It’s not the first cool day of autumn,
but it’s the first that won’t end
until April, if ever. The hail covers every crack
in the sidewalk. I skate across it, turn into rain.

Later I’m standing in the mud, counting.
Julie calls to say the surgery didn’t work,
third one this year.  Doctor referred her to some
research hospital in Ypsilanti, but she won’t
be studied. She’s on a new diet instead,
only avocados and citrus. She says,
That’s why Sudan has the lowest cancer rates
and there’s still lots of time but please come see me this weekend.
I take off my shoes and look for a place
shaped like my feet.  I tell her I’ll build us
a sweat lodge on the Auglaize, I could learn how,
I’ve seen it done. We’ll sing Kirtan
to Hanuman and sage the hell out
of you, that’ll do it. I’m sure.  

No she says build me a school
for the things beneath the things, inside, around,
the scaffolding. There are walls
inside these walls. Enough space for all of us to pray
for certainty the way it prays for us. *Fear
is the cheapest room in the house. I would like
to see you living in better conditions.

I lift the little body from the tile,
wrap it with white butcher paper, masking tape.
I roll him up and roll with him.
We’re sticking to different sides
of the paper, both covered in my parts.
I’m tired, it’s cold and I need to do laundry.
There’s a 30-day money back guarantee
At the meat counter of Lucky’s,
they never open the paper to see
what’s inside. A bad roast, left out too long.
Just apologize and hand you cash.
Did it matter if the eyes were closed
or open? Crooked honey spine, little pink
pork knuckle, curled into itself. How many
people have I kissed, how many strangers
in the last year, and now this one, taking
up the whole bathroom, all my air and blood
for nothing, for smeared red thighs, dinner
for the butcher’s dogs. Kettle of pain in my knees,
scrubbing my insides from grout lines.

We pull our knees in and listen to stories,
wait for our own name to appear. Floating by
on a six-panel door or stitched into fabric scraps
still raw at the edges but slick
as mirrors or chalked on the ceiling too high
to brush away even with a telescoping hand.

Our name comes marching from the five
o’clock shadow tree line howling itself
and blocking the light switch.
We lag on hinges but keep it outside
never asking how it came and where
from. It can’t break and enter
if the door is already open. Only enter, listen
for bootsteps, for hot handprints in the snow.

We learn to slide our names under the door,
crawl back behind it. Shove our fingers
into locks, feel around for the trigger. We are
drainpipes thickening with sediment
bit by bit for years, everything passing
through, waiting like an open mouth.

Our name leaves stepping
in its own tracks and we follow,
find solid ground. We build bridges,
draw maps to it, curl our edges in around us.
Since we are not cartographers--we cry
too easily--our whole lives are spent
killing time, searching for seams, more folds
to get lost in. Lives spent like pennies,
faces pressed hard into the fountain bed.

He reads
my cuticles
the way Daniel
reads palms
and knows
that I am
not worthy
of wifing.
Cutting
the peeled mango
flesh, the body
knows how
to hold some things
even when it doesn’t

have the angles
or hands
clean enough
for a child
of its own. And
I’m still
bleeding
and bleeding
and giving it away.

He proposed to me at Disney World
   and I loved him anyway.
He’s discovered his own brilliance at 22
   It’ll ruin him early and completely.
The Ouija Board said he’d die at 33,
   like Jesus he’s living fast and loose.
His sleep is a menagerie, a night-
   time sound machine, all owls and lions.
He drank 2 liters of gasoline
   and lived to tell it, used the fuel like sickness.
He punched his arm through a window because
   of the gasoline. *******-shaped scar tissue.
He is at least 9 feet tall
   and contrary as a tree limb.
He bought me diamonds and I lost them,
   he bought me more and ******* them into me.
He liked to clamp his lips around cold cat ears
   when he had no air conditioning.
His voice was an engine dying, choke and hold,
   growling for new air and old adages.
His name walks in front of him, announcing
   the second coming and the first going.
When he was sick or scared sick, he’d wrap in
   his sister’s pink scarf, only that one, only pink.
He told us to be strong like men but act like women
   so I wanted to be a doctor that always did the dishes.
His love was a closet too small for two peoples’ clothes
   so I packed it in boxes and burned it on the sidewalk.
His eyes harbor the whole world: bombs, bicuspids,
   A wink that could **** a small school of children.
He makes proverbs that tell the time
   not minutes though, but centuries.

She found a propeller in Portland
and carried it all the way to Eugene
under her arm, this western artifact.
Says she’ll turn it into a necklace,
use it to press through the crowds
of people reaching at her hems.
They hold the sidewalks down
as she passes, waiting like wildflowers.

On the first day, we are all just hydrogen and time. Filling these hands—
this one mirror angle, one small wrist. One afternoon’s picked-over bones.

The second day, I spun ten times. On the grass, sky turning
its cosmic ballet. The axis of the world, there in the front yard.

On the third day, a hangman’s rope of pantyhose. Easy choices
like stop, and get a ****** or don’t stop, and get a family.

On the fourth day, tick-a-tick-a-ticking. Since I learned
to tell time, cradling has been inescapable and immanent.

The fifth day, I wanted an ovipositor that would glide
and bed, know it’s way around a dark brood pouch.

Day six, caught stealing ancient definitions, stuffing my pockets
and shoes. I’m told zülf  is the wisp of hair falling over my eyebrow.

