The streetlamp colors us,
bleeding light, being on top of things
and all I can see are its circle-spots
drawn on like Communion wine.

I am its wife and its husband,
but every digit has waned to nothing,
must be related to the cold weather.

Only God has memories of such
paper flowers and stems, before real-
ness had happened somehow –
only God grew flora from pavement.

And now the best kind of wild,
the best, most dancing air above our
heads? Does it know the memories

implanted in ourselves, or in it?
I think I must be an android or love,
just a feeling for intoxication
beat the kind of color found inside.

there is a phrase – “sea of stars”
and I think
of it as the sort of oasis that could be above earth
or beneath the soles of our feet.

blue blue blue azul

where the air brushes my hair like snowfall,
where water pulls at my skin
like

a new lover. like him on our first night together,
still unsure of which
words were
too intimate to use – there came to be
no talking, so much less desperate than we
are now. I could grab flesh
and remain aloof, as the ocean is.

something
is always glistening in the sky or the sea

I wonder if I got closer, if it would look like your
hide
after twirling your fingers against
my tongue. the belly
of your fingerprints moving in my mouth.

on the side, I began to lose years in my thoughts
wondering the naïve things: is this
***
or is it just someone
who loves me even when I don’t push
my **** together. is this *** or
am I fabricating
a poltergeist’s touch with my breath again,
is this ***
or something other than *** that I have needed – I never
believed it could exist. I do not know
of desire, yet am too of age
to be a coquette
anymore
and still *** is all I have ever cared about.
forever, I believed baby pink could
only be the shade of
color inside of me. now I
wonder
is this ***
or is *** not the only thing that can pollinate me

How many times have you shot this rifle?
It rests on you like a young lady asleep on your lap.
Occasionally, she hops in her slumber
and you think (hope) maybe she is dreaming of me.

This pretty pretty thing, her barrel spread like a
dress upon the petticoat’s pillow:
so tempting and so prepared for your touch.

You think of her so much
and spill your own blood just to have her bullet hid

                     where she could see your love.

I lost my final baby tooth at age thirteen. A man came
along to pluck it out of me,
pried my chapped lips apart and said
it might hurt a lot. It might even feel like a worm, like my belly is
bloated with bottles of water or bags of blood.

But I was only reminded of
needles, the thinnest cylinder of an off-white substance
developed to cure me from my childhood.

He gave me acupuncture, he left the needles in my pocket after
so I would never forget what he gave me. Not what
he took, just what I needed
to remove the *****, size seven footprints from his floor.

I did not keep the paraphernalia,
just grew my adult molars, had dreams about crawling after him
feeling tentacles swim in my mouth again
and biting down so hard I could fill bags with blood.

I am almost eighteen and soon
he will know how it feels for someone to see what is inside your
body, then take it without your permission.

I have not ****** in my stomach for over a year,
but I have reverted to
wanting to be a tear on your face again
that evaporates so slowly, it looks like an angel’s
halo for a little while. We never
have good nights anymore, me opening my mouth is equal to
desperately taking off my clothes like I
used to
when you had not been inside of me in weeks. I am an
infant begging for attention,
crying, my need for love is incessant and miserable
and you hate me for it now. There is a filter
in your voice,
if it had an appearance, it would be the bottom of a mug
of tea or static on a television screen –
you don’t sound far away or distant, just full of something I
cannot touch. A wall, immunity
to my advances, this sort of mistress made of brick.
All I want to do is
keep your sadness company, but you
cannot recognize my body in the dark. You have me pinching
blood vessels beneath my skin
so pain will not
keep me alone in my room like you do,
it is getting bad again.      (I am getting worse again.

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.

Childhood stress is not living in a two-story home
when your best friend does,
even though your mothers are the same. All day long we talk
about weeds and leaving our husbands for each other.

Then, you go on to ask
why should anyone wear clothes if they just leave scarlet
dents on our skin, then you will answer,
someone’s branded us with barcodes like cows.

