Don’t think about it.
The last place, finish line, pedestal, podium
The idle dreams of athletes whose sweat you’d never touch
Not even the bridesmaid, light-years from the bride,
Not the pity-**** flower girl,
And certainly nobody’s first choice.
No, don’t think about it,
Because there will be time enough
In that infinite second after you’ve spoken ill
When you do think
And think it for the thousandth time
That you, you crooked thing,
You are alone even in a crowd
That that was always your talent
Raised up for it like veal
Alone in a crowd
Alone even among those who love you
Or claim to
Or love some strange idea of you, half-made,
Rendered of your spur of the moment ramblings and
Whatever fancies cloud their own eyes
Yes, you belong to some circles,
And dance in and out of them like smoke passed mouth to mouth
You nominally entertain the idea of having friends
And then, in truth, are never there.
So, don’t think about it.
Don’t think about it
Until your face is up against the wall of the truth of it
Until stone scrapes the soft flesh of your cheek off the bone
And there’s nowhere else to go.
And when you do think of it,
Do it like you always do-
Look at it out the corner of your eye like a basilisk,
And then, lazily, avert your gaze
And go back to dreaming.
You weren’t strong enough to think about it anyway.

No one is ever going to know you.
You will die with your soul achingly untouched,
And you will not be special for it.
Every day, we come in and out of the world together:
Doctors cradle babies out of the birth canal,
Hand them to their mothers, wet from excision.
Grandchildren hold the hands of dementia patients
As they lay in their beds flickering like candles.
Yes, these are good things. Yes, they are done together.
Yes, still, we are all alone.
You don’t really need to be accompanied,
You don’t need pure wordless understanding,
Your soulmate never did and never will exist.
It is ok.
You will not be special for it.

Every time I speak, I hold a crystal lens in my mouth
And the light of who I am and what I say refracts through it
Blasts my innards onto the walls as sure as I’d been shot
Point blank range, and every drop of blood a slide in a projector
It’s an unbearable burden, and it’s the curse of hindsight
To know who you are to others only after the splash of rainbow light
Only after you’ve burned some Rorschach on their retinas
I’m so ******* upset all the time about it, it’s pathetic,
But I would hold your face in my hands nose to nose
As if I were about to kiss you roughly,
And I would open my eyes their widest and shine into you
Pure white floodlight high beams of absolute truth about who I am
Only the trouble is, really, even I don’t know.

Veins, cracks, and branches
Have one thing in common:
They live in our lungs,
Or how have you forgotten?
The tip of each shoot
And the tip of each finger
Have borne out a flower,
But Spring never lingers.

And the heart of a man is the core of a tree...
And the love of a man is so foreign to me...
Protected by bark,
An unknowable heart!
We could strip everything to find out what we keep,
But the loss of the skin is the loss of the tree!

I dream of red mansions,
I am a red pearl.
You fed me on teardrops,
And showed me the world.
And you are my mountain,
And I’m just a girl.
I dream of red mansions,
I am a red pearl.

I dream of red petals,
I puke them at night.
I gave up the medals
You won in your fight!
And you are my mountain,
And I am your girl.
A stone upon your tongue!
I am your red pearl!

A stone in an oyster...
I am a red pearl.
A stone in an oyster...
Forever your girl.

I live in dead houses.
Have never felt the breath and blood and bones of a structure,
And I think that to feel something like that,
You need siblings and babies,
A family.
The heart of a house…
I’ve heard it variously called
The kitchen, the living room,
The dining room, the bedroom, the hearth…
Whatever heart I’ve touched was always cold and stone,
Too long without contraction to be identified as a heart.
And I feel like a person who’s never owned a pet,
Never had a proper friend;
For I don’t understand the care and feeding of a house,
Or the give and take of a relationship with it.
And I think that just by moving in I shock it,
Shock it with my covered-over pit of neglect, so strong
It dies on impact,
And I make my home there in the carcass.
A parasite in the body it killed,
A scavenger taking shelter in the bones.
I live in snail shells in the garden.
I live in burnt, hollow trees.
I live in dead houses.

Some things must be allowed to die.
Like pruned branches and withered annuals,
You can’t sustain all of it, nor should you…
So say goodbye to some parts of yourself,
Wrap them up like baby teeth in an old handkerchief,
Fertilize the yard with them,
Watch them decompose and brew beer with them,
But you can’t keep them around.
They’re dead, they’re dying, no matter what,
And holding on can never change that!
Let them hang around too long and one day,
You’ll reach for it,
Some lost piece of yourself,
And only close your hand around soft putrefaction.

