I am not your ghost.
Swallow my liver
like I’m a fire demon
and hold it hostage
in your mutable citadel.
Your hearth is my life
is my home is my prison.
Don’t expect my bile
to turn into diamonds.
You should have taken
my heart when offered.
You could have crushed
carbon and soil,
resilient and fresh.
I might be a meteoroid
but I am clever enough
to know when I’m being caught
or when I’m being torn asunder.
Go back and tell me
not to find you.

I want to push on the plushness of your face and tell you all the ways you make me smile.
Your voice is a drop of warm honey, fresh from the comb, settling into my stomach. You have turned my heart into a hexagon of wax.
And when you laugh I can hear bees humming home home home home.

I remember how you introduced me to your family, pulling me at the wrist, nudging me to shake hands.
Later I shook hands with a doctor and acted like an adult when everyone began using words that were confusing for me but hurt all the same.

You wore plastic jewelry and grinned when I grew bold enough to wear my favorite turquoise pants to school.
You called them, “suitably academic” and shoved me with your shoulder.
Later in the after, I bought red slacks and yellow jeans and wore them angrily to class as if that would make you say my name again.

Two years with a school counselor and I would still mumble northwestern states like I’d never even paid enough attention to specifics.
Like I didn’t know the shape of the town or the photo of the front of the building.

I would pretend until I couldn’t remember either.
Were you in Oregon or Idaho? Could I not call because of long distance fees (lie) or because I was too lazy (lie)?
I learned that denial is a degenerative form of coping and years later I bought a pair of purple pants and felt guilty that they made me happy.

I was angry that even if the earth hadn’t swallowed you up by then, you wouldn’t understand the significance of things like bright colors and pants and dumb homemade beads anymore.

There were always six of you in every class.
When the teacher would call roll, lilting over your last name,
you would grin and press your arm toward the sky
like you were the only one,
like you were named after an element
or a constellation no one had heard of before.

We were partners in Home Ec.
and you monogramed the top of our cake
in purple icing. Beneath the sweeping curve
of our shared letter there was a chunk missing.
Your hand had skipped a pace, the muscle forgetting,
and a glass cup toppled onto our finished project.

You caught my face going grim
and threatened to frost my brain yellow through my ears
until I was knocking over kitchenware alongside you.
Then you said if we can’t laugh at what will **** us
then we have no place laughing at all.
I just looked away and continued wiping flour off of the counter.

I don’t dance well but I think I could dance for you.
I could flop back on some
ugly, beige couch with a beer in my hand;
tell you this is all I am for today:

snow on our television screen, ten seconds of song
before I hit next, pacing and sitting, the shift
of my bare ankle searching for yours under a
shared blanket.

There is an imagining of me and you building a life.
I am much stronger, you are more patient, and together
we dig deep to bury trees in a yard crafted
on morning coffee and late night wine.
You get angry because I forget to pick up after myself,
and I get irritated because I’m pretty sure you resent
how much I love the cat.
There is a wobbly chair on the front porch,
our first and last attempt at carpentry,
and there are weeds sprouting up between
cracks in the back patio.
I swear your shoulder is the best place to rest my head,
and you keep kneading at my stomach
like a kitten or infant, as we lay
on a hammock in the backyard.
I love you from the place past my lungs,
between each side of my ribcage,
and further in than anyone has been.
I can feel it swelling and radiating,
can you?
Can you feel how heavy my love is?

If I’m gonna be heartbroken then I’m throwing my shame into your lap.
I have no use for it. This is a brand new theatrical performance.
The guilt can be your footwear, not mine. I’m a map not a floor mat.
This chest is a windrose and the terrain is a glory that beats behind my ribs.
My spinal column will surge up like a barometer, bobbing to the nape,
but you’re not my storm anymore so sit down, stay still, watch me.

These directions aren’t so cardinal now; I swapped them around.
I was born facing up, my laboring mother cursing her derision
like she knew someday I would raise up, face the sky again
and let loose a fury that began in me when I was conceived.
I am a violent flicker and I can syphon out the light until I swallow it whole,
until you’re begging me to swallow you again too. I am not seasonal.
Keep frantic at that compass in your hand. It won’t bring me back.

Your breastbone drum keeps me alive.
I’m not sure if I can make it out today
or tomorrow or yesterday.
You see, I try and when I try real hard
it’s like I’ve been cooked too long
and my clay just cracks.
In one full shudder, I shed my
whole body like a skin.

