My uncle insists that he accepted God into his heart
when he was six years old.

His daddy was a preacher too,
his momma stickthin red-headed submissive
and lovely
he remembers them as lovely folk, but he was lonely.

Art did not exist back in those days
neither did color television, sometimes the sunshine
raised too much hell for babes to go outside.

He was lonely, he insists,
he knew that he did not belong on Planet Earth
if the universe was a legitimate thing (nobody knew
for sure in those days).

He decided to believe in God like his daddy
at the promise that Jesus would ride him on a rocket
ship to Mars or Heaven or something
after his body staled,
but I argued that he must have wanted to be dead

sooner than his time
because space and Heaven are really great things,
he must have wanted to **** myself for them.

I did not believe him until he told me that
mental hospitals did not exist back in those days
else they would have put him in one.
Somehow he turned seventy last week, still breathing.

Baby called me Rusalka,
having the same number of syllables as my name.

Moonlight tossed me in a river to awake
fins from my toenails
to bird-sing to the handsome until I am unalone

mortality, mortality
as clean as the banks of a landfill.

Our child would nap in a basket of ripe fruit
strung to a willow and birch

description of me, “perpetually wet from something”
or alexandrite
golden by dusk though with a jade sunburn;

hair so long
would *** a rainforest’s feet if it had a pair.

Suicide on the tip of one’s tongue
now saltwater buoyant on the roof of a mouth
I was out of wedlock,

mother anchored my wrists with tangly fieldroots
right below our old tire swing

and

Baby simply meant I touch
everyone with my laugh, and it makes them dead.

There was nothing I was ever so ashamed of
that I dumped it in a river to drown,
but one time my best friend accidentally tossed my pink fishing pole
into the bayou when a spider dangled from the line.

We were eight, everything was wishy-washy
because she called herself a mulatto like it were an insult
and my older friends kept mentioning that my mom walked herself

to a liquor store very late at night
twelve-packs bruising her German-colored shoulder.
I did not tell them my father had hidden away her car keys.

Girls teased me and I still wanted to kiss their cheeks at goodbyes,
The Little Mermaid featured at our sleepovers
saying, “kiss the girl,” so I did
but we stopped talking when I bought my training bra,
it proved what was in my skirt, my lips could not touch them again.

You cannot kiss a girl if you are a girl,
even if Disney movies say it is okay because Mickie Mouse
has no ***** to be ashamed of though a wife of the opposite ***.

I learned important things until I turned ten
and Hurricane Katrina unraveled the bayou into my house
and I existed in four different classrooms in my fourth grade year
where nobody had enough time
to learn my name, much less the way it is spelled.

Now, in therapy, the certified insists
that I am a girl who kisses other girls because my mother
only put her lips on a bottle.

But maybe I wear striped dresses just because mold grew that
shape in my home on Camellia Street,
mud decorated the fallen refrigerator so it looked like
a cow some punk tipped over.
I just wish the sidewalk I use to rollerblade on hadn’t flooded.

Here, this is what I will do
my boyfriend said

the next time there are not a hundred cow pastures
enough grass to fill a continent
as big as oceans between you and I

I can **** his venom from your blood
the places he touched
become craters I landed on with my tongue
molars, a traveling force, fire beads under a rocket

names matter
fortunately I have never heard his

fortunately you have never heard his
because your body is yours, his word is not written
on post it notes flaring up your trachea

and neither is mine
but if it helps I can glue our sides together
bee stingers, a stem or thorn connected to a rose
for you to pull off whenever I hurt you

you can pretend like I died
how I erased that man from your skin tonight.

Right now, loving you feels
the way my toes do when stepping on pebbles
(the stones they put on your back in physical therapy)
or mining ore -
supposed to be cold, but extremely hot to touch.

A copper meadow
shimmy into a tree so you can look up my dress
and catch me like gold armor when I tumble, tumble.

One defense, two defense, three defense, four
worms with spines as soft as hair
try to spindle cobwebs where we skip and hopscotch
skeletons dunk our heads in some sea
but pickaxes
make air pockets, iron is a pillow for us to sleep.

