In the morning, I read your poetry
sprawled on the table paper mache.
Cut it open, rub it into my skin,
the guts and blood are jasmine oil
or motor oil still hot from the engine.
I put words like permanence under my tongue
to save for later, when I want to run hard
and bite the bit. There is greed
packed into this. Knowing someone
like you exists is a slap in the face, a tease,
an anchor around my feet
that I keep as a pet. Never
have I looked across the well
and seen someone on the other side,
waist over the edge, both arms reaching down,
just like me. That’s the moral,
the gun barrel, that’s
the knife handle in a nutshell.
What’s real is the hole
where the air has parted for your voice
like the crowd parts when they see a god.
If this is dying, let me do it twice a day.
With this greed comes the risk
of seeing what’s under
the water and drowning in it.

If I leave for Africa and take the bus
to the edge, if I step on an animal mine
and write inside the bellies of snakes—
with an alphabet that’s ruined thousands
of years of evolution—***** letters
to Mr. Rogers who rubs his pockets for candy
then bends pink-mouthed girls like matchsticks.

If I crawl through Kampala and find our bones
lined up like crayons, uncovering themselves
over years and hundreds of years, sifting upwards.
If there are questions behind those
question marks, more soggy appetites whetted,
more curvy rib bones bumping in a soup ***.  

If I run into a man who holds an empty bag
up to his ear and takes it at its word,
if this truant god—your cup and handle,
held like a pistol, love like a nail hole—afraid
to be the villain or stay longer
than an atlas, more afraid to hold than jump, chokes
the bag that won’t shut up, snuffed on camera.

Nearer my god to thee. He will take care,
will last out the cave. Hands sewn like armor,
fingernail mosaics and a propeller under each arm
to carry the faces that fell
away, curious as ever, hiding in museum cases
not in the glass but of it, not taking up spaces.

When he was 14, the youngest of my brothers
says he doesn’t like girls
and what should he do
at school
when people call him a ***

Mom says
love em and let em go, says
they don’t know any better, says
how do you know
for sure
if you’ve never tried a girl

He asked her the same

Asks how she knows
she’s a woman
how she knew she wanted kids,
if she still wants them now

My brothers say
try harder, say
what do you expect, say
get tough
and learn to fight
Wish it
away, pray it
away
We’ll teach you how

I never leave the West when it isn’t raining,*
My brother says to me through the phone.  
He is on his way back
over the Rockies and through Nebraska.
He’ll never make it intact—
hands fuse to the steering wheel
like nylons on a burn victim,
knees and elbows bolted in
precise angles keeping the car straight,
tires pulling everything forward.
One foot is the pedal, one becomes the floor mat.

Shoulder to armpit with a semi truck
hauling jet wings from Denver,
he notices the paths of rivets
like bread lines in Omaha.
Some of them are starving.

But where is the rest, the airplane body
without its wings? A hollow silo,
pilot in a cockpit
not going anywhere.  
I think airplanes molt this time of year.
It’s still raining or it will be,
the white-lined highways
will carry you here unscathed.

Did you know they pay people to study here,
to stay here after studying? It’s the human
capital flight of the tech-smart who type faster
than an entire room of secretaries in cardigans and pearls.
But the bigger question is, if all the brains
are draining out like spiders in a shower, then who is still here
weighting the state lines down with stones
if not zombies? Brainless bodies hungry, crabby, and without
an appropriate sense of boundaries.
          They lure you in
with home values and cheap houses—the tired ones
who are getting old for their age, who don’t run as fast or as often
and want an easy life with chubby children and a yard,
or those who are sick of being felt up ‘accidentally’ on the 22 Fillmore bus.
This is how they get you.
          And you stay because it grows on you
the way everything grows in Indiana, effortlessly and way too fast.
Plus, let’s face it, you’ve gotten lazy and don’t
make enough money to one day move away
with the kids and the yard and all.
So the zombies win.
          But being Indiana,
the neo-conservatists would swoop in to save the day
against the zombies who hate us for our freedoms
and the liberation of our women. And sometime after
the "Mission Accomplished" banner is broadcast
to all 50 states from a ship safely tucked away
on Lake Michigan,
          the zombies will regroup again
and pick us off like old ladies at the bus station.
Then with even more determination and hatred of the living
they’ll get fat on intellect until they’ve eaten the last,
and the un-dead of Indiana will die of starvation.

The chair is still warm, the driveway
empty as a summer bus,
I stared it down for a long time

but it never moved, even for me.
I can talk at length about your soul
after you’ve gone, but I can’t watch

it in a glass, teach it tricks, or give
it my last name. I want the driveway
to remind me of something like walking alone

through Paris while you watched it rain
from the bed of that tiny hotel room.
Paris alone in the rain is not romantic;

it’s cold, even in August and difficult to navigate
the sidewalks and bridges that hover
at street level, one story above the Seine,

its banks barricaded in slick concrete. It isn’t easy
to find the river when one is lost, unless
you toe up to the bridge and listen.

I like to walk through the apartment
at night to be sure nothing
has moved, to be sure I still belong. I quiz myself
on the layout of furniture darker than air
with my hands above my head
so I can’t cheat. I know
where the lamp sits, just out of reach.

It was a glass of water I was after
or just darkness or to check the faucet
was still dripping into rusty Rorschach portraits
like the first cave drawings made by accident
when they pressed their sooty faces
against the cool cave wall.
The man across the hallway steps out
around midnight, he pretends
to hold a cigarette in his teeth, to light up and love
every breath. When the leaves are crunching like tonight,
I know he’s outside puffing on air. His fingers rest
lightly on his lips, he flicks nothing into the street.
Sometimes I follow him out,
ask for a light and we stand together
on the sidewalk, pretending to risk it all.