You send a message through the lines
“How are you today?”
My smile and shrug aren’t working for me right
so I try to breathe and say, “not okay”
without breaking you too.

I can’t write checks for the bills
or tug a sock on, or reach around for the blanket.
It’s too hard, I’m sad, I’m terrified.
My stomach hurts
and there are fists clenched up inside my thighs
and my chest that just won’t loosen up.
I can’t see past the seam of the pillowcase
two inches from my face.
I should mend it. It’s coming apart. Unraveling.

You give me a few words again
and I don’t feel lighter or fixed
because you can’t fix people.
We don’t come with system codes
or instructions for when we break
and lose our first-glance worth.

But I feel you like a concrete floor beneath
my palms or the old, pealing linoleum
in my bathroom.
It anchors me down, and I remember
to take a deep breath now and then.
It reminds me that I’m still here
and you’re still here
and that’s enough for now.

There’s a give in here. A give I hand to you,
a slacking of rope or tautness of need or demand that I offer begrudgingly.
I act like there’s nobility, but I have no wings to carry me above the likes of you
and we both know I want too much to begin with.

You are a hot blade, an inevitable change, something that will fade or drift from me and I will continue to grasp for you throughout my life.
I will grab and grab and come up with empty hands.
I will be ninety and still clutching outward, gnarled fingers searching for you.

Your softness is mine in my head. I am probably delusional.
I will always be delusional. Someone too insecure, too needy, too much, but never good enough for you.
You keep rising like the sun and I am keening and bending toward you like a woman at worship. You are not all of me, but you are a part of me.
I want to keep you.
I wish I could lock you up inside my breast. I want to cage you within my ribs
and let you flower there, collecting your petals in my stomach until you fill me.
Until I am old and full of crisp, browning flora.
Let me help you grow. Let me push you upwards and out. I want to unlock all of you.
I will give you all of me, a gift of trust and rawness.

Unwind yourself and curl up within me.

You are out of reach to me.
Sometimes we meet and my chest collides with yours and my stomach pushes against the softness of yours and we are just as close as if we could actually hug or press against one another.
We find a likeness or a difference that becomes an adhesive.
I think sometimes you resent me for holding on too tight.

I think I was supposed to wait and instead
I went searching for you through decades
and tangles of terrain. I dug holes for you
and sifted flecks of gold down in Arkansas
before moving on to ancient libraries where
the pages all fell apart in my hands, like
the dust swiped from moths’ wings.

So many places you weren’t that I stopped
being hopeful but kept looking anyway
because the color came on six legs like
my head of hair, richening and fading with
the months. So I looked for years and didn’t find.

When I did find you it was small and quiet.
I didn’t recognize you until the months splayed
themselves out against our hands and turned
into years.

We took our time to grow worthy of exploring
and then realized we had been found.

I read the steeple of Plath and
realize I am closer to thirty than 19.

Telling me I am now all-filled-out
here, personality and something
resembling a soul.
Like those characters you see in sitcoms.
A card carrying full-grown.

Real, live person! 50 more years
and maybe I can waltz into life
without insects eating at my back.

Her hands write novels through the skin
of her palms. I am ink and graphite.
Covered with the smudges of her fingertips,
and the cant of her R’s and L’s.

I have lyrics lodged under my nails, and
a meandering thought pressed to the middle
of my back. Meaningless drunken messages
live on my shoulder-blades.

My knuckles and palms are unrecognizable.
They were held and smothered in chapters
and anthologies and I could never bring
myself to wash them of the marks.

You’ve thought this adventure was worthless.

Let me tell you about
the heartsick lioness I’ve seen
lurking around corners,
her gut held tight and coiled

ready to spring forth.

I’ve been in the grooves of your headsick
arbor. Your drowsy hands
spinning gold and paper,
delicate moth wing,
cyprus blue heart, pleasing
the eye-mouth-palm,

a skimming quick, stilted
casualty. Apex curve of your
force to my cheek,
rush of fleeting beat,

soft and unkempt night-crier.

In front of you lungs tilt and
brains bubble. A presence
in waves, the slap-thud-skid
of your hopscotch heart

pushing ours to do the same.

I wait for our clocks to run out
for you to open the last door left
and turn to run, because
I want-need-have-hope too much.
You’re all gnashing teeth and curt words.
Whole canid, hackles raised, throat full
of gravel.
Keeping mark and claim
around wrist and throat.
I hear our time ticking in my chest;
“Hush, hush,” you say, “it’s not a countdown.”
But I feel notches along each rib
Where tiny clocks keep time of us.
So, I grasp your arms and pull
hoping you’ll jump in and wind them
at my breastbone before
the world rips you back out
and every one chimes
on me.