I once cut my ******, the right I think, while shaving my legs -
cried for weeks afterward wondering
if I would be able to breastfeed twenty years from now,
thought if I could not, I would be less of a woman.
This was before I met my girlfriend who has a ***** and is
just as much as a woman as I am,
this was before I learned that womanhood is a fine powder in
your soul, like *******, but not only white, brown too
and black and mine is pink, and womanhood is
every color of the rainbow and gender is fluid fluid fluid.

Childhood was ignorance of ignorance,
adolescence taught you everything you needed to know on
hating the unique,
but in adulthood, that can change, we can know better.

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.

this skin? it is rosy, not bloodied
when you spiral it between your fingers
the pores become *****
though they are not gunshot holes  

this mouth? has more to say than
just whimpers and whines
more than just wounded cries
I am a woman not just someone’s wife

these limbs? their shift without strings
what controls my legs is not seen
there is not a trigger to mash
when you feel entitled to **** me

my body is not a battlefield
my body is my shell, my body is alive

my body is mine.

I am trying to hold my heart,
let it cling to my chest
like an unsettled infant
aching

but I just wring it to death. it can nestle here
in my palms
where your *** has stayed in the pores
and when I think of you

I blush and sweat and it grows mold.
is that what we meant
when we promised each other
eternity

or will we
be able to exchange
organs again
                                    (soon)

Nobody really talks about how
their lovers swallow
between sentences, or **** their knee into your
girl parts
bruising them like a too ripe peach
between his dreams. I am having a hard
time being separate now,
when I have learned
all the things I can miss of his. Our tongues
pulsing in sync after swallowing
cinnamon,
music playing that does not match the thrusts
of him inside me,
changing clothes in front of each other,
a rose garden on my bottom
birthed by his palm,
little gemstones of wetness, how stray fuzz
clung to his beard more than I even
could, the certain words he
pronounces like
others. I came to trust their existence,
bits I was alright with not being able to predict:
separated, apart, alone, a divorce
and I have returned to
fearing the realization that we are not the
same person. We came so
close to
melting into our mixed body fluids, and I was
so happy because then he could
never leave me - if he touched another
woman, I would, too. I
would know
and feel everything and understand why it
happened. I would sleep upon
his adam’s apple until
he needed to swallow between words to her.
Being separate
is like having to pass on these things
nobody else cares about,
the torch, the Intimacy Olympics. I believe
the next person won’t notice what
he mumbles as he falls asleep at night. He
may as well not spoken
rather than it dissolve into the air. I
wonder if atoms feel this way when they split
or if they trust
in the science of what their
partner will do once they are gone. But
atoms do not pick up
the winter weather on their face like he does,
do not turn pink in the cheeks in
cold: nobody has
such beautiful things to miss as I do.

Put your ear to the concrete, now.
It has the same rhythm as watercolor,
            our souls have the same consistency as dirt.

La la la. Everything is plowed in the ground eventually –
      every ticktock shows Atlantis a friend.

This balcony smells like violins, like a comet, like waifs
                          & has the sound of crowded prose.

    A man will spit, spit, spit on you:
  a girl will crawl from a bottle of effervescence –
      both carry their flask
one is so red, do worry about communism.

                                We will all have our canteen
microwave like a thermos & aerate into
                    our crowded spit bubble, big finale la la la.

I am cutting all of my shirts this summer
to change each seam into a headband,
one that matches my stretchmarks –
twenty-two, in fact,
that are in perfect style for anyone to see.

I did not bloom
  
     pink
underground
    summerless bulb

              mostly the
undercooked appearance

and gutty roar
         I did not bloom

     although it appears
that way –

speckled rose
with spread wings
                eating her days

     like knives
feeling small & summits

             I was born:
Worldly, sharp,
        the deranged.

I am as big as my parents
were when my elder sister was born, I am also
the age my elder brother was
when I was born.

He had a black notebook and black eyes
before he was blind, yet
he already wrote about what he could not see.

I, the little sister
the uninvited birth
the blood our father slipped
between some
  younger woman's legs — my
mother, not ours.