The lights cease when you leave
no longer nearby is the helmet that exudes site -
I think I could mine meteorite from your soul, there’s
only demonite in my own.

Let’s build a house with it
then wait for the bad men to leave, it is night again
perhaps they shall be burned by my evil.

Shrouded in wood, tucked into a golden chest
the walls are a deep purple
amethyst, aubergine, build our ceiling some citrine -
bunnies swallow the window frame
and I cry because somehow it is my fault,
I try to jump but I fall. And you open the door, you let
in some monsters, how I hate you for a moment.

But no bad man can get you
even ones who have skin sunken like a dead spider
pull out an archery kit
seventy-seven arrows, I put them all in hearts
leaving one special hook for you Cupid gave to me.

We make a great team
demonite meteorite silver copper topaz gold-tipped
and sterling the vultures listen in jealously
knowing this is what love can feel like right now.

When I met you, I stopped smoking
and began to paint my nails every weekend evening. I thought
you could ******* sadness as if it were your own
because I did not drink alcohol,
nothing could dilute it. It was always there on my tongue.
You had never smoked or drank or tried
to **** yourself, though, so you did not recognize
the acid and that hurt my feelings more than razors or erasers.

I was the first girl you slept beside,
you the first to kiss my eyelashes like smelling daisy stems
before I became conscious in morning sunglow.
Even December air had the inside of a lemon’s color.

And that was better than smoking or drinking or killing myself
or painting my nails mint green,
picking off the excess from my cuticles, without you.

The worst kind of man
is the one who saw you cry over me on the train back home.
You did not cry because of my broken heart,
not necessarily, you cried because my broken heart
exchanged your arteries for glass all clogged with peach pits.

You cried because your handprint was
on my bottom still, inflamed and saturated in the
seven deadly sins. You have committed every single one.

I hate the man
who did not realize what he was witnessing, even when he
heard my porcelain bones shatter from sobs
and allowed me to say you were the pathetic one.

He must have thought you were, too.
Or he could have believed we spoke another language by
the slurs, the utter nothingness to everyone but
you and I
who had our first fight eating the remnants of a 2AM touch.

But you are not pathetic, baby,
to have reversible organs under twelve acres of red skin
divided up in three parts. You thought it was
different. A man watched a chamber of your heart close up.

I hate him and I hate her,
I hate everyone who has stolen your oxygen from me.

I celebrated yesterday
that my mother is still alive, like how plants exist
and the sun has not fallen from the sky yet.

She has broken six bones.
She has had six different casts, all were green
but her favorite color remains purple.
She shattered the porcelain of our toilet once
with her torso and lost two ribs,
she was basically a man who can **** his own ****.

I picked her up every day
except for yesterday, because she is still alive
almost as miraculous as Mother Nature.

Cows have the ******* of Mother Nature
delivering spotted babies who do not **** sweet milk
worker bees after labor, laboring
packing their new udders with fresh, sweet milk.

I never ****** from my mother’s breast
either, I am basically a cow she’s  basically a man
I mixed my own formula in pink bottles.

She asked what my favorite color is yesterday.
It was the first time,
I said, “it is still pink,” but she said
she thought it would be blue because I am a feminist.
No, no, but yesterday I was only her daughter.

When I write down your “nanananas” and “lalalas”
I cannot make it sound like a melody:
you have a voice
and I only have fingers that cannot play the harpsichord
feet that stumble over themselves, while yours
stumble over strings and vowels and pretty breaths.

I prayed to God just so he would tell me
how to explain the way you lace symphonies together
white drugs laced with a more dangerous one
you exhale vanilla and formaldehyde
and your hiccups win first prize.

You remind me that we are all healing but we cannot all
throw our bodies in Lynches River
or Lake Pontchartrain
because there are not enough black garbage bags.

You remind me
not to swallow cement
so I get filled up with ***** instead.