I do not know how to reconcile love with experience.
The people of the past buried their children
Wearing wreaths of ceramic flowers,
Armored greenery stiff enough to last whatever journey
Lay ahead of the child’s thin bones,
And every petal must have been shaped with love and only love!
For what else could convince an aging back
And aching spindle-fingers
Into laboring over finery like that?
This is one of those things that makes young women want to die.
Awake, alive, poisoned with the lust of others’ eyes,
We stare at the coins resting on the tongues of mummy women:
Just enough to pull a little something from the gumball machine.
Our fingers twitch,
And we want it.
We can only want it.

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

I believe in the power of light to work evil.
Its presence shining on atrocities
Renders them all the more horrid.
And the way it brings heat,
Strips flesh, bleaches bone…
Light is a great and terrible Thing;
Power is power; a push or a pull.
Kinetic energy brushes your fingers through your child’s hair and
Rips bullets through soldiers’ chests.
So I believe in the power of light to work evil,
Just as I believe in the power of dark to hide it.
And I keep my lamps low,
And my hands behind my back.

A human being is a mouse-cage
Walls of the nest lined and fluffed
with candy and scraps
The whole of what a child would think of
Ice cream for dinner and
Staying up late
all compressed into one cotton-ball for sleeping on
The spirit inside racing on the wheel of the brain
climbing the rope-ladder veins and viscera
Up and down
Until one day it escapes
A thousand wings
A million eyes
A blinding light like a dentist’s
Eagle talons and lion claws
Freefall
Metamorphosis beyond the frail imaginings
of little girls and boys
And you wanted this, didn’t you?
You asked for it, so here,
Limitlessness beyond comprehension is yours

It’s that cruel thing that brings you to your knees again
Bearing up under the weight of tonnes of muscle and bone
Even in your weakness, horns tall and
Nose touched to the ground like curtsy
Human beings may have brought you low
But they said a prayer for you,
Undoubtedly,
When they did it
And then of course they dug you up again
And made you a monument to yourself,
Bowing, a courtier,
Your own funeral attendee with rips in your
Tight black plastic skin
Dancing the dance of etiquette with us
After we invented it,
After we put it aside
And murdered you.

Something pretty about me falls away in winter,
When I lose my leaves and flowers like a sharp black tree.
Spring, summer, and fall, strange men pursue me,
Tap me on the shoulder, and tear at my clothes!
But as the sun sets earlier, my shoulders square and my eyes steel.
The soft things in me harden;
Butter frozen in the dish, that tears through whatever you spread it on.

A witch lives in a house where butter is never soft;
Where milk goes off too soon and animals never approach;
Where men awaken in the morning to a mouthful of pins and needles,
Lips sewn shut,
Pick-up lines stillborn on the tongue.

I have taken alcestis’ place many times
Sighed for her and said I’ll go instead
Moved heaven and earth
Torn death screaming from its place
So others might walk once more in the sun
And so I might what?
Ah, so I might.
It would be good to stop living and dying for someone else
To quell this rhythm
“Do it for them, do it for them,”
That makes such an irregular heartbeat
Too strange to straighten a body
And would they understand what I had done for them before?
Ah, so they might.

You don’t know what to say.
She carried your body across three states,
Held you in the air and fed you your last meal,
And you don’t know what to say.
Because she carried you, bore you to soft ground
And cypress trees,
But threw away the flowers for your funeral.
Your Dowry Hope Chest lies open,
Alms for the poor,
In some nameless little town along the way.
Is it “Thank you?” Is that what you want to say?
Were you disregarded? She carried you…
She shrouded you and broke ground,
However rough her hands were,
However quickly she moved! Even still…
And you are thankful to lie in this good dirt,
You want to be thankful for it here.
So you try not to think of it,
How there was a hole to fill and a rotting corpse to bury,
How you were one more thing that could fall into place:
Flowers to the field,
Linens to the needy,
Corpses to the ground
Where they belong.
And what should you say?
You are dead and gone, settled at last;
She does not expect you to say anything.
And so it does not matter if
You don’t know what to say.

