You walk to the woods from the mountains too fast;
trip over your feet when blades of grass nip at your heels
and take up life amongst the low.
Flotsam swirls in your wake;
silt rises to meet you.
The sun sets in deference to your arrival.

You walk among a sea of azaleas and fire:
******-thorned crown:
smoke laying low over the ground protecting your footfalls,
come to convince me of my damnation,
spill mulch in my bed,
and track lake water through my rooms.

You walk with broken glass in your heels
and blood on your cheeks,
spilt milk smile and sickly sweet lips,
cradling a dead bird and a lead heart in your hands
with a gallows leash hanging off your neck, onto the ground.

You walk into the house of my elders,
the sacred burial ground,
the meeting place,
the palace,
and the bar.
You order a scotch on the rocks, a lapis circlet, a book full of secrets, dead man’s blood, and my heart.

You walk backwards
around the cherry blossom orchard and its overwrought signatures,
harrumphing at arrogant petals and snickering birds:
politic in reverse and rough lines in slow motion.
There is something you forgot: it wears white linen and
sits on a rose throne.
You loved it, once.

You walk to the mountains from the woods,
barefoot and starving,
caked in mud and licking the shine off your teeth.
Your knees are bleeding.
Your heart is bleeding

His name brings new meaning to living in the perfect blackness of a
                                     sleepless night, to living in the dusk and the
      squalor of a tired
desert town
        vacated by devils and angels alike.
His body is bathed in pink light,
bathed in bath water,
bathed in marble dust and mildew:
                        you love him.
You love him because you know nothing else,
          know no other way to do or to be
than to be with him,
at his side,
   at his feet,
      wherever, whenever.
He is yours in the way that
nothing is or ever
will be and,
            by god,
do you love him
like the birds love the sky,
            like the gods love tragedy,
like the trees love their roots.

         Without pride or falsities, you bask under
the golden light of the sun at noon, all encompassing and
    burning in the way of your shared home.
There are no new sensations—you've been party to them all—
         but you have no desire for change.
This is it,                            and you are happy.

His name is on your tongue, always, like the rivers of blood that run through your
body, like the warmth of the rocky cliffs,
like
the taste for disaster that swells in your
chest when the air is
too still.
You crave action, movement,
and he is a forest fire at play,
endless and aching.
He burns in a familiar way.

The water of the creek runs red with your cheek,
gunmetal touches your tongue and
for a moment you are in
          another life: you are underground, caked in calcium and
butyl, letting wave after wave of shock make its way over you.
It’s over now and you have him, he’s yours. He’s yours.
You carry his name on your heel, in the center of your shadow,
at the bottom of the well in your heart’s heart.
You know nothing other than him.
You don’t want to.

I got in my car and drove west,
                                        police song playing on the radio and sirens, wailing, on my left,
only to stop my car five feet in front of
a dead cow,
                    gutted and rotten,
bones pecked clean and free by that which I ran from.
The air around it was dead,
heavy on my tongue like fresh rainfall,
and I was twelve years old, in a bathtub,
                 trying to figure out
                                         how to die.

But then lightning struck and
                                             my power went out and
              the cow caught fire.
And then I caught fire.

I couldn’t answer his questions because
there was still ash in my throat
and I was still choking. I was choking.

He offered me a glass of water but
                                             that only made mud pour
      over my tongue and through
my lungs,
            clogged pores and sinuses.
So now I was drowning in tar and
                                        a hand brushed mine, so I grabbed it.
                      I couldn’t tell which way was up.
I got pulled deeper.

I died in the lake but they still asked me questions.
I died in that lake and got stopped when I tried to leave.

The moon swallowed around a mouthful of bile and blood,
sangria rising in its throat,
orange knocking on its forehead and honeysuckles falling at its feet,
and turned its back on its humble worshippers.