I hope that you do not drink too much water
to make room for pink milkshakes and doughnut holes
so honored to be inside you they
reach up and hold your voicebox like a shooting star,
I hope that you are selfish sometimes
like when I read my words just as you would sing them.

wicker seashells,
split needles and coral and ***** and ocean slugs
we have love the size of beetle shells

sometimes the sky looks like a rose
stir nectar against my teeth,

I am afraid I am not a good person when you sleep
my shy petals close up,
need to pluck everyone else’s off

get naked
I cannot kiss you between these bars

lines of streetcar dust on your face, is five o’clock
shadow five o’clock martini
an umbrella for ice that will melt

make your petals shy too
I don’t know what I want but to protect you
and cotton candy froth on your ***** hair as well

the sea loses what it does not keep
in wicker baskets or shells

and that is why
I try to keep you up all night, keep you in me.

Listen to your body
unless it is fat, fat is always wrong
fat is like flowers committing suicide by drinking too much fertilizer
fat is having too big a bloom
because petals are bad and skin is bad
and brown wilted leaves can't die if they are big and fat.

There are little folds on your neck
as you sleep
that look like hair scrunchies, I am a little girl
again though in a big man’s embrace.

You were born in the eighties
I am a child of the nineties, had a neopets
sugar daddy at age ten

and I think it could have been you, you, you
that painted my acara rainbow
told me it is okay
to be gay and straight at the same time.

I have not looked at a girl since you
nor remembered how their skirts felt rubbing
unfolding against my thigh.

I had not even said “yes”
to anyone before your big man embrace
because I thought that being silent
was the same

and I think Peter Pan stunted your maturity
so you could help me grow up
too.

If I take too long in the bathroom,
it is because I write poems about you while I ****.

Sometimes typed, sometimes portrayed
by morse code:
tampons in a wicker basket and toothpaste dobs.

I can form your ***** exact in inches and vein
just using these utensils
in the mornings
because I am seventeen and you
have just been inside me or inside my reveries.

I have enough memories for an old woman
and had enough *** for an old man.
To be happy, I must feel you swimming through
me even when our date-water leaves
and sometimes I get wet writing, remembering.

If I take too long in the bathroom,
it is because I write poems about you while I ****.

If I take too long in the bathroom,
I know you are listening in the room next door.

It breaks my heart that women are assaulted in every country
like, I wish I could attribute it to one bad thing
I wish I could blame it on America or the economy or bubonic plague
I wish it only stung like hot coffee on her tongue
I wish **** were an ocean I could drain the water out of
but some people just think others should be put in a brown bag.

Limbs, limbs, limbs. Are we all just body parts
attached by tendons and cursed by muscles that mothball when we
need to cut the eyeball sockets of someone who wants
to mince clavicles, button noses, great big hearty belly giggles?

Every memory is sorry and starry, every piece of her *****
and I just want to blame it on one
******* bad thing, I want something so disgusting to make sense.

Every time I go outside, I smell something burning and
hope that no birds have died in the past hour –
some probably have my name or something close, serene creatures
we are connected by a sea of letters first made for greek gods
I worry that I suicidal-think them, play broken wing harps.

A sum of our adjoined parts, a sum of my heart –
I love and I realized everything that has breath can be shattered
that glass is not ever-translucent, it can have feathers or skin.

I was a touch-me-not before you broke my heart
living in a child’s playhouse

now I say, “touch me please”
it is the demons that make angels exist

some girls say that sadness makes you feel dead
you made me become alive

you cried when my hair covered my eyes
so my sadness carried it away, it

uncoiled
a heartbeat per ounce I love your ****

but still we have conversations about where you
want to be buried

                              when you die.

