I am not very good at saying no to people,
                              or at being firm and direct with my patients at work.  
           I am soft and mandible.  
           I tend to let people take advantage of me.  

My physical therapist says the people with the most problems
with their hips and backs are
                                                        the ones that can          
                                                        hardly bend at all or
                                                                                                 that can
                                       bend              too             much.

I am too flexible.  
                              So much so that it is hurting me.  
                                    I fold and I fold and I fold
                                               in on myself like origami and
                                      I let people do whatever they want.  
I can't remember if I've always been this way or not.  

Maybe it depends on how you look at it:  
The woman in the casket could either be sleeping or dead.  She could either be a stranger or my mother.  This could either be the bright, multi-color, kaleidoscopic shapes I see when I rub my eyes a bit too hard for a bit too long, or it could be the dull, grey morgue her body was wheeled down to after they tied the tag around her toe and zipped her into a white bag.  This could either hurt a lot or a little.  It depends on how much you let in.  How willing you are to bend to the emotional blow.  I could either stop writing about this or keep going, but it's been, what, nine years now, and I haven't been able to stop yet—
only able to bend and
                                          bend
                 ­                                      and
                                                                    bend
                                                                                    and

There is a man from my city that spent his nights
killing and ******* men for the hell of it.  Sometimes I worry that
his blood might be in the water like 160 year old cholera
or 30 year old cryptosporidium.  Sometimes I worry that
I breathed in the stardust from which he was made, that I
swallowed the ashes from which he burned.  I do not think that
I will ever be American ****** enough to fit the bill, and
this might be my one true happy thought:
at least I am not a serial killer.

I closed my eyes in August and saw the dried up teeth of my
estranged grandmother floating in a pool of blood and thought about
how the phone works both ways.  I opened my eyes in
October and thought about spitting up the chicken bones I had
been choking on since second grade, when my father
helped prepare dinner for the last time.   (I think I might have
                                          sacrificed a couple people to the devil
                                                        without actually meaning to.)

I find the numbers
             13,               16,               and               18
to be unlucky and I am beginning to fear that the pattern
will continue, that 19 will be the year I finally get bitten by
poisonous snakes outside of my dreams.  God whispered in my ear
and told me that a different Helter Skelter was coming.  He told me to
keep breathing easy, to trust in his light, but when I
asked my Magic 8 Ball if I should quake like the Earth in 1960, the
day after Satan released Dahmer from Hell, all I got was a
bright blue, “Better not tell you now.”

The séance I conducted last year in a blackened, decaying cemetery
did nothing but rattle ghosts, and the four-year-long pity party I held prior
did nothing but chain those ghosts to the floorboards.  I have
never been good at abandoning my thoughts and feelings.  

Some mornings I wake up face down in the Green River or
with my head severed and on display in a refrigerator of a house that
is not mine.  Other times I awake buck-naked in Death Valley—
sand coating my tongue, my tonsils, my esophagus; burning
and scratching into my flesh—and I know that I will never
be able to forgive my father for destroying everything
he ever made or his mother for turning into everything that’s
just      out of                     reach.
There has never been a time when I have been
good at letting go of grudges.  I am far too aware of my own existence.

At least I am not a serial killer.

the asteroid hit the earth so long ago that
                                                             i do not remember a time before.  
(the bones of dinosaurs do not remember a time before they were
petrified into brittle and fragile memories; the moon does not recall
who she was before she got stuck in the earth’s orbit; uranus knows
nothing of how he came to spin on his side.)

you could stick your hand through
any of the gas giants and find
                                                          your whole body
                                                           slidi­ng through.  
this same theory can be applied to my skin.  i have very little gravity,
or at least it feels that way most days.

maybe it depends on how you look at it:
one way is perfect, and the other all wrong.  the woman in the casket could either be sleeping or dead.  she could either be a stranger or my mother.  the head or the tail.  the light or the dark.  the two sides of the moon.  the comet striking through the night sky.  the interdimensional toll could refuse to let you through.  the cult could accept or deny your entry request.  there is one and there is the other.  the upside down.  the rightside up.  the parallel universe.  the evil twin.  it’s fresh and then it’s rotten.  this could either hurt a lot or a little.  it depends on how much you let in: how willing you are to bend to the emotional blow.

science says that the human body tends to
                                                            forget physical pain as a survival tactic.
but science says jack **** about emotional pain.

so am i living?  or am i just existing?
     the difference is six feet deep.

I’m choking on a fistfull of bones.                   There’s a skull
hidden deep in the back of my closet,
maybe in the abyss beneath my mattress,
maybe lodged somewhere behind my bookshelf,
that reads aloud all my past regrets
like bedtime stories.

I found the dried up teeth of my grandmother
on my vanity and used them like dice.
There’s a rib from my great aunt that I use
as a clothes hanger dangling on a hook in my bathroom.

When I was little the playset in my backyard
looked like tomorrow,
but weathered down and rusted, it looks
        like a mausoleum.  

There is a lock of hair on my bedside table that
is not mine, but hers, and I can’t help but
wonder if she wants it back.  Does she want it back?

