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.

said “I have to feel you I have to feel you”
and so you touched my nudeness
and you touched me again

until you found my heart whispering lullabies
to the other men
who found themselves under my dress.

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.

How is it that I can have you inside me
and it feels like everything, every wonder of the world
traveling from under my skirt through my throat

but you are nothing more than flesh and bones?
You are nothing more than me.

I feel you like I feel a pill dissolving into my stomach –
I feel you like I feel fluency in a second language,
we could develop our own, another romance tongue
using the reaction of pale skin being ******

by just-fallen snow. It has never once felt like you
were scratching my ribcage when looking for my heart:
no, just serenade my *******. Set your map inside.  

X marks the spot where I fell the hardest,
I felt it like an earthquake penetrating a beautiful place.

I unload your god in that laissez-faire way
where the bandages mend and have no need to be placed,
formidably, regret to admit the moonshine in my hair
looking Gothic, but beautiful:
sober the men’s breath as it falls, falls, falls
not more mild than a snowstorm in its final lapse.

Sat there to be dreamt. He put his hand to his beard,
and I would have kissed if had I believed
that he was not merely trying to haunt my body,
the hair I kneaded into air.

It flowers, and flowing these marzipan sands
where God lays man next to his wife,
she bears the peaches: juicy, ripened, but not to eat
expecting us to swallow ourselves in turn, spin the bottle.
I could not care less for the braces in his lips –
or their fur, but gums beneath like peaches.

**** it out until the pulps mirror,
you have the skin of a four fruit, or an eighty,
flames high as kites. But suffering for each flicker-****
and dating a girl who smokes cigarettes in bed,
I know he could not support that, your god.

Morning comes with a glare, now eating her hair
the involvement of some odd raconteurs. I beat them
and they beat my ******* for their heat –
God is a cabin boy with genitals in his palms,
said he would love the women as long as they are gone;
if he does not see me, the flames, I cannot exist
not more than falling falling falling hair.

hung your reflection upon our cave
the moonshine, the tiny peats
you only exist in these natural rags –

it smells like incense and
I am so alone.

He fills my mouth with bumblebees, they fill my
heart with honey:

part of the criteria that I have met includes desperate attempts
not to be alone, to lose abandonment
before I lose someone to it.
Antennae are between my molars – I have found
he will kiss me more when my breath
tastes the worst. He fell in love with me because
I love so hard that he will become a poem and live forever.

I may not be the saddest girl in the world,
but I sure have come close, thinking about how easy it would
be for him to leave me
if I simply kept a smile on my face for too long.

He may not be the most fearful man, but I heard him
cry about dying and now I know about
the two types of leaving
and
that there is one he would never do on purpose.

Months have been named after
girls who broke my heart, four whole weeks
a year birthed in the honor of those who
should have never been born
delivered in my heart like a box of fireworks –

I half-learn foreign languages to believe that
there is no such thing as remembrance
and so her name is different
than each fourth month, the one of showers.

Cometh no flowers or forgiveness
enough to forget, just new words for old pain.

I am so tired, I need to get wasted
but I am pretty sure
any alcohol would curdle in my stomach —

the trashbag I keep under my
clothes, use my intestines as the
drawstrings. I get
anxious, my body is hot and heavy and
moist, everything slides off
my skin and never stops coming back.

I need to get wasted
but sometimes it feels as if everyone I
know is an alcoholic — mother,
sister, uncle, dad. It could happen
to me

and maybe I would finally be happy if
I always had something to
use to drown my body.
Having blood is not enough,
it won’t even stay under my skin. I
am so awake, I could drink
a river

and then another and another
and all my nerves would still feel open.

I am lonely.
I have driven past the house I thought we’d share
going on eight times now, and there
is no proof that it has gone back up for sale.

To be honest, I am not fond of it anymore:
its lime concrete and white wire fence are a little
too outdated. Painted cleanly.

A clean escape –  a criminal fleeing
(it was you who left me).

Nothing is natural or mineral
about wood doors looking like an emerald
but the expense was high.

I was lonely.

I called and a real estate agent confirmed I did
not have the means to hold you there
or anywhere, really. The line
broke like pillars crumbling from a lost war.

Sometime in the future, I am
expected to have a blood clot and call it my son
my embryo
my fetus
a comet shooting from between my thighs.

I am female. Parts of me will
move on to form an extra set of toes for eighteen
years,
he may hear how unlike me he looks
why his freckles are in the wrong place:

he will learn of adoption
then become convinced that we purchased him
came gift-wrapped
in a blanket, a placenta.

My husband, another set of toes,
will bring out the belly photographs and realize
there has been a whole field of corn
metal poles threatened by
a lightning storm right on my skin ever since.

