the walls were once paneled brightly, splashily—
a drop in the bucket or a room on fire

like the roof of pure expression in the form of vivid umbrellas
that now absorbs her every move

when it rains. she is a nicotine stain, no longer trendy,
just old, and compensating with watered-down decaf.

her clothes have gotten grayer every year, and she
blames the laundry. how can she focus

on sorting colors when she’s been spitting out
her husband for the last thirty-seven years?

piece by piece, she scrapes off her tongue and gathers
her belongings, which have also dwindled

to this shawl, not meant for the rain, the cacophony
of hanging birds. it’s lighter, she would argue,

than any raincoat, and almost as effective, giving her
the appearance of indifference, like her eyes,

which used to garner compliments, swift and vicious,
intended to slowly gouge them out. and now she

smiles in negative, like a dream, and reality passes
her by. even the rain is fading out, an audience

where only the smattering applause of stragglers
remains. and she walks slower than ever, not because

she can’t speed up, but because she’s humming a song
she used to sing to her son, and in that moment

she becomes a poem, etched in the language
of forgetting, of dissection. but she can be happy,

dripping as she is with newly fallen rain and
a few loose cells floating in her hair.

on the day my sister was born,
my dad took me to a minor league baseball game.

i watched the pitcher as he chewed the
pitcher’s mound to shreds with the teeth
of his stride. the ball combed the air, taking with it debris from the kind of sad people
who show up to watch short-a ball
while somewhere, a little girl is
dragging out her claws and staking her
claim on the operating table.

my older brother littered the yard with
bottle caps. this stadium was his dream.
he would have slept in the unheated walls
for a chance to touch all 216 stitches
with two perfect hands.

the batters today are fooled by
a series of nasty changeups that
cough their hearts up. peanut
butter and jelly awaits them in the
dugout. a couple of halfhearted
diehards keep score on the back
of their wrists, the pen tying up
their veins. the pitcher authors
the whole game like that, a painful
rush.

i want to leave. the kind of
faultless art makes me sick. he
was born in uniform, certainly,
and glowing, his arm whipping
around from the womb and tossing
out any notion of normalcy his parents
may have held. nobody can touch him.
he never cut his feet on old
beer caps in a quest to touch
a patchwork god.

the next hitter becomes a runner
when his hands take his heart
around the block and come back
with a ball cutting the air, colliding
with a meteor that surely would have
destroyed the world. someday on a
faraway planet they will see that ball
bouncing through the stars, restless as
the man who drove it. that spot on the
atmosphere may never recover from its
brush with non-destiny.

nobody dreams in the minor leagues, not even
the batter-runner whose arms have just
propelled his team to a spot above
heaven. god will surely collapse them soon.

there is a girl somewhere, being bathed
by a stranger. she has ceased to be dead.
a miracle for certain.

we could disapprove so heartily
of everyone around us, so unfamiliar
with the abyss that they were always touching,

they were the emptiness, all ugly laughs at things
they didn’t understand. they were the people under sway,
patriotic as they were to hate the countries with no names
and not comprehend all the beauty that flows from chaos.
no books in neutral colors would ever touch their hands
or bruise their minds.

and music becomes noise when sung so loudly
and emotionlessly, if you don’t know what you’re saying
half the time. i found the city to be a cornucopia, a cacophony even
of dial tones and rushing fingers, busy yellows and belts up around the
iron lungs. the lights would only alternate, never seem to concede the stars
their share of night.

and clothes were only to hold in the edges of
people and their problems that they had to share
in the form of made-up dreams, the communist manifesto
of personality problems and narcissistic smiles.

i’ve moved from place to place, looking for something quiet,
but the flow of time could only grow louder, and absence hasn’t
made my heart grow the weeds of unwanted fondness, but sometimes
i just can’t bring myself to even
care.

the space at the back of your knees
was always straight; you never bent your
legs and held the air rigorous around them.
compensating for this, your shoulders were forward,
fixing your eyes on a seam in the sidewalk
just a few inches deep but crawling with breath
and some child’s skinned palms

and the gap between your collarbone and rib cage
was a moat. fingers could sink between the lines,
between the countries that  made up the map, folding
and unfolding you, and between the rivers of everything
you contemplated as you slept. a smile crept over your spine.

elbows locked around the town, a fist forming the
peak of the hill that everything washed around. you were
the boundaries, the clumsy first kiss behind the school,
the same bricks every time, and nobody is alone. all the
graffiti holds itself in place with memories.

i could tell you were leaving by the way
you said “love” so many times in so few words
and your eyes were already blurred, looking anywhere but here
and the light had moved its way over you, and you wanted to
leave right then, just to separate your body from its tight
and unrelenting binding you had draped yourself in
all those years ago, being in this place

let’s be wild and crazy
in a plain white room
with a post-modern unknown painting
not exactly catching our eye
we know it means emptiness but we choose to reject

let’s talk to strangers
for the sole purpose of changing our minds
time and time again
we grew up thinking everyone was perfect
and now we know it’s true
and beautiful to be unclean

let’s wait for the last train
to leave the station and talk about
the people on board; was the girl,
fresh out of college and making all the 20-something
mistakes, seduced into working late? what drew her
to the gray streets of nowhere? are the people on board
just ghosts? we stand on the tracks but know
there’s not another train coming
and we feel cheap for pretending
we’re going to die
but aren’t we?

i used to live in boxes,
not just the ones from packing my life
away and expediting it, or where i would
store myself under old refrigerators,
making soft buzzing noises with my tongue

i kept things in them, wings plucked
from butterflies and soaked in the
sickly sweet scent of formaldehyde.
it was satisfying to separate myself
from all the spheres of influence
and drops in the bucket
of my mind.

the past was all accorded for,
the present mattered not. i could get by
on scratching windowpanes for golden flecks
of light. as long as i had the memories of
being too young to understand thoughts,
i was okay, and okay was a word i could say
without regret. it promised nothing.

so what chance did you stand, all silver
and sparkles, speaking backwards and boiling over
with steam? you pretended it was virtue you were
smoking, hand-rolled, on the slowly sinking porch.
i could taste it as hypocrisy, some softest contradiction.

and i wanted to seal you off, garnished in
a soft sort of word salad, and dressed with adjectives
like “lonely” or maybe just a little bored. my way
was too angular for your knees, softly curved as they were,
and supple on my chest. you compartmentalized
so sloppily into a stream-of-consciousness story.

so there is a box for you, sitting somewhere, and i confess
that i always wanted to sleep alone. a can of soda
can be champagne if i’m celebrating something. and so
i think i’ll spend my night sugary and sober, painting
the sky cardboard and faded, like a memory without
a frame to hold it in.

it’s cold now.
it was warmer back in january,
the sky was made of bleach,
falling on our heads and christening us
angels.

i put a *** of water on for tea,
take out a pick, and carve out
iceblocks to hold the moon
in. a bird is painted into the
snowbanks, its eyes popping
from the force of july’s fever.

giving up on the idea of
mac and cheese or chicken noodle
soup, something substantial,
i order chinese takeout. the deliveryman’s
lips are purple. i eat it cold, like
it’s meant to be.