No matter what you dedicate yourself to, it hurts.
There is always the honeymoon, the good time,
The spark inside whistling:
“I was made for this!”
And that’s a dangerous thought;
You weren’t made for anything.
It needs to stop.
It needs to stop, now.
You weren’t made for this hobby,
This job,
This lover.
They’ll leave you behind;
Neither their existence nor your own
Depends upon this union.
From dust, from cells, there is no difference,
They met without any special purpose
But subsistence,
And when they are separated and dispelled,
The tears shed for them will evaporate as quickly
As normal saltwater otherwise does.
How many grand purposes have passed you by?
It must be five or six by now.
You weren’t made for this.
It needs to stop.

The moon rose in my window tonight
A half moon
The kind of straight-edged split pea that
Reminds you of math
Real eldritch math that hides under high school Algebra II
Like a hole in the earth that could swallow you forever
Sitting prettily, disguised under a manhole cover
The force that shapes mad dust into planets, spheres,
That folds light just-so around one single, even half of the moon
It rose perfectly in the middle of my window
While I talked on the phone
And then rose up past the top of the casement
As the sky got truly and properly black
And if I were a certain kind of person
A happier person, no doubt, even for all the trouble I would cause,
Its disappearance might be proof enough
It had never been here at all

1.
He said
You’re so thematically inconsistent
What are you? A ghost? A vampire?
I said I am a more old fashioned thing
Before monsters had to be **** and well contained for the screen
A specter- solid when it wants to be
And blurry when it does not
Think of me as the mistreated children
And the wreckage in your wake
Think of me, and my hands will grow substantial around your neck.

2.
I don’t self-diagnose.
Don’t trust myself to know myself,
I take personality quizzes with
A moderated panel of objective observers.
What mythological creature am I?
“A fairy.
Step light, speak quiet, hard to get in touch with.
If you weren’t right in front of me
I might think you weren’t real.”
A fairy.
A sweet thought, pleasing to the ego.
Who doesn’t want the graceful bearing?
The mischievous face peeking out from holly bushes?
Who wouldn’t want to feel ladylike and airy?
I don’t self-diagnose.
If I did, I’d never end up with something so pretty.
A ghost, I would say.
Long-dead and fading every second.
My tangled hair and pale face,
My cold bare feet padding silently over the hardwood floor,
My too-big clothes swaying in some invisible wind.
Step light, speak quiet, hard to get in touch with.
Better organize a seance before the veil draws closed.

I want a clean raw heart
Like a house cat’s heart
Light and string and feathers
And sleeping in the sun
I want the pricking up of ears
And the eyes that miss nothing
A heart that knows little and tastes much
I have grown too long and traveled too far
The cat heart and the bear heart
The elephant and whale heart
They are behind me in the distance
And I am the overgrown thing sleeping
Beneath my own weight
I would slough it if I could
Oh to be unparalyzed
To pick up and move house with the wind
And stir leaves under my feet like the wind
But I could never embark
Dragging some heart
Some strange heavy heart
Not without leaving a crushed world in my wake

i never believed in a soft God.
the one that kisses birthmarks onto babies
and sends angels to watch sleeping children
He is blond and white, like honey and milk
and the baptist hospital gift shop sells statues of Him
enthroned in pastel puffy clouds with roses on His cheeks.
He calls me "lamb" with a voice like a grandmother's,
He puts casseroles on potluck tables, and
i never believed in Him.

i do not know what hard God would look like
but if i did, that knowledge would be my undoing.
in the old bible, He is called "my sword" and
"my shield"
and that is how God is used today
the shelter over the head
the weapon on the hip
to whom you raise your arms in self-defense
only if you want them marked in blood forever.

hard God knows that birthmarks are made by splitting skin cells.
hard God knows that infants die for no reason in their cribs.
He puts price stickers on pink statues of soft God,
reminds me that lambs go to the slaughter,
and doesn't let just anyone into the church function.
He killed the man who taught me
that even if i could not believe in a soft God, i could love like Him.
hard God said "no other Gods before me"
and He killed, slowly and painfully and publicly,
the kind man who had believed so earnestly in a soft God.