On the seventh day, I shelved myself and gave back one rib, honey
spines of snakes. What tiny handprints they’d leave if they had hands.

This all becomes intriguing, as these things are.
Listening to couples speak in different languages—
which consonants are abundant, which sounds
I can’t recreate with my lazy American tongue.

But I try, bending it back further than I ever have,
folding it in half until it’s touching my tonsils.
I flip it over, loop it into a water slide,
let the new sounds tumble out in delight

kicking up waves and losing their swim trunks
along the way. They barrel out of my mouth
red-faced and quietly embarrassed. I learned

to whistle when I was seven, a whole week
of pursing my lips, rearranging the furniture
in my little mouth, hooting in frustration like a sham.

I was told to imagine my mouth was full
of peanut butter, the kind you had to mix yourself,
heavy and gritty. Or to actually eat peanut butter
and the crusts of all my sandwiches
which would be instrumental to my success.

Pretend you are kissing, wet your lips. Press
your tongue against the fence of your top teeth,
no the bottom, as if your tongue had
a bigger kid behind it, stealing everything from its pockets.

Open as a glass, vulnerable as clear water,
this is the place hot with birth. I’ve risked more
for less. Much, much less:
I ordered a nightstand from a catalogue,
the wood from Brazil probably,
pressed in Mexico, packaged in China,
traveling to my doorstep in pieces
seeing more than I’ll ever see.
Electric eyes of nocturnal forests,
the habits of the ocean
when the land’s not watching.
Connect bracket 3 with bolt C,
drop of blood, cross my heart
and fingers. It has four legs
but the drawer won’t open,
its crookedness leans against the wall
for support. There’s no money back
guarantee but there’s value in knowing
one cannot build furniture.
Now I take pictures and send them
with my Christmas cards.
I pull it out at parties and point to
the scratches and empty nail holes,
the unused brackets and each joint
where the wood has split so bravely.

I am your denial, your Lent fast
The mania in your DNA,
the way the helix twists around itself.

I am the finger-shaped bruises on the inside
soft of the thigh, the color of ripe plums
that you can’t stop pressing

because it hurts just right—
like us, the way we crack our knuckles.

The scoliosis question mark,
bent spoon of your spine like
Scandinavian silverware, its unfunctioning beauty.  

The snow of a thousand dandelions gone to seed.

The sugar sacks of fat around my body
that I love to touch and hate to see.

I am the thrift store of your desires,
a polyester pantsuit resold.
The starch of morning arthritis.

The dark under your nails
that isn’t really dirt.

The yellow smoke smell in a jacket.
A mango eaten off the pit,
stringy mango veins that stay in your teeth.

A washing machine that doesn’t drain.

A man cursing in his native language,
foreign words that don’t translate.

but throw things
anyway.

Break something glass
and beautiful.

appreciate
the sound of it.

Like handfuls of water,
                  carry it
or let it lie there unfixed
shards for days;

walk in it
if you have to.

Stop breathing
and let your body

                    No breathing,
feel what it’s like
what happens after.

“The atoms that comprise life on earth are all traceable to the crucibles that cooked light element into heavy element.”   —Neil deGrasse Tyson*


And up here we have Vega, rigged to a few older men,
Jupiter’s herd of moons. Look through its eyepiece,
convince us there is no such thing as reconstruction.
The right time to return light, the path to earth. Yes,
we are part, living or real. Such is the layout
of this cosmic ballet. A naked man and woman,
a map of earth’s location, unstable in their older years.
He spreads himself so wide, hard at the heavens
for two reasons. Fairly often, someone would call the police.

Handcuffs came from stars, next generation solar systems
quantumly entangled. Size is only development condensed
into a singularity, enriched guts against gears of war.
So what does this mean? The breadth of the actions
taken, meaning limitations, meaning sky was worth looking at.
He charmed the cops with conversational boom, dozens of people
crouching in the dark. Their common center of gravity:

darker barrel shaped streets with long rows of sold-out houses.
It’s not a lecture—how to calculate latitude, one neck cramp at a time,
an extension cord across Merlin’s Tour of the Universe
to satellites gliding in low orbit, nine years to work its way out.
The voice is deep and rowdy—from a man at the edge of the crowd.
The other reason is down here on earth, down the handle of the Big
Dipper. An artist will tell you—crank it some more, until it begins
to glow blue. Red-hot is the coldest among all the hots.

Time moves snakely
whipping around tripping me up
on the scales which are really just trap doors
on hinges, flapping shut to the rhythm of
the blood currants
carrying river run-off to the mouth.
He that dares stand where I stood
to drum up sunlight from the cellar
pulling the cord, hand over fist—
Calling the ring shouts in my place
weaving and wasting what little is left.

We will calculate
the weight of your last few months
by measuring the angles
of afternoon sunlight—
fiber-optic puddles with receding shorelines,

and we’ll rain dance every night
for more time.
In my quiet house, I’ll make you
a deep bed with seven layers
of patterned sheets and pink pillows.
Those little bunk beds
that dad built for us,
remember? That we kept
well after our feet dangled over
the edge.

I’ll say to you, remember
hula hooping until our hips bruised.
Remember sneaking out in our pajamas
to the night grass
and calling after constellations
who were not yet born,
who would never be.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.