I don’t like cauliflower so I will feed all mine to friends
moving black specks, fruit flies on vegetables
confused
killing their dinner with cyanide
like sticks of cinnamon or garlic cubes

I hand it to bugs with my long second toe
that is supposed to mean I am a genius, but I don’t eat
cauliflower broccoli anything leafy and I am missing fish oil
from my diet

confused
I whisper into the fruit flies’ elf ears
perked up as dog eyes escape their sockets sometimes

Dogs do not eat cauliflower either or hummus
they are not even confused

Morning, we all see the same shape of the moon’s goneness
but others will eat bread despite mold
I wonder if I am one
and what have I done to the economy by disliking
cauliflower broccoli anything leafy and fish oil, as well.

At nine, I asked my mother if I could shave my legs
and she said no
At ten, I asked my mother if I could shave my legs
and she said no
At eleven, I asked my mother if I could shave my legs
and she said no

At twelve, I asked my mother if I could shave my legs
and she said maybe later.

At thirteen, I had not shaved my legs
and my mother asked why, everyone wondered why –
that is like asking where I got my molars from
or why my tastebuds sizzle when I drink orange juice.  

Suddenly suddenly I was grown
but I had to hide every ****** tissue in the garbage.

The last girl I kissed told me I have a heart like a colander,
it is 2007 and I have not met you yet
there was no reason for my feelings to be wet grounds in coffee filter
I had yet to need the caffeine, but with you,
it lays there soaking
more than five years of boiling into unattractive brown sequins.

I am still kind of the same: still hear
pinecones hitting the roof and think that rain is falling
still dream about ******* in front of my biggest infatuation.

My heart still strains a bunch of gunk, I think it could be a kidney too
but now it simmers for a while first and stores
images in locket cases, now sometimes I believe in love,
it is 2013 and my name means serene
yours is “wealth” for every bit of love you can collect, are keeping.

The last girl I kissed would not believe I gave any at all
I even rejected the sea
because inside every conch, I heard creatures who could touch me
if I would just climb into their shell-walled places.

When I was thirteen, I attempted to cook pasta without water,
this was also when I was obsessed with
cutting every photograph in my mother’s reserve
either to display it on my white plaster door or to **** those pictured.
I murdered eight different family members and myself
nine times without even sending them through a paper shredder.

I am still kind of the same:
though I soak everything up before I can throw it away.

I apologize in advance for slashing all your tires
and stealing all the condoms in your nightstand so you really
have to think about what you are doing
the next time you carve out the insides of another girl.

If she gets pregnant, I will pay for the abortion
just so she realizes that you could **** up her whole life .

You will wish you played guitar, you
will wish that you mailed me a manila envelope of love notes
you will wish you were dead like I did every day
I was with you, you will wish
you didn’t put pebbles in my luggage so I could leave town.

She can have the hairs you left in my bedroom
and the shirt my best friend bought that we shared for years.
She can have the train tickets I bought to get to you
and she can have the money I wanted to spend on new ones.
She can have the sound of your stomach growling
and the knife I cut your Xanax with when you were anxious.
She can even have the Valentine’s Day poems I wrote
with every graphic detail of you taking my ******* virginity.

I apologize in advance, I am sorry I am not sorry
about anything but being with you:
I am sick of giving myself bruises on every inch you touched.

I put on mascara today so you would find my corpse perfect
(all that existence is, looking beautiful for earthworms)
then realized that you could not open the tomb –
yes, the worst part of distance, the last person I see will not be you
(and the mortician will not know which dress is my favorite).

Only you, only you know about the burgundy lace
that we said makes me seem like a dwarf princess or psychic –
in it, I could call you from the past even when I am gone
you would be the king of every maggot delivering my messages.

I would eventually ask to be excavated (and if anyone says no,
please do not have mercy upon them, sweetheart –
wish that they catch the measles or chickenpox or insomnia)
so you could see the sallow skin I blanched even more just for you
the palace in my grave did not matter when you weren’t there.

Speak low, or I will fall outside my body again.
Just last night I fell asleep while we were on the telephone
hair wet so I can recollect the memory in my ringlets

today
tangling out your love salt, perspiration sand, and touch
it to my tongue, remember how we made love.

How easy these are to forget when my heart does not fit in
between the ribcage you grew hard against.
Press yourself to me, and I still do not feel the throb.