I am like all other fools;
Nothing broke my heart.
I am told I was a happy child,
And I remember it so:
Happy alone in the dark,
Happy apart from the rest.
The little princess, the secret garden,
Ariel in her grotto with the hearts of untold music boxes...
I cannot shake the feeling that nothing happened,
Nothing!
A childhood of blithe gray happiness and
Nothing!
I am so upset and why?
So I have to go back and look for the reasons,
Stir the *** for carrots to float to the top,
And trot out what I find like fluffy show dogs on Thanksgiving:
"See this one,
This one is pure.
Its grandfather is its uncle
And it is pure.
It does not heel, and its bite is fierce.
It explains everything."
I'm not sure if I believe it, or if anyone else does either;
It was wrong, and it happened,
But if it didn't bother me then, why should it now?
How did I live happily with such rotten filling?
With a missing father, or a cramped existence,
Or a present so empty of true love it engenders a future of death by seafoam?
What wakes me at night with the terror
That I am the last person left alive on Earth?
Is this the horror of not recognizing?
The audience sees the shadow of the monster creep behind the girl,
But in that moment, her mind is still peaceful.
She won't scream until it's too late, anyway.

I am a Passover meal without honey
A salad of parsley and salt
I am the face babies make when they taste
Lemons for the first time
And when the riptide yanked you under as a child
The brackish fetid smell of your lungs afterward
The breath of the drowned-dead corpse that lingered
Even after listerine and the end of summer vacation...
What the **** is wrong with a person who hates happiness?
Why does my skin dry and shrivel at heartwarming moments?
Why do hallmark cards make me wanna yartz?
What the **** is wrong, here?
Rupi Kaur split her poetry in sections:
Hurting, loving, breaking, healing.
I want to like her but I can only stomach the first fourth of the book,
The rest feels like a betrayal written by someone I thought I knew.
My coworkers express their sadness at current events and all I can think is
Finally!
Finally, you feel it too!
Hurt people hurt people.
I'm in the crab bucket and you're ******* coming with me, pal.
I've heard it said that I'll get better,
In body or mind or soul, the something that's got to give
Will give
And I will get better.
No one ever says exactly how, or when.
Until then I will sit among bitter herbs
Licking tears, uselessly, off my cheeks.

There are things we do not talk about,
Nor speak their names, nor bring them in the light;
The picture that gives injury through the eyes,
The song that kills, while sleeping, through the ears.
What watercolor of yellow poison blooms
When from the void steps something new to fear?


There are maps to places I should never go
I colored them with blue and green crayons
Made indentations in my grade school desk
And a tight-lipped teacher whispered phantom breaths:


“There are sights you never will unsee;
Flowers cannot regress into seeds,
Steps can’t be folded back into the legs.”
So I closed away what I should not have known
And my face flushed as I stilled my twitching legs


“There are things you never should have known,
And never dwelled upon; can you be smoothed?”
I try to reassure, by bolting down
Pandora’s empty chest, whence specters sprung
The raging lungs billowing in the night
The murderer’s knife a curvy white rib bone
One ***** left, weak-beating heart of hope


There are things, and things, and things, and things, and things!
Oh honesty, couldn’t you have struck a balance with me?
Couldn’t you have shut my eyes and ears,
Rubbed sunblock on my skin, and drunk my tears?
And left me in the dark where I belonged?
Cool in the dark, forgotten there for years


There are things grown people know and talk about.
There are people far too weak to find them out.
Too late. I should have known. I know it now.

Some people say it is the easiest thing in the world
The first thing that spills from a baby’s eyes:
Not tears, but love, easy love like cheese oozing out of a sandwich!
I like that, I want that;
That ease of use, reaching behind me to pluck love
Out of my toolbox without even turning to look!
There it is, at hand, at hand, fistfuls of it like plenty, like bounty!
But other people say the other thing,
That feels so true because it hurts,
Because hurt is what we’re used to when truth comes into it.
They say it’s hard work every day, that it’s conscious;
It’s the tension in your muscles when you do a new dance step,
And the only ease you ever find is the autopilot, the muscle memory.
Years down the line after hard, hard work you just might feel it,
The way a gymnast’s old breaks thrum in reminder.
“Remember how it used to be so hard,”
“How it hurt you and you had to work to become this,”
That inner contradiction to her graceful posture when she lands.
I think I want it easy,
But I don’t really know how I want it.
When you’ve never had it at all, how can you
Pick and choose the way you finally get it?
I think about women in pastel dresses brushing lint off their husbands’ clothes,
And I think about how blood rises to a cheek when it’s been slapped,
And I think what if I was never meant to have it at all.
Maybe I can’t even do it the hard way, can’t fake it till I make it
‘Cause I’ll never make it anyway.
The easy way or the hard way,
The easy way or the hard.
We never talk about option number 3,
When someone looks up at you, eyebrow slightly raised,
And says with a quiet finality,
“No.”

