you were still there!
I was not chilled or lonely, I became alive
and kissed your coarse edges I had known
inside my frame, my pinkness apart so
he would find my purity going by, by, by.

He said that I was buried alive
in the flesh that carries me to death –
the filthy pounds of it, peach but stained
with moss and weeds and bird nests.

And that they enfold me in such
dim light that I barely even look alive,
nightingales knocking from side to side.

He said that I tell them to come in
they breathe my air and bite my limbs –
this carcass lay still for the pecking dribs
suffocated by flora that shall take it.

The ivory flower
in stone, she cannot move
and breathe as petals do

separate
and separate

I see the centerpiece,
the head reaching from a
black hole

it says if you do not
move, I will want to be

inside of you –

an ivory flower fell from
the stem from which
it bloomed

and became as hard as
stone

separate
and separate
the flushed folds of June.

Eyes that storm through vicious seas
look brighter than lilacs or lilies,
and perhaps they smell just as sweet –

one nectar branch, it has its wood
carved by man or animal or weather

still like a stem the corneas stand
in their emeraldness, tornadoes cut a
trail from open arms to that branch –
see its width and drop tearlets inside,
the descent is what turns you bright

as stars petrifying the sky, lilacs and
lilies bloom in the heart of an eye.

I am glad that I can love you again,
take you from the attic and
remove the quivering death things –

we are alive! Not the ghost of
lovely beings loving, but ourselves.

And how we sin together, how we
have the courage to inhale each
wine-sweet cupboard’s wood chips:
upon bread, the wheat can breathe

a fawn shade your skin, the lamp
of which granted the only light
speckled for months in your eyes –

I gave you enough, but not truly a
love to life for. It was a brother

of dust sheaths or a sister of winter
leaves, their final lapse of green
having swam from her mother tree:
I am glad that I can love you again

and that you continue to love me –
independent of the attic packed
with our dark, decomposing things.

You were as small as a seed –
     a package I had opened and life
                    jumped out at me,

blank, but ready to grow.
                No, I said. No no.

       I do not love the things that
are not already alive –
    that way, they face no death.

And so I aborted you that day,
     Goodbye, seed, I said.

A package won’t let you breathe,
             may you jump out from a
        more deserving belly.

I buried thorns in your bag so
you would know not to leave again

you played them like a harpsichord
breathed the rose-scent in

& watching the blooms, I knew
that you could not disappear at all

instead floated on for a little while
until as rain once more you fall.

Perhaps I will have love made to me
soon by a kiss that sloshes like sewage
and feet hung limp over the carpet:
our entrails laced in its plush, a spiral.

Mine tried so hard to reject yours –
as you sipped my pink flesh, coral hit
a very funny part of us I thought I
would bleed. But it was just me
opening, closing, opening & shutting.

The words were local: I need I need,
still enveloped an umbrella above
our pea-shaped, wintery things.

And spherical as scallops or stone,
I had mind enough to breathe in body
air, dust, slivers of your bedroom –
the corner where another love
will be warped & coiled inside of me.

I thought if I gave you my body
you would grind it to dust
and discharge the split parts
in *****, cradled by my blood –

soon a garbage pile of us
would creep into the subfloor &
build a mausoleum of muck

jade, and stone, a heather grey –
my peach insides have their
own place.  To sleep, to hunger
taunt their tiny bownecks away

when I gave you my body
you did the same, handed me a
heart and I minced it to grain.

Does it not feel like rain today to you,
my delicate ghost?

That or the wind has lust,
blowing up my skirt, it must see the
white you left unattained by men
I say for you, these storms are
a chance to greet pureness again.

You have an O-mouth
the way your whispers ring like howls:
borrow the air, evaporate mud.

I hear such a sound and know that
virginity won’t be enough –
what tears do fall
from your great blue waterspout?

Do they know, my delicate ghost,
they are but pieces of you dropped in
my hands?

When a lace funnel carries your final
god-spits cleansing our land
you are so delicate, but I shall ask –
is it like rain for ghosts, is it sad?

I hate how you become crystalline
losing that stiffness laid upon your arms,
as if daisies grew where your nerves
once were, they had trembled up –
wet climate, trembling down your face.

And the little army of tears builds
a mountain between us, lava seeps red:
I am unarmed compared to sadness.

You, bright and so clearly agonized,
the tortoise shell is clever in its respite –
shields green from gentlemen until
they hardly believe that they are alive.

I despise what the dampness can do
sometimes slipping you rigid while I am
concrete asleep in a nearby bedroom,
under linen and hardly a human –
your shine so pure it overwhelms mine.

Twisting like fingers,
caught around these curtains –
a pattern, two colors and
more dimensions than the sea.

One wave shivers upon
our house’s shoulders, neck.
It looks so aged and wrinkled.

The rash makes rafts
of its skin, purpled from burn
and the nerves become tin
cans or rooms without guests:
she napped on the bone.

Jealous that there is not
flowerpots in less, not color –
death’s but a mirror of black.

And giving pearls to
maids: I watched them pick
the suede from clamshells
and become a mother flood.

Nature was here with
dovetailing white linen sheets
soiled by flame, cancer birth.

A strawberry bud chest and
orbs of blueberry earth: the terrain,
it earthquaked with flutters. A coquette,

will you throw me in the air like confetti?
I am a tear you do not see swell,

my saltwater tastes sweet,
honey branded twists of left to right –
fill your spoon with this sadness
make believe you are swallowing what is

left of me. Just a wall of stars
melting the apple-grip or banked cloth,
I move with wind breath, bud chest.