I threw my bridal bouquet backwards into the ******* void and fell onto the shore,
the sea chasing my heels
angry at only having itself to fight and we laughed. We laughed and the world laughed back, the flowers and bees and dust settling where you left.
Everywhere was where you left.
                You were gone
                                     and the house was about to burn, burning, burnt so
       I told my teacher my homework burnt and she gave me an F and I told her my heart was ash and she gave me an F and my throat filled with cinder and my lungs filled with copper. My lungs filled with copper, rotted away the gold
and with the gold gone I began to
                                                              ­ shame myself, for I was imperfect.
I was imperfect and I was
                                       marble and I was copper and I couldn’t feel
     my hands or my feet or anything, anymore.
The moon left and it took away my lungs and my knuckles and left me bleeding in the
    stairwell on my birthday,
ruined.
I was copper and kerosene and ruined,
soiled, in its abandon. I lay fallow and my eyes had shutters and the clouds were
                                suddenly antediluvian in their loss and in their weight, heavy and
        waiting for another chance to unite the sea with the earth and the earth with bile and the bile with holy water: the floods were coming.
                    The water would pour, was pouring, poured and my gold-turned-copper rusted and I couldn’t move to chase after you and then you were gone.
                                                           ­                                                                 ­         I can’t blame you.
I would leave too, if I could.
                            But my joints froze over like the dead in the lake and you were gone so I had no reason to fight to free myself, or anyone else.
               Before you left, I told you if this means anything then carve it on a cave wall and draw me in blood but you didn’t hear me because the door had already
                                               shut.
My whispers didn’t reach. I knocked from the inside, but you had locked it.
              I knocked from the inside
                                         but my wrist snapped
               and then I snapped and then the world snapped back. I looked through
           the window in the door and the bars
    framed your shoulders like pillars
of some ancient grecian coliseum, of some Shakespearean tragedy, or trees in a forest.
Trees, the space between them,
                                      and the earth beneath our feet, crumpling like origami and folding like cards.
              The ground shattered and so did my heart, the trees fell and so did my hopes, the birds fled as the sky bled out, pink and purple and red, and they took my hands with them so
       I couldn’t do anything. I had no hands,
                                             how could I work?
But someday the birds must land. And someday I will oil my joints, my rust will break. The moon will come home and the clouds will deplete. Someday my hands will attach onto my wrists backwards, and I will write you love letters backwards, and we will live, happily, backwards.

devour the garden and the
sunshine and the rain, too,
with open-armed and tight-
jawed glory. my mirror is
cracked more each time i
look into it; my mirror is
slithering, silver liquid pouring
down my throat, thorny bird
of paradise curled across my
shoulders. your shoes don’t
fit me right. your scene isn’t
mine and i don’t have a scene
anymore and sometimes i regret
it. is the self-assured smugness
worth its weight in gold? am i
better now that i’ve stripped
myself of bracelets and ink and
leather? or i have i sacrificed the
essential for the sake of your
comfort, for you and your dignity,
for the neighbors and their
mouths? my mouth is inverted and
my smile is crooked and my teeth
aren’t quite together, but i’m tired
of straightening myself out for you.

It was night until it wasn’t.
It was night until you crushed and ground
              the bones
to dust and swallowed around it.
Until you
               licked a stripe along a jaw
and laced your
             fingers in the notches
of a spine and
                                     called it holy,
               made it a sacrament.
The phone is ringing in another room, another house, another life.
The phone is ringing and you answer,
                                            but no one’s on the other line.
The phone is ringing and you answer,
                                              but it's not for you. The phone is ringing and
               you don’t answer.
Your lover walks into the room,
                                                      phone in hand,
and says 'how long will it be until you love me?'
You blink and the light turns silver,
                                              liquid moonlight hits your skin.
You blink
            and your lover walks in,
phone in hand, still ringing, and says
'it’s for you. your uncle’s dead.'
So you go the funeral, a different phone sitting like
        an anvil in your pocket,
and your aunt is the color
                                                   of famine.
There is wheat growing in the fields, still, although winter has sunk its teeth into the ground and ****** away its life.          
                                   Your uncle is buried under a broken sycamore tree,
still blackened from the fires, still shaking ash and dead leaves over the burial mound.
Your uncle is dead and interred in the fields of his farm.    
                                Your lover calls you on the different phone that your pocket protects and says 'if I were were double-headed and suspended in bliss, would you join me? if I broke your collarbone, would you forgive me? if I shoved your face in the gravel and spit in your mouth and snapped all your fingers and cracked open your head like an egg and told you how I really felt, would you still love me?' and you,    
                 standing next to the freshly-turned mulch, say “yes” and hang up.
                        You return to a hollow house, a room where the
light doesn’t quite reach,
and bathe in blood and milk.
Your lover rings like a bell,         like a flower opening and closing as if rehearsed, like a butterfly migrating,
                       like a deer’s head bursting open from the pressure of a bullet.
They ring and you come running,
                               slipping and spilling, from the waters.
You blink and, through the window,
see the dark-denim of the night.