There’s nine-year-old smoke in my lungs and
five-year-old iron around my heart.
There’s a wishbone branded to my liver
to signify the what if? and a
skull branded onto my chest to
signify the what is.

I learned not to trust so fully the first time I
nearly drown and how to be independent the
first time I learned to swim.
I used to want to be a “daddy’s girl” until I
realized what that meant.  The roses he gave me
for graduation went headfirst into the trash.

I have many things left unsaid.

I sat side by side
next to my dog upon
the burgundy leather sofa and
followed his line of sight
out the great glass window
into the desolate,
snow covered forest.

“What can you possibly
                see?”
I ask.

After a few moments of
silence, he looks to me and
says, “Sometimes it’s not
as much as what I see
as it is what I
                        find.
This woods speaks the truth;
you just have to look for it
in yourself first.”

Buddha belly, rabbit’s foot,
how much luck can you get
                                                    from touching the dead?

(Maybe that’s the reason behind Jeffrey Dahmer’s slaughtering of
                                                                ­                         seventeen men;
maybe that’s the reason why we break wishbones—
to remind ourselves that this bone is dead
                                            these hands are alive
                                            do something with them.)

In some cultures, it is socially acceptable to
                             eat your child’s placenta—
there is good fortune in it, power in it.

(I wonder if this is the reason why cannibals eat their victims.)

Number seven.  Cross on the wall.
         I wish you good luck.

I’m in the dream again:                not the one I had while awake in
the catacombs of St. Callixtus in Rome.  Where the darkness was
so impenetrable that it began to echo.  To look like the mixture of colors
that burst when you rub your eyes too hard for too long.  Like the
neuron rupture before death.  To shape and morph and become liquid.
Where the darkness cobbled itself into a physical form.

Not the dream where                    I kept seeing
flits of my mother out of the corner of my eye.  Behind
                                                                ­                               every street corner.
                                                                ­                   Every turn.  Every tunnel.  
      Reflected in the casts of the bodies in Pompeii.
Mirrored in the waves of the Trevi Fountain.

I’m in the dream where          the soil churned from the bottom to the top.  
                               where          the hand outstretched from the grave.  
                               where          my grandfather clawed his way out and returned to my grandmother﹘sopping wet, covered in thick mud, socks torn, skin sallow and jaundiced, spitting out the wire the embalmers put in his mouth, melting makeup, and ravenously hungry.  And it’s been so
                                                                ­                   long since he was hungry.  

“He came back to me, Taylor,” my grandmother tells me. 
“He came back to me.”
                                        I don’t have the heart to tell her that he’s undead.  
                                        I’m physically unable to spit out those words.
And it’s a dream and it’s a dream and it’s a dream,                   but
it just fits so perfectly.  That he would come back to her.  
That death would not be a barrier.  I can’t explain it.                It just is.  
My grandmother is a shell without him.  
The body that’s missing the limb.  
The body that keeps score.

There is a body floating in the water of Lake Michigan again, but no one is willing to fish it out.  There is a body floating in the pond near my subdivision again, but everyone already knew that anyway.  
        I am sitting eighty miles away, overlooking a city that is not mine, thinking about how the moon outside my window is the same moon that you can see from down below in your partially frozen-over dirt bed.  I am thinking about the vampire that sits in his apartment, chugging two-to-three bottles of blood a week, and wondering if he is haunted by the same ghosts as I am.  
        It’s taken me eighteen years to realize that I was infected with a different variation of his curse all along—I am less human and more lycanthrope than I would like to admit.  I am not like you, I am not like him, I am my own breed and that terrifies me.  (There are black cats prowling in my heart and fragments of mirrors in my liver and salt that bleeds from my heels when I walk.)
        No matter how many rabbits’ feet I tie to my keys, how many dreamcatchers I put above my bed, how many cloves of garlic I hang over my door, I am never able to rid myself of the chill that goes hand in hand with the phantom you left here.
        Mother, I think I killed a man two full moons ago and I haven’t been the same since.  I threw his body into the lake and watched him drift out into the unknown, watched the kraken drag him down, watched the water spew him back up like a cork.  And now I need you to make your way back to the land of the living to sit by my side.  I want you to cut off my head and make me a trophy animal.  Create a rug from my fur.  Eat my organs and freeze the rest for winter.  Use me for your own survival.  I just want to be helpful.
        I want to be everything the vampire was not but my fingers are breaking from holding on too tight.

                                                               ­                                          I should let go.

The color of death is not black, is not white.  
                                                        ­                        Not red, not gold.  
Think: ashen skin.  
                               Think: where did the blood go?  
                                                          ­                       Think: pale, so ******* pale.
Bruise again.  He’s going to bruise again.  
     Mottled red   and      purple   and      blue   and      green   and      yellow.
That’s what the body does after death.  Blood runs down
to the lowest bend of the body and bruises the skin.  

The rust of cerebrospinal fluid as it sloshes
                      back and forth
       in the bag hanging above the bed.  
                                                      My mother’s hands:
white knuckled and gripping down on washcloths
to prevent her from breaking the skin of her palms.
The constant hum of telemetry,
                                the soft whoosh of the ventilator.