I am always missing signs
and the standard question here is
Can’t you read
And the only answer here is
Yes, I can read, but I can’t see
Long ago, when I was upset I could shut off the camera feed
Do away with my eyes like removing a pair of goggles
And one day I misplaced them and have not been able
To set them back down atop my nose
And the question of course is
Why would you do a thing like that
And the answer is
It isn’t really so injurious
These days it feels like I never see the stuff
Inside of other people that other people are always talking about
The greed and selfishness and the cruelty and the lack of care
And it has been so long since I’ve glimpsed and
Properly identified these shards of glass
I’ve almost convinced myself they aren’t even there
The only problem is I know about them really
I did see them before, the persons unshelled
The coals and flames and pieces of
God and Angels and Demons
The burning cargo inside the wineskin
That when you ****** a foolish glance you can only say
Oh sorry
Before blinding yourself in humility
As if there were enough apologies for seeing
As if you could shut a door and forget what’s on the other side

Chasing after wonder days
Of eggs and toast, no tums required
Walks to the grocery store past
Rows of cactuses and pansies
Bouquets of daffodils strung like hangmen
In the window
Singing to Tie Guan Yin at sunrise and weaving
Life of strings over and under like a basket
To sleep in.
Chasing after it all,
Struggling feebly now,
A dog under a heavy blanket, against
This thing that lives inside you
This thing that hates your happiness so much
It would bleed to see it killed
Signs of life appear at mealtimes,
When rambling,
Under laden branches,
In flower patches,
In the filtered light of the sun,
Especially at dawn.
So, you want to thirst for the past?
Ears ***** up at pieces of it
Flung like pebbles against the siding
And, chasing after wonder days,
You were always what you are.
You have always loved an equinox.
Every spring and autumn bringing
The gradient smear of change.
Chasing after wonder days
You will not get them back.

I get it
You want to leave
Fall off like split hairs and shed scabs
It’s the natural process of the body
The un-become and the dust-to-return
And I get it
The hangnails and the skin cells
Omens and auguries
Hold up a mirror to this necrosis of the brain
I want to leave
And so do you
And I’m sorry
But here we are wrapped up together
Tentpoles under flesh and the
Constant ache of splitting
Hands twined together
Ribbons round the wrists
Forehead pressed to forehead
Twins under a blanket of quicklime
In the same ditch
We want to leave
We want to leave
We want to leave

remember your limp cat after surgery
eyes caked in mammalian sleep
woozy around the house
resentful but too sore and tired to
hiss at you under the steam of medication
her soft paws, her uncontrolled
streams drooling around useless fangs
uncomfortable, as always, meeting your eyes
and this must be, you thought,
this must be
an alien abduction
and something of infant extraction and surgery
Fishing line through your tear ducts
your ripe fruit swollen face and eyes
peaches and grapes before you were weaned
Pricked through you
you blossomed to cough up chunks of wisdom teeth
****** sleep paralysis flinging insects up your nose
to infect your skin with itch
in this bed where they laid me down and lied to me
that i was my own, leading myself to The Land of Get Better
when even a spayed cat could tell you in words
as clear as those of an assault survivor or an invalid
you are not your own
a claim is laid to the body by the first hand that peels it open
cracks the ribs and gauges the ripeness of swelled organs
feathering fingers out over the veins
a hammer and chisel to the jaw and now you’re
introducing the self you used to be
gnawing around mandarin to a room of ghosts
yes this must be
this must be
an alien abduction

You love flowers in the springtime, like a classic girl in love,
Sweetness heavy in the air when sugar’s not enough.
All the lies that daddy told go down better with honey,
And gifts make you uncomfortable if they cost too much money.

So, take weeds from the street, and steal prizes from the garden
To soften up the heart inside you that the world has hardened.
You like it that they’re for the Dead, for Maidens, and the Sick,
For of the three you often feel that you could take your pick.

They make you understand the things so emptily talked about
By Film and English majors running at the mouth for clout:
Rebirth and Renewal, and the fever of the Spring,
How Death pervades the world and cracks up every lovely thing!