And my elder sister
thought most about rescuing pills small as
taste buds and opaque rocks
that color-change your mind, the happy
          opals.

She told me liquid cough syrup was bad
yet she taught me to pour
water on my father's recliner, so he may think
my mom had an accident again
maybe she will stop drinking
maybe she will stop drinking
well, maybe, sister
you could stop rescuing pills
and rescue me instead.

I felt like a murderer at age nine
starting big fights about stained seats and
fake **** — my dad
had my mom against the washing machine
but any time she gave him a ****** nose, he'd
have to wash his own **** shirt.

By then,
my brother could not see at all.

One day, he stepped into his black room, locked
the door shut, tied his beard to it
and I lost all sight of him —
my belly could have split open for
seven babies
from the last time he remembered
my name.

I send my siblings birthday cards
they cannot read,
              just to keep track of my age.

he ingests sand
like rice and
finds its grains
in his hair a
day later

his sneezes
are tornadoes,
his coughs
earthquakes

when he eats,
chocolate forms
crust in the
corners of his
parted lips

giggles slaughter
whatever age
he's acquired
in the past
twenty-five years

still, he
is young.

mania is everyone you have ever met hiding in your bones
and depression is feeling them break, this
is supposedly the beginning and
end of life but I heard that those you love are
not even as large as the sky (I just don’t know for sure).

the thing is
everyone is a body of water, but nobody is an ocean
we can drown inside ourselves and

most importantly, we can drown inside another person too
(I just don’t want to believe that the man
I love could hurt me anymore than he already has).
somewhere there must be an island.

A jagged, sharp thing the men love:
is it my teeth? or the knives?

I do not know if the world is getting
bigger, or I am getting smaller –
one would comet a smile into grass,
the safe blades: the green is bliss.

But I am piqued by such shine,
I do not want it in my life, no, it’ll
outweigh love I have cut into pieces
inside.

And it cannot be the teeth: they
are human, though blank as a page.

I like to leave strands of my hair in the sink of anyone
I have ever loved or hated
because when they clean their bathroom,
I want them to remember how many times I
cleaned up blood and puke and ***
in their name –

I do not want to be a ghost that silently haunts on skin
but so tangible, even their
house will remember how I feel to touch.

With everyone but you, the photographs are scrutinized.

My mother says
we do not look close enough
or even as if we like each other at all.

But with you, she changes. Our skins seem tucked in
towards each other
the wrinkles know where to slouch,
I see not through the windows of my eyes but by braille.

There is a drug in us
leaving track-marks for the other to tongue.

More potent than wine, not as thick as moonshine,
this young and living love
amends the lighting in my bedroom and bathroom to the
consistency of honey, a shade of citrine.

Strangers are stopped from seeing
our pale complexion,
faces so close that the blood between us seems to blend.

Think of how much world is wasted on
bad eyes - by blindness, or ones that merely do not want to see.
The next thing you know you cannot miss a sunrise
and french kiss both moon and stars
goodnight, your head will hug its fallen hair on the pillowcase,
strands telling stories of when you were not conscious. I
realize you will visit jewelry stores and
watch how gemstones are faceted. You will imagine the galaxy
within an amethyst, publish novels on their bouquets
of cigarettes, worry about how pretty things can **** themselves too.
Everything is a story: you ask to see my cellulite,
you tell me how it got there, how my skin stretched to make
room for every place we shall go
including statelines that do something similar. We stretch apart
and still we are okay. We think about how the same
dawn reaches us, I can almost see your pupils dilate when the sky
dances - I watch but you hope to learn the ballet.
Someone is taking a photograph right now that they can look
at later, ours never came out the way I wanted them to
or perhaps the memories just go by another name.
I learned about homophones when I hurt you
by trying to sound beautiful. It is so much easier when we can see
morning peeling open our feelings, easier when you're here.

I do not imagine suicide as impulsive,
rather the day I wake up and travel thousands of miles
in my thoughts
to tell everything I have inhabited goodbye.