The child
   my embryo
         my fetus

the handful of cells
will ask if there are any brothers and sisters in
there, inside me.
No, son, just glowing orbs of gas
only stars:

I can hold a whole galaxy under my ribcage
but not another
nine-month long thought.

Somewhere there is
a boat made of sunstone crystals. Watch the
river flatten
its tongue underneath your sails and color
night. The world around you
always shimmers, the sky’s full of gemstones.

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.

My poems idealize your tongue on my tongue
your breath in mine,
these verses will romanticize how we skipped from street to street
our arms swinging between your left hip and my right
like I did not think about how my parents
never doubled their strength to pull me up above ground as
we walked through parking lots. I
needed to fly and no adult could let me but you.
The sudden hurt, I have not yet dramatized that morning
you returned my voicemail unsuspecting
unknowing my intention to whisper I hate you I hate you I hate you.
Every bone in my body had broken because we could not
levitate any longer: you were not even strong
enough to keep yourself grounded. I make you sound beautiful
I make you sound ugly, but neither is real, just as
how there are no words for the New Year ball dropping.

A pair of identical twins, a pair of ******* –
I wonder if we shall stay as similar when I become an adult
or if December 29th, 2013, I am to be a sleepyhead
no more. I wake up early and go to work and come back home
without needing you, broad man, to prop up my bones.

I wonder if adolescence is merely acting as a canvas
perhaps off-white, but not intricate,
expecting, waiting for an artist to sculpt from the material:
mine mine mine a man of twenty-five, small feet
big fingers soft toes a heart that bleeds paint clumsily.

I became him somehow, and the opposite of him, too.
The body language, stepping chest-first,
it appears so similar as if we were ghosts of each other but it
nevertheless feels that he and I are never in a same room
watching separate films on TV with the same words.

To be careless, I wonder if that is adult
because if the contrary is true I have been there forever
and the train I made him venture did not have that destination.
I wonder if being a lady is different than being
a man. I wonder if we can be identical when I turn 18.

if you cheat on your
girlfriend of three ******* years,
buy her twelve roses.

I wanted more than anything
to wash your mouth out with soap and rot
your teeth so no girl
would ever want to kiss you but me.

Told her things in ***** words you thought
you taught me,
but you weren't my first

tongue,
blood, use for a bandage.

-

I wanted to say I had swallowed pills
that hurt more than you.

-

I wanted to adopt lilies
as my little sisters to help them grow with
my tears -

something has
to get fertilized (has to be real).

-

I wanted to believe in fairness, that I'd
done something wrong

wrapped my lips
around the base too hard
you are what I needed so much, perhaps
it put an ache in more than just
my heart.

-

I wanted it to have been loneliness
not desire

(that is why I let someone's father put his
fingers in my mouth
and napped in lingerie his wife
never wore, and his daughter, aged

one year farther along
than me, heard us

me being his good girl, and
her understanding why she never was.)

yet you were not lonely
just painting a still life of two girls
with rubenesque thighs
you had hoped would last forever.

-

I did not want to be saved.

you put something (someone)
inside of me

and it left.

does that mean
that you are leaving me too?

There is something to be said about me loving women:
I did not love them gently. I had rage and
though their skin was smooth, their hearts could be as hard as
a man’s. Then, there are the men who I held when
mugs of green tea were only something we could burn our
tongues on, we would slide them together
and their wounded bodies slept on the other’s welts.

I have learned it is okay to be soft to those who can hurt me,
that there are hundreds of ways to love someone
that his hurt and her hurt is not always similar to mine.

I have relationships with and in watercolors.
The paints are conversations we could never bare having or
dishonesties swirling, permanent on some canvas –
picked up colors as wiry black hairs and straight auburn ones.
She folded my dress on the balcony but
a grey windstorm violently stole it. She made it happen.

I have learned that purity can hurt me, too,
the skipping stones that stub someone else’s toes and make
their feet taste like salt. The women I have loved
saw moonlight brighter than I ever would,
just so they could dim it themselves, like a dull knife.

When the soft bodies became too hard of hearts,
someone told me that I was going to love again soon
but it was not the same. I do not hit my pillow when my head
becomes insomniac, thinking of their faces.
I love men who are as fragile as tea leaves and taste so
sweet: their hurts feel just like I am vomiting my breakfast.

The day
your train left
we caught the stomach flu
to purge our bodies of everything
but me and you.

Once, there was a man who wanted so much to love that he
snuggled butterfly bodies back into a cocoon
like a small manila folder. He married their two existences together
and braided her antennae to signify an engagement ring –
never kissing, not as a husband and wife would
just would light up the nerves below his skin any time he showed
his butterfly what became of
the earth outside of air holes. In a way, he lived there, too –
breathed through the sheer fabric of butterfly wings.
He knew how to love, every eyelash looked like her flying again.

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.

You said you like my shampoo,
but you love me more.
I didn’t shower for weeks, tucked my
***** limbs where they couldn’t be seen,
just to make you grin.