You very nearly arrived in the caul.
When I reached between my thighs
to touch you for the first time
without a barrier of skin, muscle, and water
I felt taut, soft, rubber instead of the
slick velvet I’d come to expect.

It’s supposed to mean things, keeping
your 10 month membranous home around
you as you enter into this world from yours,
bringing your planet to us.
Good omens and seers and a symptom of
sacred luck.

I like to think the way you splashed into
this existence was just as auspicious.
You quietly keeping to yourself until
the very end when the bag ruptured and
poured right before your crown, like
you knew you deserved a headdress or chaplet
of dauntless liquid and warmth.

No jazz hands here, just the crowning
of a soul who decided that the quiet but
relevant ordeal of the amnion was too much
and the rare gush or early trickle of
water was not enough. So instead you
chose the in between:

Kept your foggy sheet wrapped
tightly around your body until the last second
then announced your arrival in a burst.
Bringing you to us, but also claiming
your quiet possession over yourself.

I am hungry.
We hold our hands up together and create a world.
If I could breathe I would tell you it’s all going to be okay, that
one day this place won’t be imaginary and we will finally feel anchored
and free.
We’ll lounge on pavement, soak up the heat and shuffle bare feet through grass.
The others will be invited and our earth will sponge up the anxiety at our knees
and trees will plant themselves where anger falls.
The ebb and flow of the sky will be comfortable and balanced
and the givers won’t give until they’re empty, the takers won’t take until they’re bloated.
We’ll see each other for what we are,
and we will allow the spaces between us to fill with sand and soft thoughts.
I am hungry for you. For her hands, for his voice, for our goodness and a balance that is no longer delicate, but sure and strong.
I am hungry for hands to hold mine, but not hold me down
because I like to pretend I am free and
not bound to giving up my own hands
when a need rises up from someone else’s ashes.
And you should feel the ground,
it should be steady beneath your legs and you should
hear your pulse and footsteps as real, and alive, as you are in the tiny glimpses I get when you are truly joyful, here and now.
It won’t be a bubble or a prison. There will be a sky,
and a world with us in it.
We won’t be hungry anymore and we will breathe.

“I like natural holidays like equinoxes and solstices and moon phases, because they happen even if no one’s there to acknowledge it.”*

Like the curve of your cheek bracketing a smile
and the elongated hum of your first consonant.

The gait of us takes a fluid shape and the tiny,
joyful bursts of your footfall fill up the
quiet between the words we offer.

You feel like old tradition and new thought
made up to bring the rest of us forward into ourselves.

I’m sorry I’ve not been myself.
Has it made you sad, sleepwalker?
Do you wish I could come back
and force you to sit and listen,
run a hand down your back just once,
push in,
and make you release
the moths from your stomach?

There were these written exchanges
where you told me I would find a
place for my chest to settle into again.
I said, “No.”
There was too much to weigh,
even then with all the inevitable consequences
of faulty nerves.

I burrowed into the landmine
of your genetic code
and you kept shoving at me,
telling me there was more than
just you, here, now, and after.

One day we will be dead.

Our daughters will flood
the buildings of power like we
never had the gall or opportunity to afford.

They will bleed on the steps of
civil law and **** along the the stark
black lines of “rules” like pale meat pandering
for sympathy within their own box.

The powder on our faces and the cotton-silk
of our garments will stifle the very licked down,
spit smothered lies they raised us with,
gutting the cage and raising the dead.

What will they do when we amass
like the folds between our legs, bellowing
like the sounds of our *** and forming
in the clean cut lines of blazers and slacks?

Can they get a handle on the heave of our
*******? Can they take the pulse of our
wombs? Out, in, out, in, like the very ******
they aided us with.

How many months in a lifetime do we
have to bleed and clean to earn ourselves
the right to humanity?

Our girls will know more than this;
mark my words. Our children will see
the right they were born with.

We will be free, we will be free, we will not

be silent.

Kissing is described as pliant
and warm.

I’ve never touched your mouth
but your softness has the same
glow. The same flow of
surprise and movement people
like to talk about.

I think if we pressed ourselves
under the same sheet and
shared the same air, then my heart
would settle

mouths slackening and tightening,
into pliable smiles. Tongues curling
over words and laughter.