Nature will have the instinct to swallow my skin
in its blanket, the breeze whispers
to my boyfriend that I love him anyway.

A crew of mushrooms shall lay me on their breast or
beneath their umbrellas as in a rabbit hole

and upon lying down, petals spill
across my tired eyelids, and the breeze murmurs
that it is okay: I will not be missed because I will have
nature holding my bones the entire time.

She is there, playing my hair like a harpsichord,
whisking me away.

Said, I can show you around the blackberry bush –
I planted it last summer, you know, that June you coasted
to university and stopped having crushes on cousins.

Said, you grew your hair long.

I toss it out the window many mornings:
dewdrops as a conditioner and tease strollers with
a crease by my armpit you like(d), my flab on the side –
I impress others now, men cling to the bottom of my skirt
and suckle on the hem to make each thread fray.

Said, but your knees feel dusty up against mine.
There is no big wide world, no plum summit skies below
the cuff of another person’s dress shirt –

just a watch. Remind me how much time I have left
until extinction, no hand held or hug goodbye:
this is a kingdom where nothing can die
and when it does, seeds are sown in the pelt of your heart.

Said, no, I bred this world for the fireflies.

Said, there are berry-droppings on your chin.
You look as if you’ve eaten licorice or caught lung cancer;
I wish you had, I wish I had never called you sugar.

they have
become so nothing that they are everything. I
hate myself for
liking the stubble that inflames
my skin

I hate myself for caring so much about
being hurt
by them, for wanting

to show them
how bright my blood is when they turn me inside
out
and my veins show like
the splitting seams of a shirt, tagless
for more breathing room.

men are of no importance to me
so much that they have become everything. I

wait
to fall asleep in
the ocean spilling from their bodies

because I always have this desire to drown where
another girl did not want to.
I learned
there is no god, just
love addicts and the vulnerable
who piece together memories out of

salt. all

bodies are made of salt.
water, ***, I want to care so little that I love the
thought of men
breaking me open like a clam
that dies when they take the pearl out.

A ritual, I shape an acacia from your flesh and blood –
the fluff rather concealed. So are we, though your insides decorate
a globe just shy of blonde cornfields.

Tomorrow, you can be the columbine’s milk,
split drops deserting her center: now a park of petals on the edge.

But I examine every exposed hipbone, your clavicles rosy by me –
there is something around a jonquil about this image
you spread so I can embrace you, answer coils like a telephone
and want as much far away as I would close up to flaxen.

Hand me a celandine capsule or periwinkle bow –
all of this tied in a knot, originated from a bend of your hair.
I have recollections and joy from imminent meadows, girl and boy.

Everyone I love
is mostly water, but I
am made of fire.

inside is sugar
and spice, but nothing else nice
until the *** comes.

after my heart broke,
my veins looked like the poems
he wrote on my back.

girls draw butterflies
across my breast, but men put
them in my belly.

sometimes, oxygen
kills me more than it allows
my lungs to expand.

there is a gemstone
in my stomach, it makes my
cheeks nearly purple.

Scruffy thing, livid from washing
with the tip of my tongue
found hair in places I knew not existed:
it gave little track-marks, a buried belly button
sprouts in the radius of your private parts
and I scrambled your fur like eggs.

Matted with saliva now
but I find small locks in my ******* from
time to time, ones that did not stick
and were plucked from your pants-line.

They slumber in a box or are wiggled
between your comb’s teeth on my nightstand,
I want to find the torn follicles
and replace the black stems again
compose poems on you with my wet mouth
hide my name in your body hair please.

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.

round as the top of
tea cups, white as creamer in
coffee – ***** are sweet.

keeper of my heart,
burglar of every man’s, *****
can fall in love too.

men like ***** and so
do infants. then again, I
think everyone does.

I cannot stand my
mind, but I sure love playing
with my ***** sometimes.

I am beginning
to believe that breast milk is
made of shooting stars.

what I want is a
bowl of yogurt on my skin
that moves when I walk.