You hold the promises of these that ooze from every flower,
Collected on your raw red knees, kowtowing in the bower.
You press *** flat in poetry, and Death in dictionaries.
The Garden of Eden makes good tea when dried with leaves and berries.

little animal walking in the dark
chased by the heartbeat, heartbeat,
the hammer that says
die alone in the dark
the downswing of it cruel on the skull
of the suffering little animal
in its misery in the road
You still take an analgesic
and feel nothing
a cure is a poison is a cure is a poison
you’re grateful to the berry
that killed you
and scared of the river water
that brought you back
scared of the stutter of that
heartbeat, heartbeat
the ache in the chest
the shortness of breath
the voice saying that was enough to die
now pay enough to live
heart-throat animal stumbling on a dark road
it can pay you as well as a rock can fly

Philosophy stretches back into pre-literate mist
You can watch it do this when you close your eyes and you are not yet asleep
This is just a ladder of time, a helix of faulty ancient dichotomies
G to C
Touch the step called “light and dark” and watch it resolve into weary gray
A to T
Touch this fragile rung, “man and woman,” and watch it crumble into dust
Nothing there for you to stand on, child, so don’t worry about it
Make a new ladder, a new rung, and **** them all
The grasping hands of the wordless past, the gibbering tongues
The blank faces that barely knew what living even meant
You know what it means.
Now do it.

The body’s unrelenting in its pain
Because God said it has to be this way
Light will shine and it will be this way
Some pain is unrelenting and must chase
Chase round a sleepless room from lay to lay
Light shines and you will know the chase of pain
You wake with it upon each newborn day
From couch to dining chair to bed you chase
And unrelenting it must be this way
Your spine all like a matchstick in its splay
A burnt out head and brittle down the length
Light color bone and splintered down the length
How can this driftwood bear the weight of pain
It has to. It just has to be that way.

Washing berries for a pie that I cook for someone else,
If they were for me alone I’d eat them straight and raw from the carton,
And if pesticides killed me, then I suppose I was a pest.
That’s no revelation;
I’ve tasted it on the skins of countless gala apples.
And what about other poisons, laced into blackberries and broccoli?
I can’t count them or know their names but I can hope
That one day they’ll gurgle in my gut like
The last note of a song,
And that’ll be the last I hear of it.

in times past
there was a rifle called mine
and daddy, always boasting-
she’s deadly with that 22
she’s deadly

i was deadly

four feet tall
i swung it out in front of me
cane of a blind man
as wild and changeable
as the spinning needle in my compass
watch where you point that thing
take care

take care

and all i said for want of wit
to memory now i can’t recall
only empty chairs, like gapped teeth
mark the occasions of parting glasses broken

pots boiled
whistling in dry pain on the red hot stove
destroyed objects, leaped before looking
and an empty oven on 400 for two days
she’s deadly
she’s deadly
take care

Let us see a slasher
I’ll show you one I like:
A girl who faced some biomedical horror
Some Thing From Another World
That lived in her and ate her alive
Made her need showers every other day
And hairspray and soap and razors from the drugstore
There was hair on her legs and teeth in her mouth and feelings in her dreams and
Oh, she was so very upset
She cut it out
Cut it out
Cut it out out out
Whatever it was that made her stink
That stuck the flesh to her bones
And made her feel happy and sad
She slashed and burned and became
Less, or more, than human
A toothy facade on long hollow stilt legs
Never smelled of anything at all and
Never slept no more, much less
Dreamed dreams
I’m so happy for her, I
Wanna be just like her, she’s
The Girl That Makes It to the End

Now close your eyes
Now close them
Now remember this:
The part of you that first rolled over
That learned to walk and refused to crawl
That grew from mewling and learned to speak
Pull that hand, that drowning hand
That drowning girl
Pull her up from the water
Now open her eyes
Now open them
Now live like this

The screech-owl in the wasted tree,
Who blights the branch and smites the leaves,
She wails that she was once like you and me!
Hey Lamia, hey love of mine,
Whose banshee moaning boils the night,
I won’t listen, for I know that Lilith lies!

Oh, naked beasts, oh variegated lives!
Whose ribs You cracked,
Whose love You lacked,
For whom You cast two wives!
Oh, hungry man, that bites his keeper’s hand!
You mixed his tears,
Instilled his fears,
And taught him “Lilith lies.”