Shotgunning one another’s voice
with the same virility some
lovers kiss with.

I met you when you owned a universe.
You were a pitiless empress and I made pies for the sake of pie making.
After a season of orchard trysts
(a queen picking apples! The world would talk.)
you requested a pastry of my heart.

So I carved it out and baked it in and cut my hair for the latticework.
If you want to satisfy your gluttony, the directions are here.
The filling calls for apple cores.
Make sure you use the ones in the very back of the grove
on the ground where you nudged my knee with
yours as we gorged and gossiped.

Sprinkle a little dirt on it, sweetheart. Don’t be afraid to get adventurous
and use the outdated milk and don’t sift out those sugar ants from the bag.
Knead the crust with your elbows, don’t use the hands that would pet my hair
as I lay in your lap.
Crawl to the oven, cut out your heart with a paring knife
(no royalty to buy you a clean blade) and toss it in.

Bake it at the degree of your contempt for me now.
Don’t sear the top with your temper, darling.
Act meek enough and eat your ******* pie.

You’re sort of everything I could hope for
with a beard of decades and faded tattoos,
like you’ve seen too much sun and rode
a motorcycle too long.

I have this hearsay that says you were a
traveling man who traded your
friendship and your charisma.
(I know nothing firsthand.)

I was a girl once and thought you were
searching for something until I realized
no one ever actually said as much. Just that
you went from here to there and sometimes back.

I wish you could have been seldom rather
than absent. Or maybe rare but at least felt
the pull of my heart enough to pause.
I don’t remember the sound of your voice.

I could be your lover or nimble fingered arithmetician,
serve the rice cold and the soup too hot,
make the trope I’ve made my life into a
means to ruin others.

I could be his other. All similar shouldered
as we are, pressing up against each other,
because soft bodies and soft hearts alike
call to one another.

I’m a gardener and you don’t see me
pressing my thumb to walls, convincing
ivy to climb to me over toward the other
side. I am stone and soil.

I’m smiling too much at the cashier when
she makes a joke and it never occurs to me
that my heart should be something to
apologize for.

You can’t make me, take from me,
or chip away at whatever it is
you think I am: lameness and uselessness,
inability to click back onto the track.

I could be deserted. I could be
dessert, the strays can lap up my body
and I’ll lay here where you tossed me
until I disappear.

I could have been something other
than this settlement of lies and circles,
leech demanding its nectar, mottled
voice waiting waiting waiting.

I am joy and indecipherable name,
sticky on your tongue. I’m kept.
One day you will search for me
to no avail.

From the bruising
on your back
to the lines
decorating my
left radial nerve,
we keep count
of bad fortune
and tired breaths.

I once dove into your heart.
I carried you with me through the sea
and time gobbled us up like
h’ors d’oeuvres at a dinner party.
We are carnivorous creatures,
wading out into high grass
to find the meatiness of the best ****.
(**** them with your cling and your clenching hands)
If you could swallow my love whole,
it would take you alive
and turn you inside out before me.
If time and space did not stand between us
like a dividend from the karma corporation
for all those nasty things we’ve done,
I would place my hand on your dimpled skin
and tell you that your flesh gives me breath
and your shoulder touching my cheek
keeps me alive.

The grass never stays long enough to go brown.

She flew in from the grey and
All of the skin on her legs could not be
bought from me.
The voice that wrought a piece of me so
Crucial I thought all of the breathing before
it must have been labored and never this
free.

When our hair touched and fell together
the green stayed longer. Like someone
hired a caretaker who raked through the mounds
of myself there was left behind. What parts
kept the ground barren were gathered up and

I could see a new season.

The heart is the heart because it wants to be.
The paste and cement are cunning
and clever and selfish.
Dance circles around the lungs
and you’ll never realize that you have
not actually touched them.
(years and years, how could you never notice that you
pull back before actually placing yourself within them?)
They won’t notice until later
when they ache for hands upon ribcage.
For now, believe you are making contact
when you’re really just taking
and breaking. All of us are blind.
The best fakers are the ones who
don’t even realize they’re faking it.

Interim with salty eyes and a slowness
that comes with the hollow sadness
that nips at our calves like we’re
little girls again, disturbing the grasshoppers
of summertime with our stamping feet.
This buoyant heart is from God,
even if I don’t know him too well these days.
This lightness in my cage of bones is
growing.
You are a thief of heavy things and
you fling them off the highest hill
until we are small again, and our souls
aren’t haunted.
We stand, hand in hand, with our faces
to the breeze. You say,
“Brace yourself for the joy.”
and I believe you.