Your lips met my forehead,
tasted black waves, dyed to straw,
that stuck to your mouth in the wind.
I regret to admit
the hurricane soon fled.

I bathed today, in dish soap,
and focused on my feet,
then cut off the hair you kissed,
because it had grown too lengthy.
I waited as long as I could;
my eyes aren’t visible,
and I tripped over a rug this morning.

I’m bidding farewell to you –
the last trace of
your body on mine.
And I want to cry.

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.

It is August
but I have your shirt pulled up to my nose
like your scent will
protect me from another bad night.

I wear it as a turtleneck
and tuck my arms inward, making a blanket.
I am so sick of
              not feeling safe.

I remember asking you to use the tip
of your fingers on my
shoulderblade
caress the flesh into small waves
(You live too close to the sea to not taste
of salt)
then fabric wrinkled in a bundle.

Make me guess what the skinstrokes mean.
I am learning braille
or just how not to be alone.

I am so tired of
              waiting to know what you drew

when the sun is so high
shadows can only be cast on the oceanfloor
and everything above my clothes
breathes (I love you
too much to not taste of salt).

When summer ends
maybe I will get a good night's sleep, held
by seaweed and
reading your messages out of a bottle.

He asked
how I felt after losing my virginity
and

I just needed to know
if god will bury us in the sky
after the ground
is full

Beds moaning in a give and take
some sort of car crash outside, morning’s roadkill
people choking on their breath during sleep.
I exhale words I do not mean to say then swallow them up again
          just battered croaking –

all these sounds spattered like a Victorian print.
I feel the air of another person whistling on my backside:
he will climb vines to get in my bed and eat me.

I hear night-noises, and that is what I think,
there are cannibals at the sill
big green tree-looking men who fit me whole in their stomach.
                My bedroom, like a cupboard
                         and me the same, we open without a key.

Across the street
there has to be a factory of some sort

where women are put into jars for jam and their skin’s the toast –
they get pregnant by ear. One hundred decibels
given by my father’s snoring moustache
and fifty for an ****** that causes leopard print sheets.

               Then, I am in a dream in which
   someone large holds me
closer than a criminal, but we just ballroom dance.

Then, I open those eyes again
                 and dogs bark in southern accents
                 and my house sweats from a nightmare
                 and the hour hands me sandbags
                 and wives finally get to pawn the rifle for thousands
                               but not before I hear a shot.

In a meadow where all of the plants have
the pattern of calico cats,
where the birds sound almost watery
have the tweet
of a smoke detector with low batteries,
where dandruff is just
the sky chipping as nail polish,
I realized
my palms could hold a tree to the ground

You have seen as
many winters as I
have known days,
and my body still
coils under frigid
beads of weather,
while yours is an
unbolted entrance
to planes touched
and surfaces seen
by many seasons
my caress cannot
compare to, now.

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.

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 small
call me baby, or love, anything but doll.

Call me angel, not honey
I am not sweet
nor could I ever stick to you.

You left me three weeks after holding my head
underwater,
shrinking more and more until
the brain could only process our memories.

Later, just the absence
of pet names that would have made sense.

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.

The best thing you can do to get me to forgive you
is take off your belt
and make me bleed, better than I can.

I have slit my wrists into mouths for air and
pockets to hide unhappiness in

because of words
like sorry
like I wish I did not have to do this
but everyone always has to, I know, and I need

for someone to carve the
flesh from my asscheeks the way my
parents wanted to
that time when I was six years old and dashed into
the road really hoping to get hit

for the first time. You
could hold the blood and guts for the first time and I
promise
when I am empty, an apology will feel full.

I think that you will feel better
if I remind you to keep bottles of seawater and a spoonful
of honey on your
bedside for the next time you get sick:
a detox, this will climb into your pores like a
pillow
this will smooth any of the scars in your digestive
system, your fear is in
you like it is a new ***** that is destined
to fail. Sometimes suffering wants to be silent but I have
tried to talk yours down, promise
that it is okay to be
soft
and okay to need to add sweetener to bitter tea
and acknowledge pain like
I do when I imagine myself as a little girl again, palm out
because she knows she is lonely for
someone to hold her hand.  I
pass pills to you, maybe they will stretch out your throat
or decrease your fever by a couple degrees
without realizing
you would feel better if I just
thanked you for taking care of me when I’m sick, too.

You are a radar-buzz,
I feel the jitter when you are around.

It is stony, it is inescapable,
but I do not mind.
I might want it, even if it weren’t yours.

For your shake I have my own,
like a thousand peacocks, enhancing
themselves for their mates.
Already too bright.

And what they are, I cannot say,  
not much better than my midnight jolt
when I go dancing in you.

Dilate your clavicles, sweet:
I am diving inward.

I think you sound like suicide inside,
do not want to admit you hate life.