I fled before you were brought forth
And spread, you race of sons of ******!
Oh children, you are mine, and I am yours!
Un-furred, un-feathered, and dull-toothed,
How the Almighty forsook you!
So sick and weak, you all can barely move!

Oh, teeth and bones, Oh heaven-wide applause!
Come Oneiroi,
Support ‘tcha boi,
The ape without no claws!
Oh, sticks and stones, oh desperation’s knives!
Come Seraphim,
Sing us a hymn,
Remind us Lilith lies!

“She lies, she lies,” you cry “she lies,”
But I have wings, and claws, and eyes
That pierce the dark, and to all schemes I’m wise!
Yes, I obtained these claws of gold
That keep me safe and fed and whole!
You can’t condemn what hasn’t got a soul!

Oh, life from mud, oh mare who bucked the stud!
Who sits on beds,
Perched at the heads
To drink the dreaming’s blood!
Oh, owl’s eyes, oh man’s dread realized!
Come talk at length,
And show your strength,
And show us how you lie!

We build the bony cage for all our lives,
The twig-by-twig of robin’s nest in ribs.
The one that I have at the base of my spine,
bird-fragile, nestles in the bowl of my hips.

Here no reverie, no peaceful inclination,
No dignified ascetic’s mindful rest.
Just rattling these bars in self-castigation
Of the prison-home I’ve set within my breast.

And in the dark around me, I hear gnawing:
The ugly wail of metal chains on teeth,
The beastly sound of walled-up creatures clawing
For heat-stroke freedom wavering out of reach.

Come dance with me awhile inside this prison,
And beat your feet down on the bony floor!
Come let them know what strength has now arisen,
And don’t do your jailer’s work for him no more!

In the thrift store, the shelves shine dully with brass,
Old candelabras and cups that could serve in ritual,
If they were not made so poorly and marketed so cheaply.
I first found these thin, yellow, sheet-metal creations
Stacking the shelves in my grandmother’s trailer.
Under the grime, the settled oily sheen of air freshener, there rested
Chalices into which even a king would sneeringly spit the epithet “rococo!”
There must have been a hundred million other such trailers,
A hundred million places of honor for stamped yellow tin.
Why gather them up? Why give them cult?
The entire dragon’s hoard seems now to have found its way to goodwill,
While the real versions of these ghostly trinkets sit heavy upon altars and windowsills.
Volunteers must weigh them, each in hand, and make some distinction:
Did this aid in worship? Was this treasure?
Or was it only treasure enough? Butter-smooth placebo
For those who found themselves in an endless dry spell of weekdays,
Unpunctuated by the sort of holiness that Normal People
Crave and crave and never attain.

I do not want something sweet.
Not just any flower, not just any thorn;
I want things no one can give me,
Not out of love or admiration,
Let alone traded carelessly with cold fingertips!
I ask for easy victories and braided bread,
For cinnamon and oranges;
A piece of fruit, my purple name
Carved bruise-cruel into the flesh.
I want it written in birthday cards
that it grew on the tree that way,
That memories of my eyes and smile
Burned warm within the splitting cells!
And at this late juncture? I barely care if it’s true.

Now, I’m afraid of death.
Was never afraid before, but
Learned the metal taste by comparison with
Honeyed, watery accomplishments, and
Realized I couldn’t bear to die
Like stars died before we charted the sky,
Some soft-bodied nothing passed over, unfossilized…

Grasping wretch, ugly stilt-legged and waving, begging,
Signaling for statues, hallowed trees, and candied fruits…
Well, what can you ask for?
Nothing if, without spoils,
You retire quietly to premature old age,
Some undecorated Cincinnatus wrapping up, for good, in bed.

What ergot prophecies existed in the past
of the coming of dead black suns and starless nights?
Some love affair with tragedy, ten millennia long,
that resulted in us all writing
"kindness and love and rest and holidays" in red ink.
I am tired of saving grains of rice for the world to come,
but the bandages my grandmothers wore around their arms
keep me from putting the *** on to boil.
I have dreams about the future, and only believe the nightmares,
And so I suppose that nothing changed after all.

My father cooked.
My father cooked like cavemen cooked, fire and stone,
Like men in the wild making cacciatore,
Soldiers in a trench chucking a can into the fire,
A party in winter furs eating kidneys raw,
Carved from the back of a beast.