Every morning
the birds taste morning light and
soliloquize it like it’s
their job.
The robin’s eggs are
blue but his body is red like
strawberry jam, your favorite
because it tastes like June and
June is for forgiveness.
I must confess, I have never
known your friend in a form
other than from your mouth.
You thought anything, anything could
be forgiven: blood on
the cleaver, mercury in the tea, our
lungs in our hands,
a heartbeat gone wrong:
silent is the night and silent is
the wind and silent is the hand that
takes.

There are other words I could say.
Softer, perhaps. “Darling, forgive me for  breaking our wedding china. I’m
sorry I left for so long.”
Sorry I didn’t say that. Sorry for
making you believe I ever
meant it.

If there’s a limit to desire, I
have yet to find it. Our love is dead but
propelled onwards without
rhythm or reason. In another
universe, I am somehow
kinder, somehow better. It’s
not hard to be. To be better is to
know the taste of honey and still say
no, to get back in the car
and drive away,
to buy chocolates on Valentine’s day
and pretend they’re for anything other
than an apology. Sorry I said what
I said on that night, but
I meant it. I’ve never meant anything
before then and I won’t
take it back. I can’t make this
any easier for you, but I can
ball a melon and serve it
with toast for breakfast if
you’d like.

Somewhere, the robin swoops
over the open coffin, over the
unfilled grave, and
sings.

I was born in the cold
of the waters, shivering and crying
in the embrace of an armless mother, wrapping around me too tight,
too warm, too hard, too much.
Everything was too much and I
was drowning in it.
I was born drowning.

There was blood on my body then,
and in my mouth,
on my teeth and tongue,
when you hit me yesterday.
When you said it would never be enough.
But no price is too much,
not for you.
I would pay anything, anything
to be by your side,
to feel your flames licking my heart.
I am full of cinders and
cherry blossoms,
trees born from nothing and dying
from nothing,
painted purple by a battlefield blessing,
plum kisses on hands and wrists and forehead,
salt in the air, in your tears, from
the sea on my skin, always.

Write me a hymnal for all the things we must forget,
a rhyme for all to be stolen,
for each barbed wire and rust
sunset painted on my skin in the desert’s forgiveness.  
Because it will forgive me, in the end.
It always does.
And when my body rises, darkly,
from a sand and calcite tomb,
be ready:
for the ocean always reclaims what it has given,
and even its gifts bear a price.

My neck is open and my hands are gone.
No, sweetheart, I don't where or when they’ll be back.
They’re just
                 gone.
My skin is dissolving. It’s melting off; I'm only marrow and sinew
                         and muscle, bubbling and festering, and I
               can’t reach around the sun to get to
You.         I can’t.
I can’t, it’s too far, it’s too hard,
                  and you know I would give you my
life-blood if I could
but I can’t.
Because the sun is too wide around and I
don't have the hands,
                     don’t have any hands, to reach inside,
Schluff off flesh, sickly as it is,
and rip out what you need,
                                           whatever you need:
I would.
I would give it you without hesitation, without penance, without
                                          mercy.
If you want me ruthless and bloodied, then I      
    will carve your name into my heart-skin and whisper it on the wind.
You are on the moon and gravity is a shackle: tell the stars I want to come home.
Tell the stars I have
                      vultures pecking at my liver
and there is a girl,
                singing, behind the rock, behind my eyes,
                             just out of reach.
Is it you, sweetheart? Are you my golden sunshine girl, singing softly where I can’t see you?
                 I just want to see you. I just want my hands back and my
skin back and these bones shoved back into place, ripped out, ripped off, whatever.
                Whatever you have to do, I’m game.
Is it cold up there?       Is there room for me, still?
I built a ladder from my failures and called it Perseverance.
     Call it a royal flush, call the doctor, call my lawyers and my mothers, but this
room is a closet and the closet is empty.
All the clothes are
on the floor. All the clothes are
on my body but I am still so, so cold.
                      I think the sun and I are feuding. I think he cursed me. I broke a rib trying to reach, reach around him and when I felt it snap, I
                   just took it out with teeth and spite and placed it on a pedestal in his altar. Placed it in a
              museum, and called it Discovery. And then I left. I’m leaving, sweetheart.
Tell the stars I’m coming home.