Today,
I can only leave little notes on the skin
drop small baby hints of what I knew you felt at the time.

The pores on your face
are enflamed, like a valuable red ruby:
I realize for the first time that I could shatter you
put my sadness in your heart
stuffed up like fortune cookies, misfortune.

When you cry,
I realize for the second time that love is not just
a chemical like dopamine, serotonin.

I do not love you just so I can fall asleep
at night but I only play with
puzzles when I realize you are missing from me:
that is the difference
between science and feeling, your beauty.

I taste the placebo affect
when you smile like quartz in the rough,
I realize for the first time that I want you to hang
from my neck on a diamond cut chain
and discover, and know that I can be happy.

Stars are drawn in the exact shape I love you –
to the moon and back, going a distance like Santa’s sleigh
making the rounds every black sequence,
the Earth does not cease rotation, so stars do not blink
or forget to twinkle when God does not shovel dark clouds:
pillows of snow that have been urinated in,
still fresh beyond the membrane of something grey.

I do not mind if you call that ugly.
I understand if my rural nights are frightening to you –
they were to me at first, they did not feel like
a time, rather the absence of
and I do not mind if my poems feel that way sometimes.

I write this because the evening never stops –
five o’clock somewhere and midnights too, which we pale
by blonde stars, the hair color of mine you despised
resurrected. Never stopping as you and I do not.

My ex-girlfriend bought me a star once,
though I did not know you then, it was still our shape
the contour of your hair clogged in my bathtub
the blue moods of mine dyed purple, almost lilac by you –
I think of how her ******* got in the way when
I tried to listen to her heartbeat
but yours is always there, never stopping like stars
never blinking in the exact shape I will always love you.

Miss mother nature, goddess of earth
your grass masturbates my feet
and the clouds cushion my bedhead –

I am alive
as the plants breathe, I
can watch myself as they watch me.

I am mundane, plain, a concrete building
brutalist and manmade
but their real existence, live vines climb
and make me seem attractive…

Even as I want to be dead,
they kiss me as a husband would his
sleeping wife –

even loving when unaware, forgetting
acknowledgement
being beautiful all alone.

Miss mother nature, goddess of earth
I am alive
no longer manmade in your home.

A woman crying has the same smell of cherry blossom buds,
leaping from small thing to small thing
everything is raked, unleafed the summer cobblestone.

Of her ex-season she may ask –
oh, autumn, did you wear a taffeta wedding dress? With pearls?
Because her husband left when she did too,
that silk is such bad luck, frilling slightly as a broken rib
so now the days have slits last winter’s snow was meant to fill.

A clock of seasons and the last time they slept together,
spring sprung an ******* any time she wept, fertilized by salt
these crystals, the pits on a strawberry
and folded a laundry load of wedding season clothes.

I lived for twenty-five months, have been dead for five
still obsessed with how dirt in my cuticles
collides with a blood-stream like the train that took me –
my baby was on board and hid in a cubby
because he knew why, why, why I threw off my
conductor hat right then even before I could have guessed
he knew, knew, knew. Choo choo choo
I lived for a week and have been dead for twenty two.

Twenty-two, twenty-two,
twenty-two weeks and pounds in a giraffes’ big heart,
collections of key chains in my baby’s room
I will never see, and wild animals would adore me better
than any man could reach at just under six feet –
choo choo trains keep me dead better than I ever could.

You are the first person
whose **** left me with a mouthful of flowers,
flowers of flesh and blood, our shell
a garden I nurture

reap, sow, *** and I know I can recover
as long there are babycurls on the back of your neck
riding piggy back
they are a peacock tail between my thighs.

You are the first person
that made me believe I could climb in a geode,
maybe meadows are not magic after all
just maybe things grow beautifully when fostered

as I am now,
touched by the thought that I may not be safer
alone and that drinking up an ocean
will not help me discover what I am missing.

You are the first person
to read books about plants falling in love,
just as long as butterflies kiss their babycurl vines.

