As soon as you leave home
There is no home to come back to.
It did not matter that the Helvetians burned their own villages,
Or that the sea closed up behind Moses and his flock.
Unburied, unburned, fully and completely accessible:
The place is not the place and
The mind carries the only shard left of what once was.
You can take it with you,
You can!
You can hold it like a glass ball in your chest,
A gem cradled in your palms.
Not only can you take it with you,
That’s really all you can do.

You get hoarse and forget how to speak now
lightning struck your throat and left a cold opal there
all milk white and cornflower blue
riot fire noise trapped in a chunk of ice
the veins of it scraping the throat raw
and reaching down to fossilize the heart
the whole of the innards becoming included in the matrix
until it is all stone
until it is calcified chunks connected like a maze
waiting for some craftsman to pour resin over it
make a conversation piece, a coffee table
But you?
You will never speak again.

If you learn the building blocks of womanhood
You will never be the same again
This gender self-destructs when gazed upon for too long
And The *** Therapists and Makeup Artists
The Midwives and Matchmakers
Have all been un-ladied by their knowledge of lady-ness
Here’s to the fat mask-wearer at the Sephora makeup counter
Who will never get a beau and did all the faces at her sister’s wedding
Here’s to legions of ruined teenagers
Riding on the *****-seats of motorcycles
Because once you’ve gazed on the truth of femininity
The others can smell it on you
Like mother birds rejecting a chick
And all of us Nuns and Ateliers
We’ve only got each other looking out for us now

Where do little wild animals go when they die?
Does a weary dog ever collapse in a public park
And what do they do with it after?
Theoretically, you know the answer,
But the details are another one of those things
That other adults learned somewhere together and then just forgot to tell you.
And you don’t think about it. You don’t need to think about it
Until one day you find a long gray cat sprawled across the sidewalk.
Fluffy, maybe, fat? Maybe? No, not fat, but Bloated.
And you could walk around him or step over him,
But he really does block the way.
“call animal control”
This is all your friend has to say about it when you text her,
And you’re pretty sure they’re for living animals anyway,
That go crazy and bite people and run unpredictably into the street,
But you find on google that they’re only available to respond
On such-and-such a day of the week, at such-and-such an hour.
(even though you’re sure that for every second every hour every day, people and animals are dying in droves....)
So you decide to walk on the other side of the street for a while,
And after a week, the cat is just a gray pelt.
(you don’t know what’s underneath...)
And after a month, even the bones are gone,
And your mind boggles at the sum totality of all the things
That you don’t know you don’t know...

I forgot he was dead all the time.
I never saw the body, and couldn’t attend the memorial.
I went to other cities, and I told people about him;
I used the present tense-
“A family friend, who makes these beautiful paintings and sculptures!"
And I would tell the story, and even in the telling, the end would surprise me...
There are people I met who don’t know he died,
Because I got to the end and couldn’t finish it.
How could I bring something so lovely into their lives,
And then ****** it away in the same breath?
The artist died, but I forget. I forget every day.
I look at his painting of a sphinx cat, and wish him well,
And the signal pings back off his bones,
And it pings back to me, and the people I told,
And the museum in my home town, where they hang his name.
The artist died, and now the story should be over.
Yet every time it's told, my breath catches and I stay silent,
And in the quiet, I wish for the artist to live on

I spent my life in a covered basket
single kitten left over from the litter
Ghost brothers and sisters reaching their little hands
through the cracks between the floorboards
Where the jokes lived
And when our parents fought,
When the levy broke and the pipes busted,
We’d flood the house together,
Play at under-the-sea,
And taste muddy undoing.
I learned how to run from rising water so early on
At beaches, at creeksides, at home.
I knew what it meant to see trees bent to the ground
As if bowing.
I don’t know what kind of fire others face
And I cannot imagine a life of any kind but
A life alone
You and your erstwhile enemies, you and your brothers in arms
I feel like the first man on Mars when I look
At baby pictures of you…
We made the mistake of wearing the others’ clothes for a bit
Mistaking flood for heavy fire,
Fire for flood, flood for fire
And I was offended when you offered shields for sandbags
Well, now I wish I could bring my flood
I would wash my memory out of your head
And I would swim away, paddling
With my hands and the ghost hands
And nobody else but us

I am dreaming
Not dead, but dreaming
Balled up under the covers
With no ugly sunken city for company
Just crumbs and trash and socks
Like boulders strewn about
And I am dreaming
Because I am stupid and fragile and
I can’t get over
The tenderness of murderous eons
That fostered the frogs who once lived in Antarctica
Squinting their eyes against the warm rain
As it rolled down their bumpy little backs
It fostered them and they are gone now
Frozen and dead and maybe even dreaming
Crushed under time like their modern brothers under Jeep tires
Fossils and curiosities balled up like me
And we are dreaming