i am running out of new forms of
consumption of new ways to
**** myself i am slowly draining the
pus from a wound i
am washing myself off my/
self and pulling nothing out of
thin air and the ocean turns and looks at me and i look at it and it asks me what i’m doing here and i
try to look at my/
self but i cant i cant my eyes are messy runny egg blobs like the girl with the
bomb i am the girl with the bomb
i am the bomb i am the
**** im madonna and the ***** and im locking myself
back in the tower.
the tower is
burning and crashing and suddenly,
the waves.
i still havent answered the oceans question, its getting impatient,
i am eating breakfast—eggs—and the shore
erodes away until i am standing on nothing, the ocean beating mercilessly away at me—it does not tire like i do. it does not tire like
i do. i can’t look the ocean in the eyes. i want to bottle it up and swallow it, salty brine and all, and maybe then i’ll finally
know just what it wants me to
be i will look at me through the
ocean’s eyes and know
my place but the ocean shies away from my hand and
shies away from my hand and
shies away from my hand until my hand is nothing and nobody

i had a dream once where everyone died and no one believed me. i spent ten nights
trying to convince a town of ghosts of their death. i spent eleven trying to forget.

it goes like this:
i can’t prove to you that this happened,
but it did — your body through the windshield,
your hands empty and cold, your face marred by sweat, hair out of place.
i’m in the passenger seat. every car stops and turns inside out.

i get out of the car and you get out of the car and say ‘at least no one got hurt‘ but i’m looking at you and i’m looking at your body as two separate wholes. both are cold, but only one lies still and rots.

my face is wet. it’s raining, i think, and a butterfly lands on the broken glass without landing and dissolves itself into the rain.
you lead me away from the accident, to the side of the road, and walk me home.

my parents’ bodies are sitting on the front lawn, skinned and cleaned, but you don’t see them. my parents greet us and walk up the steps to my door. their bodies still sit, and say nothing.

there is no longer a glory in the perverse.
i wet my hands without cleaning.

and the river unfurls like a heart attack at work, his body a bomb captured on camera.
We are watching him from the banks waiting to see
     the unraveling, waiting to see if anything happens, waiting for the smell of
fresh blood on the sand, for the ocean cold longing to spill
                            out and over
as he tears his body in half.
                                      confetti falls from the sky and onto my
tongue,      glimmering wet,     the ground is
craterous where the paper falls
and the trees
                         shiver away
  their leaves.
water spills down the canopies like
something half holy,
his body shaking and seizing on the ground,
the river winding around his form like a snake.
is constriction freedom or oppression or are we just waiting for another storm to pass? i am watching the tornado **** my house up from underneath an underpass. i am ******* bricks and it is a very dark morning and i can still see the stars in the sky like tiny pinpricks of light spilling through a velvet curtain.
have you sat in spilled milk yet or licked up the shine from the floorboards?
there is something
                                   pulsing under mine,
under my pillow. there is something whispering his name in my ear i do not want to think of his body in repose i do not want to wonder on the motions of rot.
i have a snake tattooed on my arm
          it is eating its own tail
                     it is removing its mouth from its *** and slithering up to my throat: a shiny new necklace made of emerald to flaunt.
my therapist asks me if i have anything to say and i say nothing at all and curl tighter around myself like a duck-patterned blanket and the man on the riverbank retreats from the waters and sits up right and carries his blood back into himself, him and the river two whole circular separates.