Nobody put any one of themselves first,
just the bottle.
My mother, genteel as she was,
wrote sketchpad poems on how alcohol must feel
shrouded in a chifforobe. If I were the author
each stanza would only say “warm”
because such is how I felt
folding myself among the goblets as a child.

On dress hangers she had no use for
but to dream to abort me,
I hung and thought about how laconic my kin was
not asking what state I was in the past week.

(Mississippi,
I would announce. M-I-S-S   I-S-S   I-P-P-I
as many meters as letters in its name
and I burnt my calf on an old man’s motorcycle:
he kissed it better, a stranger did
though your bureau’s dirt chocked below my nails.
)

A false god set my parakeet free that trip
at least that is what mother held when I got back –
Oh, many days ago, azure feathers
spanned in a conduit
right by the lady’s home, you know the one
you tell me that her carpets look like bacon strips
(once eleven years ago I had,
as many years as in Mississippi’s name).

Had it been so many months
from the episode when I accidentally mumbled
“I hate you” and never regretted it as I should have?
Had it been so many hours since I wondered
why I could not hate her
but she could hate me, or say so “accidentally”?

Nobody put any one of themselves first,
just the bottle
even I was careful not to shatter when we shared a
ligneous hiding space, regal, misunderstood.

But on returning from Mississippi,
(M-I-S-S   I-S-S   I-P-P-I
One Mississippi Two Mississippi Three Mississippi Four)
I hoisted myself like a stiff jacket and
realized no one could see the difference between
red wine and a child's blood, in laced imperial stripes.

I bought a new dresser since you propped me again mine.
No longer can I reinvent that day –
it is too high, I would not knock your belongings into a drawer
and fish by strings of saliva just to see you again,
send my body parts to your mailbox so they feel at home.

But I can sit pantyless in an office chair
shooting bad guys via computer cables. They all are bald and
do not voice in my accent, nor yours, we were only
ourselves almost as I am only me without you
though not quite. Somehow we
are two together while I am not more than a half on my own.

When the judge asks,
how many fractions are the reminisces of a person worth?
I pontificate that I shall test them like a hypothesis,
I forget the loss of virginity because naivety never did leave me
though you did, and that is about the same, but not quite.

Silence should not even have a word,
silence should be at most
a glance
or as the process of
growing baby teeth and wisdom teeth

spells from nothing to something
with just a morsel of red, wine-y blood.

There are more letters
in “silence” than there are in my name
and there are more letters
in “silence” than in your name, too

silence is more valid than you,
than me, than us
but silence does not exist

silence should not even have a word
because it cannot be touched.

I have felt no one since I loved you
any sensation
percolates my membrane like juice through a honeycomb
our final moments buoy in the bluebell’s cup –
then I forgot to bite the full moon,
Luna, your mistress for this sixteen hour journey
call her Luna, tell if her craters are similar to my *******.  

I sleep I sleep I sleep
but when I awake I will be forever aroused.
It was that ambivalent phone call, “I miss you and I will
hate you for several seconds if you don’t mind,”
that severed my nerve endings.

Piercing my ear the next week
there was the thought, a novel philosophy, just a tingle
that I was carving out a part of me that still
loved

you. I have felt nothing since, I have
been a statuette like Miss Liberty in the pond:
said she stands just like me, well, what if I got my bow
what if I shot an arrow through
every piece of astronomy you find more worth in than me.

Miss Luna, the Estrellas, even your sol
can feel
me break them but I will not feel any of that from you.

Daisy ***, patchwork dress, lalala
I baked you cherry pie while you chatted a wizard
hope it kept warm in the oven.
Dear, the contents partner our cheeks
a good-natured face, freckled of breadcrumbs at
each of six circadian meals to come by day.

Everything is rosy in this hobbit hole –
flowers, and mouths, and food laugh all in sync.

I reckon when you digest
we shall scamper off to our twin bed.
Lalala I sing, and lalala you sing, raccoons are so
close above the wooden beams
that I know their supper is dandelion stalks.