I guess that’s how things change:
like seasons but not nearly as methodic,
and like lovers or skin that finds
new indentations and marks over time.
Like how one day I look up over
my mug of coffee and you’re
no longer there across from me.
Instead, you’re a thousand miles
east or west and I can no longer
keep up with the colored marks on a map.

I took my luggage to you
and you said, “Just check it over here.”

Then we went sailing
as people do when they find one another.
We went fishing
for words and atonement.

I said, “I am this violent thing and
I thrash about like there’s anger when there is not.”

We put together seven hundred and fifty pieces of a
puzzle and it made my heart ache.
You put pieces together of me and I put
a few together of you.

You said, “You’ll leave. I am not enough.
Never was. That’s how it goes.”

We sat in a park, on a graffitied picnic table
and did nothing but talk then sit quietly.
I was once taught the value of silence and stillness
but before that park I felt too raw to practice it in turn.

I carved curves and names into the table beneath us
and bumped my shoulder to yours.

I am afraid. I know I’m supposed to pretend I’m not
but I’m terrified.
I want to rush out in desperation, reeking and determined;
shove you behind me while I tear the world apart
until some poor schmuck in a wrinkled lab coat who
doesn’t understand the gravity of this
clutches at my sleeve,
to tell me they’ve found it and it’s all going to be okay.

I make myself forget.
Then sometimes I hear a phrase or see a word
and I remember,

and I’m angry. I am filled with it. I want to destroy someone good,
rip children from mothers, sabotage, and crumble
and claw up the things in this world
that are right,
because this is not right and
I have no remorse that my rage could fill someone else’s
life with dread and pain.
(that should scare me, but it doesn’t)
I am bloodthirsty and selfish and you deserve better
than a lottery that says your light could get smothered
under a thickness of receding grey matter and nuclear inclusion.

You are ingrained in me.
If someone tried to pry us apart
it would be like pulling at a plant,
tugging hard until the base of the roots
pops out and still the earth won’t release her hold.
The vines keep coming in knots
until you’re forced to dig them up too
because they refuse to be separated.

We are tangled. Not two
halves of a whole or pieces of a part,
but sibling roots twisted like lovers’ limbs,
wholly separate but very much
twined together to be something else entirely.

I’m not saying I wouldn’t go on and move forward,
but if you were gone from me
I would be less.
The days would dim
and the moon wouldn’t be something
I held my breath for anymore.
I would be less.

Light hands thread wool and silver,
duck cloth and burlap,
the concrete and dirt under the wood.

Your bold heart betrays your mouth.
Your chest is a bellowing gong
against your sisterhood-cotton-patch.

Could the river cry to your empathy?
or would you stuck-stay-stubborn
and hard-****** to your unmoved stoicism?

You have the rich-filthy-love I look for.
Truth hearty and sacred like the
sincerity I didn’t believe in before you

showed up creeping toward my front,
announcing yourself as unending,
giving the stomach promise of stay-sure flight.

The same week you kissed the boy I sorta liked
you said you wanted to stop going to church.
“God isn’t doing much for us these days.”
So we never went back.

Our Sundays stacked into a tension until
you threw a pair of kitchen scissors at my feet
then smashed in the glass front of a cupboard.
We both stood there shaking.

“I can’t use them anymore.”
God didn’t do much for us then.

You’re a warrior,
armed with cinder block walls.
Sister legionnaire with fingers stuttering
down my spine.
You are a helical path across my clavicle,
the sun filled A-frame in my gut.
You are the space between my head on the pillow
and my feet on the floor.
You are a well for me to pour into.
I want to drink from your hands and know you.
I want to find your face on the surface
and slip down
until I meet the siren.
I want to touch your face, nape, arms
and have license to explore you.
You are the bottom of a hot spring,
slippery stone and encompassed warmth.
I bare my neck to your teeth
and urge you to share the weighted things
you think about at night.
Breathe at my neck and shoulder, then
learn to exhale.
You are carrying too much, Kindred,
it will drag you down.

You joked and joked
until there was nothing.
I never started laughing
and you finally stopped.
You couldn’t hold a cup
or a pen or my hand.
You just played a
phantom piano,
that transformed into a foxtrot.
Nothing could make us
laugh
when the Greek dance
took over your body.