He cooked like people dive into ill-fated romances,
No looks backward and all caution to the wind,
No time even to throw a pinch of salt over one's left shoulder.
Heart broken and fingers burned,
You would learn to love again,
And you would complete the recipe next time,
And it would someday be true love, amazing,
A bite that could sustain long after it was consumed.

My father taught me how to cook.
He taught me by taunting me when I picked too dull a knife,
Without ever showing me how to tell a sharp one.
By screaming at me in impatience when we were a second from crisis,
Without having the foresight to speak softly before danger was nigh.
He taught me the grandeur of making something delicious,
Without extolling the virtue of making it cleanly and safely.
He taught me recklessness,
To risk everything for just one iota of glory,
To act out of insecurity and even suicidality.

"My mother doesn't cook,"
I bragged as a girl.
"You will not find her barefoot and pregnant in a kitchen,
A dangerous place full of sharp knives and hot fires and screaming men;
My father protects her from all that."

But my mother does cook.
It is easy, and quiet,
And so it is difficult to notice,
But it happens.

She taught me to make spinach pies,
And when the frozen mixture itched my hands,
She took the filling from me and did it herself.

Meat, as wrested from nature by brave huntsmen,
Is tough and stringy and crusted with cartilage,
And when I clean it thoroughly,
I am doing as my mother taught me.

Decorated cakes are soft and fine and, yes, unnecessary!
But people eat with their eyes,
And balance the bitterness of life with all things sweet,
So I am doing as my mother taught me.

Setting a kitchen to rights may be as dreary
As removing the dead from the battlefield
After the spoils are won,
But both prevent rot and disease.
We do it for others as much as for ourselves.

That is what my mother taught me:
To act like someone else cares about me,
And to show I care in return.

Some People have never experienced true Relief.
Pain does not just stop, it leaves Pleasure
To settle like rainwater in its dent on the couch cushions.
Some People never Rise because they never Sank
One can writhe contentedly in Nothingness,
One can *** when a Headache lifts its pall.
To Some People, it is good to sing
Of "freedom," of "love," of "pain."
Some People have always Walked Without Chains,
Some People have never been Hated,
Some People have never experienced true Relief.

When the natural color of your lips
Makes Pantone’s list
And suddenly for the first time in years
the **** lipsticks in the drugstore reflect back at you
A bouquet of roses which compliment your hair and eyes
Suddenly, when you never wore pink before
Now you revel in it

If your skin bubbles up in pimples
Your fingers float up of their own accord
Dancing with the shared delusion of
A clean excision
Yes, it works this way:
Remove the thing of evil that has poisoned the water
Pluck it neatly from the tree and watch the flowers bloom

The face answers your fingerprints in a drop of blood:
No, it does not work this way
Your skin, your life, is not a lever
No two-step process,
No fulcrum to remove and leave behind a simple rod, inert
Not even a Rube-Goldberg machine
To be followed back end over end
The handkerchief chain from the clown’s shirt cuff
spirals out impossibly with no simple beginning

Welts on your face in dappled shades
Pantone’s colors of the year
You cover these over with foundation that
does not quite match
This portion of blood you seal away
And that portion you smear on your lips
Loving as much of yourself as it is possible
To buy in a tube

I can channel my hate into self caring until death
Reading my own birth chart
burrowing into my own psyche like wrapping up in warm unwashed bed clothes
Worming for clues deposited there at my birth
Diving into my own grease slick pores where my secrets live
Spreading out like a spatula under my own skin and
trying to heave it off so I can feel peeled and clean
Capping the ugly raw bones at the ends of my fingers
with my own teeth pulled out of my own
sick sweet watermelon head and
filing those teeth into a long coffin
wherein I will bury the usefulness of my soft white hands

I am doing this because I Command that you look at me Exactly Right
Without pitying me or ******* me I want you to look and NEVER touch me
You must Never read my birth chart or sleep in my bed or extract my pores or else
I will fall apart in a way that will definitely **** you
Then you must also understand that your memories of looking
belong to me
I have given you license to use my face just once in just one way
I have signed myself away to you as a sweet madonna dressed in rhinestones
Like how parents sign waivers allowing their children to appear in commercials
Now you are under a contractual obligation to Never Ever Ever
******* talk about me unless I am present to modulate
your present perception of your past experiences and
nudge you
into the correct opinion so that you may Love Me and
Make other people Love Me
And if you don't love me immediately after meeting me then
I am probably going to climb into your window tonight, ******