Tucked in, this is what is christened a perfect fit
your foot the extent of my head
and kissing at my toes, their lady stubble.

(You, the skilled shoemaker
who will not tolerate me hiding in pelt moccasins)

If the moon arises, we do not see:
lalala, mockingbirds sing the garden to sleep
but the vegetation dances
like a dwarf’s beard, though blonde somehow
saturating ginger for a reading nightlight
bellies full of sweet cakes and dinner number four.

You kiss me our Eskimo way, then as halflings
I whisper about the ariel orchard today
(Rosemary, red-cheeks, lalala) afore first breakfast.

Mother Earth has birthed billions of nymphets
knees that flirted with their socks so much it left prints
coquettes gyrating Bubble Yum
         on digits, her sunglasses’ stems,  a split end.

Mother Earth gave us nymphs so
bodies would not be loamless either, so we can be as
fertile as gorges far from any lofted stone wall.

Mother Earth, that she was never nubile
labored faunlets with pink gumwads upon their genitals

and frothed when one creation alit inside another.

Under the tires,
concrete penetrates me

like seeds, my blood a fertilizer

is this how pine trees are
grown? forests on the side of the road?
every particle of earth is taken

from a sad girl’s soul
and I donate mine to the highest bidder

may it be the 18 wheeler
may it be a rifle
may it be the noose, its chainlinks

or all three.
I am to be part of  the atmosphere

condensation, an angry girl’s
rain.

Let’s trade wounds: I will give you the burn
under my breast and you can replace
the Vietnam War stabs with it.
I will take them upon my shoulder-blades.

Let’s just lick all the scabs away.
They make you look good, but I wish your
hurting would have stopped
the forty years before I was born.

People who touch me are scary
but people who don’t touch me are worse:
if I am a pocket they turn inside out,
at least I am not suffocating
in someone’s emptiness.

Would you mind terribly if I painted our bedroom
the color of the sky the day we first met?

I still see it clearly in my head –
Crayola calls it “cesious” or “wild blue yonder”
but there is something missing from that, something more sad
given grey of an infirmary above for angels.

I want to savor  that emotion, remember
that we can be one together and imperfect at the same time:
let us paint the bedroom like a hurricane sky –

I will have insomnia, yet love you in the morning.

I was told not to love another woman
I was told not to **** any man
so I thought about books when I laid in my hammock with lemonade
how I wanted one with a spine as long as mine
to finger in the dark of a moonless night, rather than myself
or any mermaid-girl who dripped with water like loose gemstones.

Her stories were what I would read and her body
I would imagine swimming to the harpsichord of a fantasy film song
effervescent, but never touched by anyone
even a fellow without blowfish thorns for fingernails
as smooth as hardback covers, as permanent as paperback pages.

And I grew up, and I did love another woman
and I did **** a man
but I still remember the mermaid-girl who had paper fins
and an all-consuming love for splashing ink like an ocean’s brine.

Once, all I saw were train-tracks the way falling dust
looks like tiny sprites pirouetting in midair.

That is what I recreated every time
he could not walk from the loading port into me,
sparkles in a cardboard box for Christmas, birthdays, anniversaries
crowding like fairies and lightning bugs during summer.

Just like it.
Three years ago, my hair was shorter and it could not
get knotted in razorblade patterns:

your hair was longer then, we added all of our strands together
and decided it is all very equal now.
You can rope me to train-tracks and wait to pick me up,
until then, I am an insect fossilized in amber
my body is the shape of a soapbar, my consistency hot wax.  

Sometimes the train comes by
without me even realizing the time is 12:53am.

Sometimes it is 4:08am, so I ask why you have not arrived.

You have had two hundred cups of tea since I
last tasted you, and every single one was a gift from me in
one of those containers packed with glittering beads.
The bottom of your mug holds herbs floating like sprites in midair.

Just like them.
Sometimes at 1:44am I think I am the same
flying by wing to you.

