sometimes this is
a barn loft filled with crumpled mad owls
like you punching the side of my car-
when your eyes became more rock,
less ice and i sobbed next to
a woman in a lexus watching me wheeze ash and spit
into my wet hands shaped like
the kuiper belt, the bodies within them
(yours the hardest, the most blue)
the condition of the sheets around six in the evening
there are ways of living
milky, the way i am
not currently living
do i confess that as i sleep alone my spine curls with want
to be other, to be nix, hydra, charon?
the black vulture circling your thighs
the water-drinker crouching
at the crater’s languid salt pool
alternately feeling the desperation of
american canyon road, zip 94503
and the thick clarity of
a non-smoking room in
the southern realm of “here”
this was a case study,
bending under you to observe:
your mouth filled with hot water and spilled out onto your naked chest
as parts of myself went missing
the water ran down into my throat
this isn’t moon linen, it’s polyester
your face television blue, your slick hair
your eyes sitting in your pretty head,
hurtling chunks of ice and rock
stealing me into torpor
we stand on a ledge and look up
the nearest planet is clear
we think of invisible things
not knowing that sometimes we ourselves disappear
like mice under the hotel floorboards
and like the highway, all covered in white.

like the time i walked a mile
to her house with no shoes on
she was waiting with a bowl of cold water
the pavement was wet with heat
twenty nine **** cigarettes on the teenage balcony
trying to hit the neighbors house with spit
or ash because they
never really liked us, distractedly stroking the dog’s back in
every crosslegged seventeen year old
too hot to breathe sticking minute
the bathtub is overflowing because
i’m talking on the phone
ghosts slip on the stairs
i’m needlessly concerned with everything, with
victory, drooling blood all over the bathroom
i get in trouble for the things i do with my boyfriend
in the 35 thousand dollar swimming pool
and in the foyer of the two million dollar home
that i’ve been ******* around in since 1995
distractedly mouthing words every crosslegged
fourteen year old minute, we are both
licking our lips
looking at all the cars in the driveway i’m
somewhat tired of gentle eye makeup remover
the classic morning lens flare in the guest bedroom
artifacts gathering light instead of dust, it’s all
growing white through the glass blocks, carefully installed
wary of “architectural importance”
(the cars in the driveway are all
just people looking)
i’m pooling in this glass
and all over the walls like a thrown egg
i can’t help but kneel here
and keep my face turned up,
licking up sweat, waiting for the fever to break
when the tornado comes we’re pressed
together in the safe room
where the house is the most dark
if you look outside, you can see owls
and where the turtles were buried
the swimming pool
the gasping fingers clenching
the high water pressure-
do you know what i’m talking about?

maybe you are sad
because your hair is so long and
that’s where sorrow lives,
sleeping sickly and close to your ear
if i could i’d put you on my shoulders
and carry you to the edge of lake powell
in arizona and say look, alea
there is beauty beyond ourselves
and to us it will always remain indifferent

you apologized with art

you, filling the room of your mouth with earth
carefully. you brush the dirt into the center of each
flawed little room, humming. there’s a light in
the front yard across the street where i cast
my long-over moody shadow
about the couch, backwards:
where she and i slept in our soft vapor
and when it was across the room
where you placed me as if i were a piece on a table
like “all part of the game” that i forgot to think of
as you slept beside me, sorry or not sorry
i say you’ve grown taller
as if sowing eight drops of blood
had stirred something within your spine,
undamaged and still young
cracking in your sleep
my jaw told her i dream of some long lost bird
and she understood,
there in the humming clarity of that first-floor room
where we’d never been
as if this could all be about me
and the condition of light on that first morning:
the music which i did not hear
the room that i never saw
(but wept at all the same)
the things you hide from me, even now
each photograph is too big for truth
and how surprised i find myself at being finished.

emails: knhik

i’ve built a real autumn here
you still scratch at the bed for the edges of cards
every moment was nice
there is still something delicate underneath
there isn’t a house of how much water falls,
there isn’t a tub that will fill up
i want to do bigger things, or other
i want to recreate that feeling like you’re not old
and tell the top layers that no matter how much water falls,
and tell the paper,
and added lights
my favorite color has changed.

i like those lakes in elliot’s bed. i love your nose the telephone, in the stairs
caroling almost like milk

—-
i want to wake you up to talk about landscape
it’s there-there on girls’ faces, ponds with a chair,
the lovely black, graphic novels about Scandinavia, MDMA, a beast…
describe your earliest memory.
perfect, shy, painful and no one is an American petal. a sunny room
recedes into his head like bark and the blue veins, almost lewdly thick blue canals of memory. it is so entirely unfocused and I cried, shed tears for the moon. I am meticulously cutting holes in his chest as in a deep breath-
That’s it. My literary malfunction is chopping at the snow, ankle-deep

a winter visit is
blood to us,
collected in our thumbs, pressed together, always
distracted by
effectively knowing that which is true:
feral will never make do.
going to the space needle,
her mouth was a cowry shell that i saw in the water
in my fingers i heard the snapping of twigs
just that prickly little feeling saying
“kenna, watch the corners of her mouth”
lovely in the passenger seat
my hand quaking
ninety miles to go
oregon behind,
peppering the corridor with firs
quietly i sang watery songs
“run river run,”  “golden vanity,”
she slept with the stars sitting on her hair
then seattle waited
underneath her black dress
(velvet, from her mother)
wondering where will we stay-
she woke up. from the sky fell
zebra orchids, already dying