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Trinity O Feb 2012
This road is every dirt road,
every grassy ditch and wheat field;
that hill near every river. The stairs
that shuttle down are the same stairs in dreams,
like fattened finger bones. Nothing,
not even sky can bear the road.

Pear trees are sometimes inverted,
sprouting soggy fruit underground
where muddy birds lay their eggs
and hatching babies paddle up for air
like sea turtles. There are alligators
in every river, gardens of them wilting

and waiting for the man who presses his arms together
and carries the water to the mouth of the road,
who gives what he has, and knows he’s no good.
Trinity O Feb 2012
When you step out
like horses hunting
for the scent of salt

Galloping miles, days
to taste

The same salt runs
down their necks
Those mountainsides
calling back    turning around

Not asking, but entering
Not following a map

You enter
You listen

Rain cup tracks in the dirt
Turn around     drink from them
Those heavy steps
You cannot return
You don't ask why
Trinity O Feb 2012
Strangers packed into the subway
   through the guts of the city
they ride thigh to thigh, eyes velcroed on
thick lamplight,    flash mobs drowning
the stop at Powell Station.

It’s not only night but the inside
   of a piston badly lit
and always leaving someone short-changed.
River of yellow between
   the platform and the train

makes everyone take sides
   and rearrange.    Girls who had wandered
off, stayed stationed on knobby-kneed pylons,
   holding their skirts to the wind
to anyone who’d take them.
Trinity O Feb 2012
I need different arms and elbows;
these are used, they fall asleep
at night and I wake up
without them, worried
and wondering if my arms
might be oragamied
into a crane,
flying shadow puppets
stuck to the walls
that can’t find the window.
They scoop cupfuls
of clay riverbeds
over each other
that dry into casts
and click against the floor
as my arms make their way home.
I’ve threatened to leave them
under such conditions but I’m certain
they’ll leave me first.

This new apartment—she’s cheap
and *****, used up.
lazy ceiling tiles pillow down
and yellow, watching me half-heartedly.
Then somehow you,
always full with something,
your shoulders

taking up the whole hall,
phonetic laugh and roomfuls of teeth.
Upon seeing you, I wonder
how ancient pieces of broken church
feel against calluses, what it will sound like
to give birth. There is a word for this
in Siena, allupato.
The wolves starve
and feed.
Trinity O Feb 2012
Because tomorrow I will be almost thirty,
I've decided to buy a house
with rolling floors, windows all painted shut
by the ones who abandoned it last winter
who didn’t worry about stiff paint brushes
drying to the countertops, stout furniture legs
and the oil in the rain slipping down the street.

Somewhere there are layers
of the dead that make up the soil,
paleozoic dirt clods hatching bone seeds
and plumes of thatch. And from behind
my book on the many uses of short kitchen knives
I remember the feel of my forearm
against a deer’s neck—watching myself
in the black glass eye
and reaching in deep for blood
like a pioneer in snow.
Trinity O Feb 2012
There is something stirring in the hardwood,
the color of stained honey, suffocating
under Skittle-colored plastic bins bulging
with the weight of laundry, fishing lures, mildewed books.
I follow the small pathways into each room of my father’s
apartment, just big enough for a unicycle—tributaries
of wood lathe where yesterday he was eating oranges
and reading Popular Science before folding
himself into the mattress for the last time.
The tiny ridges of floorboards were once
smoother than good whiskey. The rippling
water in each knot is the story
of what it is to grow. Trees grow branches like mothers
grow babies and all end up here, on the floor
together. I look for the veins
in these mounds of ***** dishes
and towers of magazines, some sign
of movement. We are all being held, kept
from what’s been running beneath us.
I want to scale the piles of shut-in relics,
climb into old age and never again
think about the wet hourglass
of snow tracked in from both doors
that kept us from collapsing
in exhaustion with our inheritance.
Trinity O Feb 2012
It takes nine weeks for cement to cure
in good weather,  and in bad weather,
years. It needs to be covered lightly
like a sheet over the face with a rebar
skeleton buried inside, the steel ribs
of wings cast into the settling stone.        

The dust is the glue, it creates itself
and wonders how birth canals can
expand, and in nine months give way
to moving parts, to the sponge of organs
and cries so thick cicadas won’t
burrow there.  Skin is merely

rice paper, not contained by concrete
but leaf etchings—delicate, illegible
scriptures buried in the archives.
Bars of light from the window push
around the floor there, as if they were    
substantial, as if they had weight.

— The End —