Our date in the bathroom was the best
you, in the tub, and me bending over to staple my hair in a bun.
We were both naked but neither of us looked good
just beautiful and imperfect, soggy like flowers after rain
until I used the dryer that works in a crescendo
belly up, then down, cool sprays
hot as chocolate under a pair of wintertime mittens.
Now I can laugh, remembering the best part: as soon as I finished
and seemed as unspoiled as a girl with fresh afterglow can,
my locks slicked back by your sweat and sink-water,
you asked me to take a shower with you. Wet again and
feeling so romantic as I step on the fur you shed
then the stomach of where your bare bottom had rested.
Remembering our best date
how your ***** looked like a cat’s tail wagging against my skin
how you picked out what ******* I should wear next
how I dropped your belongings in my underwear drawer
(for me to find a month later, Valentine’s Day)
and still pure, I mopped the puddles with our towel afterward.

I am about the age of trees. When I scream,
my breath smells like my mother’s when she drank herself to sleep
and so I spent the night in a neighbor’s garage because
his cat just had kittens, one was like
a pumpkin in color whilst I had the roundness on my jaws.

I showed him the green canopies I
would jump from, and he got caught: the man I called dad
had to work his way through the jungle (-gym)
or the McDonald’s play area
to fly us by our potbellies like Superman in the cerulean above.

I never thought what it meant,
that I was already sleeping in an old man’s covers at six and seven
but now I feel those nights like bruised elbows.
Now I am the same afraid girl trying to find wombs in men
the age of trees, yet I still climb them just to ask to be carried down.

I wonder
what training bras train us for –
could it be smiles of blood between our thighs?

Or the Olympics, that special woman sort
where everyone loses and men
are given
our prettiest offering.

We need training bras like we need them –
nothing wrong with growing grapes.

Someday
you will come to understand me
and you will love me less.

Lost will be the urgency to see my face every day
then my openness is such as a wound:
nevertheless, no stitching
at dusk can be finished by dawn.

I thought this skin belonged to you
but, god, I never let it

by fearing
sentences would get lost in your ocean waves or
airplane wings or bad phone reception.

So came three years
and someone’s city change, came cattle
the rooster feathers casing one eye in case she
needs her consciousness early.

You told me to appreciate that and now I do
I wake up every morning before you

I never fall asleep
because something seems to find a key to
my chest and I lose my breath.

But still you can see that I never take my dress off
pretty ones with bells and whistles
and pockets for your hanky, when I lay

and you will begin to wonder why I never relax
and you will ask

I say:
(god, I did not really want you to
breathe my air.)

I fear you understanding, and I fear you will not.

It is occult, maybe, that we are twins
          but not of Gemini

how you know
which streets to turn left at
while I have the names and no context

how you still smell like cinnamon
although I never saw you
rub powder against your skin.

We are in the same city now
we have the same radio stations.

I see you the way I see the outline of
a boot when I can’t touch slumber
          not ethereal
    but almost reduced to such a shape

a barbershop’s swirling bulb
stretched and sunnier when no one has
entered in some time.  

           Everything is magic
in desperation, everything is similar.

Your name is Rachael
and I am supposed to sweep you up like a moth
or the baby spiders you think are yours
but they ate their mother, too. Like you will.

You will see yourself in a diagram
the size of dog paws.

You will see yourself on the owl stand:
artificial, do you like it? I am sorry I said no.

You will fracture an oyster
and expect babies to queue out, to call you mom
out of every egg is a memory not your own.

Your name is Rachael but
you are hardly a woman, not a person, or a bug.
A moth is more alive than you
because its wings can blister on light-bulbs.

Your name is Rachael
and so you are of artificial skin and thoughts.

There is thunder in my ******
from my ******, falls her monthly rain –

I like being a girl, but I hate being a woman.  
This is what all of us say:
give me estrogen but not too much.
give me the babies but don’t make it hurt.

And all their milk is store-bought.

                                       April 25th, 2006.
             Judgment day, in white pants
I give orange pulp to everyone –
the Sixteenth Century has me by the ovaries.