The human body has roughly 7% of its weight in blood.
The human body has no ******* idea what to do when
there is too much or too little of really anything.
Think: blood vessel bursting.
                            Think: cells mutating.
                                                  Think: proned patient coding after intubation.

Bruised.  His hands were bruised from all the needle-sticks,
from his lack of platelets.  And a single transfusion only goes so long.
                                                           ­   Goes three weeks long.  
The hands on the belly, laid so gently, so carefully are
covered in makeup.  The hair is parted wrong with a cowlick.
I know how they created that soft smile on his closed mouth.
                                                                         I’ve read the books.
                                            I’ve heard the talks from morticians.  
They’ve made my grandfather tan, but
I know what’s underneath the foundation:
                                                                                  grey.

It's the pilot light in the stove,
                                    the fireplace.  It’s the
night light in the bathroom,
                        the living room.  The
reflection in the mirror,
                  in the glass of my windshield.  The
      hum of electricity,
the sigh of the furnace.  

What do you mean I’m supposed to go looking for something that is constant?

The conjoined twin does not go looking for its sibling.
                 The brain does not search for the heart.  
The shadow always finds the body.  Gravity invariably
                                                    pulls the moon into orbit.  

The smoldering ache of loss
                  —hot like bubbling magma, bright like a solar flare—
                                                   is always there.  
Lurking beneath the skin.  The face behind the mask.  
                 Gnarled roots beneath the forest.

What do you mean I’m supposed to look for something that is a part of me?
Assimilated to my sense of normalcy.  Integrated into my DNA.
I can only do so much introspection before I go insane.

sunspot
sunrise
sunshine
moonshine
i lick you off my lips like strawberry
                                             pineapple
                                             grape              ­    juice
                                             a fine wine that i’ve never drunk.

asteroid belt
orion’s belt
daddy’s belt
i am opening the door a crack for you only to slam it in your face—i am
waiting for you to knock
             to pound your fist against the gate
             to break your hand on the wood
                                 i am waiting for you to say that you love me
                                 and i am waiting for myself to believe it completely
                                 (i think you do but i am still afraid you might leave me)

((jupiter has 67 moons and i think that i might be
                        each and every single one of them)).

oort cloud
smoke cloud
the burning ash of my father’s lit cigar flicking onto my hands
i am awake at night and thinking about how you no longer taste like lung
                                                                ­                                       mouth
                                                                ­                            kidney        cancer.
my grandfather almost died of prostate cancer
my friend is dying of brain cancer
my father will probably die of liver cancer
                                                          ­ there is not enough space in the cosmos
                                                          ­ for all of us, is there?                   … God?

meteorite
meteoright
i am trying to sleep without your face in the back of my neck
                                                      hand on the back of my hand
                                                      leg tangled around the back of mine
i am trying to telepathically whisper my secrets into your ears
                                                       but the only problem is that i have not yet
                                                             ­  mastered  this  form  of  communication—
          i think that everything would be so much easier if i just didn’t feel.

The fog here is thick, until you step into it.  
The storm rages until you get to its eye.  
I wish this same principle could be said of me, too.  
But like a gas giant, you could slip right through me with
                         the smallest amount of pressure.
There is no calming sense of self at the core.
Gravity does not apply to me.

There’s a boat on the lake cutting through the fog.  And then nothing.  
                                                      ­                                    More waves.  
                                                        ­            More birds.  
              The fog covers it all up again.  
The sun slinks and the tide comes in, or is it out?  Does it matter?  
The moon controls it in some way—the push, the pull of the waves.
At least the lake looks blue today,
                           looks green today.
The geese are in the water now.  The families are packing up.  
                             The ice cream shop is closing.

And I do not remember if I was ever here with you.  
                                This, of course, is a collective you.  
Could mean you, my reader,
                                               could mean one specific person,
                                               or two
                                                             ­       or three
                                                                ­                          or four;
could be whoever I'm thinking of when I reread this to myself.  
That’s the funny thing about the litany of loss.  
                                           It all starts to congeal.  

Waves crash against the rock.  Starts to chip away, create something new.
                                                      That’s what memory does.
It’s not permanent.  It’s malleable.  
Flexible.        Bendable.        Moldable.  
It smells like lakewater.  Like
                                                  fish and sand and mud and
                            gulls and rocks and shells and
     algae and fog—thick, thick fog.  
Smell is supposed to be one of the biggest memory triggers, and yet
                                       I cannot place a single memory of you here.
                                                    And that’s mildly crushing.  

So I would take you here:
                                              to where I wish the air was
                                                       saliter and less earthy.  
                                              to where I come sometimes to think.  
                                              where the clouds are so thick and puffy and
                                                            the setting sun makes them look like                                                                cotton candy on the Fourth of July.
                                              where the sun’s reflection on the water
                                                                ­      turns the green lake pink.  
                                              where the geese are back out of the water and
                                                                                                     onto the shore.
I would take you here with me.  
Into a new memory.  
                                      Homemade.        Handmade.        DIY.