So your body speaks for you.

That, the drone, it travels me in,
Love you like a son, a brother, a husband,
and cannot decide which is moving.

Lulling conversations
about ceiling fans and washing machines –
appliances I’d never think
to purchase as an idealistic youth,
because they’re included
in the best homes, a lifetime warranty.

Such as the time I learned
vinegar dissolves sweat from t-shirts,
or that nail polish remover cleans carpets.

There were occasions I
unplugged lamps during storms,
as knowledge crept upon my aging spirit,
while on others, teenage
dramatics fell solid victim to the
irate beast of lethargy, a sandman.  

Can responsibility be measured
by the care I offer electrical sockets
and moments devoted to preventing sparks?

Quality versus quantity –
there’s a hearty debate, countering
kitchen tips exchanged from
housewives to sisters and the infrequent son
that I base my initial worth on,
of all arbitrary numbers.

I recite your scent to my every acquaintance
as if I have spent a lifetime living in fields of it, canopies of
you atop a jungle. Truly, it has only been a mass of airplane rides –
maybe two or three or four or five with one stop – that I
have sifted you through my candy-and-smoke air
and that makes my stomach turn over like soil and earth.

There is no distance and stretch in time that’ll give
me a stuffy nose: we have had bike-baskets filled to the brim with
tropical rainstorm waters, and we have never caught a cold.
Nothing’s bitten me hard enough
to uncurl my toes, swinging above you on monkey bars.

I smell your scalp although it is not visible, I have your shampoo
memorized by ingredient and chemical property
to play scientist when the park closes.
All I need are cinnamon roots long as asparagus. The
morning dew climbs the tree I am in, this is a room I can never
escape. This is you materialized – buds still in growth.

There are arrows made for killing and
arrows made for loving –

I was oblivious to the latter
until my heart dropped and bled on the floor,
crying, give me over to someone please!

And I did it fast. I was given eternal love
all because of an arrow in the ***.  

One day I will die for the same twig –
wooden, pending, poked through my spleen.
Even open wounds have needs!

I beg like a girl, please oh please,
if you make me die I can live in a dream.

I want to be inside every girl you ****** before me,
show you the birthmarks you never noticed
shaped like canoes and rocketships.

I will get her chest to rise, then fall,
steal the very source of her breath and curl my fingers
around it –
into dough, how you never could knead.

I have my hand on her throat
because you hated when she would talk.
We could work together, tie her hair into a knot.

I just want to be inside the girls who have intestines
like cotton candy and ******* like watermelon
explain why you should
have loved her as a woman sometimes.

You say you prefer my skin, and the way I whimper
but maybe you just did not
**** her hard enough.

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

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.

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.

You are melting into the windshield,
a single bug the wipers hit,
and I never loved you: no, I could
not have desired something like this.

Your flesh does not resemble a
body, nor a human, nor any being I
have felt compassion for somehow.

And your words are jumbled like
lyrics repeated out of tune. I do not
know you, bug, I do not love you.

I have noticed that you do not bleed,
although your murmurs are pained
of a pink sort of memory
from your live, a single human day.

Some witch, blocks of lavender
and spice and bricks, will pick you:
she will grant a single human wish.

May she find some use of you,
the single bug I have slaughtered so,
but recall that when I killed you,
you were something I did not know.

Adventurers travel
to places where they could shoot themselves and
have it mean something – wait for
steel-toe boots and whimpering floorboards to remove a gun

from the kitchen sink, the tile is as green as
moss statues in pool water
and the caulking is about to be dyed red.

I follow tracks, the pads of my feet. I want to be one
of them – steal a rusted van
with shotgun shells in the passenger seat, safety uncocked.
A home for the only things I care about
has no door. Squirrels

carried it away in a drought, bad men lit a wildfire,
birds stay safe in eggs that never hatched
hanging by spider webs in someone’s daughter’s room –
her hair remains in the velcro of a teddy bear.

She is the only ghost – everyone
else’s corpse had some reason or another to stay here.
I see ashes in a skull, I smell **** on the center of girl palms
old blood used to keep eyes glued open,
mine holds dolls to
my wounds, my emptiness fuses plastic hair to me.

Almost little pillows of ravioli
bloated bellies, frayed skin, so white that morning
cannot detect us – in death, pimples
might pop like balloons, and we get left to look beautiful for
for the next person who wanders along.

I told a man that I did not know much about Pride & Prejudice
mostly because I had none,
he laughed and gave me packet of Earl Grey tea.

I wish all men did this,
all women too. I think there should be more free herbs
that you can add honey or sugar to,
I think that would make everyone’s day better and sweeter.

you left, and I kept your pillow naked in my bed
for me to kiss and hum on

its case
stuffed down my shirt like a training bra

wondered if
blankets and beds understand what a touch is

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.