I cannot sleep – too
busy thinking about these
pillows on my chest.

spinning stars on my fingers, but they are amputated
before I could get callouses or cigarette burns
like daddy gave me when we hiked through woodlands
and meant to urinate in shrubbery not on my shoes

years we were consumed by the distance of each other
but he could not have scarred me on purpose
or I would have known it was meant to sting a little

sleeping in blackness but wondering ceaselessly
through conversations in which lovers are not obsessed
if I do not wring my eyelids, juice the retinas to bed
figures dance and they are ghosts of rifles he has  

us children **** the very barrel obsessively
until the trigger flicks our tongue, soon I smell smoke  

black and white and the disorder is somewhat colorless
there are sparks but rarely a single flame to see
just the bruises spitting **** slapped into skim milk
and now, some relief, I can do all the slapping myself.

The buttocks of a round building,
here we sleep, in the cheeks

each penny groans
and a door with the inlet

like lemonade mist, egotistical
where I mouth waterholes

they are without genitals
I can travel by candles to amend

my bed-sins –
such a chaos, still look silk

folly, belly-aching mistakes
not enough apologies to escape

I bet you would, had you no cribs,
you could tuck me in

staple comets to our ceiling
darling, I have the sleigh bells

and I think you made the pearls
hot, our mattress’ internal springs

while businessmen clothe
we will make love again

beyond astronomy, college didn’t
teach what is beneath the stars

but now I am learning
it is your tongue and chest-plate

glow you consider me delectable
though this office has more bottom.

When I am sad,
the only thing I can think is that
I never gave you permission
to pulse inside her and
you clock 90 beats per minute anyway.

I fear
others falling asleep when I need their attention,
loving those who are not
conscious enough to accept it. When
he was all eyelids and we were not eyes to lips
my heart rate increased. It whispered a
secret to me,
so I could tell him.

So he would wake up and kiss me.

It was on the first day that we made love, and the second
and the third

waiting for the eyes to become glossy
when we practiced letting go of each other’s hands

I never saw you in any light but fluorescence
the flaws escaping your face

it was on the fourth day that I recognized the taste of you
as the blood that seeps from skin cut

by broken glass.

I wanted my taste-buds
to feel like sequins on the tip of his tongue, to be
something that
could attach to him and decorate
his insides. Maybe he would not hurt anymore
if everything looked beautiful
from his throat
to his intestines – like water washes
blood
away, dyes itself red to save someone’s wound,
I wanted us to trade saliva. Trade
mouths, he could have
my strong stomach. I could take the mud
out of his esophagus for keeps –
trade bodies like school lunches between friends.
To be as young as me again,
to build it all again
so he has veins of lace and vines connecting from
his heart to his lips, to my lips in case
I ever have to **** out
the flowers that never got to grow
inside him again,
taking up space he could use to just feel better.

your jaw is locked
in a way that tells me
you would rather
tear my flesh
than watch another man
caress it.

you will
keep my blood in a jar
keep my tears in a jar and drink them so
you can taste the pain I felt when
you left

sew a quilt from my dead eyelashes
and stain yourself
with my mascara, melting
under the hot sun of your hometown.

i dissolve in light,
becoming hardly anything
more than
a ghost

so
you will hold me as mist
then wring me dry

so
i can never rain
on another love’s skin
like dew.

we are building a bridge from my bones
just so we can break it.

He lived in the perfect place
for a trailer park,
but his had the only wheels for miles. It
was a cemetery with just one

dead body,
a morgue with a single
black garbage bag.

We had a funeral for my hair
when he held
scissors to my skull, and swallowed my
motor cortex so I would never

run away – a promise
that he needed to check for silkworms
in case that is why my hair

stayed so soft.
My braids went into the plastic bag

and his tongue danced down my throat
daring me to move
saying he would love to
see me bend all my bones for him.

All his blankets were green
like the forest,
all his walls made of wood paneling –

me, the last young thing
and he buried me alive in his bad breath.

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.