I'm a Prisoner Trapped Inside a
Little Rectangular Marvel
Which knows, to six decimal ...'s,
My position on Earth

And the irony is that...
Electronically found,
I feel lost.

Way before we knew about
Jeep *** EssSs...
I lived 300 miles away,
In a little town called
Bettendorf, Iowa.

Few days after last
Christmas.
I made the journey
Back. To the
Former.
Place I existed, survived,
Lived, thrived (albeit briefly)

I took my family with me.
Or, I went with my family.
The four of us in the same vehicle,
Anyhow.
300 miles in December.
There was snow everywhere
Else. Not on the road, thank
You.

You leave bits and pieces of
Yourself in the place that is
The home for your feet, blistered
And toe-stubbing sidewalks and
Your hands grasping frozen Gym-
Door handles on Minus 10 Saturdays
When you bundle up and slog 1.3 miles
To play Dodgeball all Saturday afternoon.
(And returning it's twice as cold and dark is
Edging its fangs over the dim, muted horizon)

You sweat in the summer. Profusely,
Drops of the stuff watering brown
Grass. You bleed in the snow,
Stark red on even pastier
White, though it feels
Painful only in the abstract.
Sometimes numbness is better
Than painness.

You get blisters from raking leaves
In that season that seems
To have gone palavering somewhere
East of here.

These fringes of leavings, like
The tiny toenail clippings you spy
As you use a foreign bathroom, balefully
Eyeballing someone else's Medicine
Cabinet of Curiosities.

So we went to the place
Formerly known as home.

You can travel a linear or
Non-line-like distance back
To the place where you cut
Your teeth on life, and life cut
Its own bicuspids on you, but fading,
Fading,
Only the shimmering
Ephemeral memory of an
Equally diaphanous memory
Of those teethmarks exist.

Or, succinctly put:
The past is dead.
Long live the passed!
(But not the vaporous
Kind)

Still, we pine for the earlier
Times, younger and much,
Much more innocent, gull-
Able, even: When time had
Not yet painted and varnished
Us so much, the years piling on
Our faces deeply and thickly,
Lined canyons of worry criss-
Crossing our brows, the feet
Of those ****** crows nestling
Where our eyes end in points;
The sagging, the
Lowering of once springly,
Spritely flesh. 3 chins.
Since when do I need two
Extra chins?
**** you, Gravity!
**** you to Heck!

We travel back on new
Roads over the great
Old ones that used to be
Concave asphalt trips to
Anywhere and Nowhere
Special, they all were, even
The ones that led to hilarious
Dead ends.

Wow! There used to be a
(Insert memory here)
But hey! Lookit that!
A Yarn Barn. Hmm.

And oh! I lost my
(Insert memory here)
In that very back parking
Lots of Tots? What kinda name
Is that for a Pre-School!
Open on CHRISTMAS? Whaaaat?
My hometown has lost
Its mind.

And then silence, as the
future that passed us by
Reasserts itself so strongly-
It might as well be screaming
At us from useless billboards
Selling crap we don't need.

This place is a foreign
Country to me. I don't know
When it stopped being home
And now, I really don't care.
Let's do this thing, family, this
Familial obligation, and then kick
The stupid dust from this town
Off our tailpipes.
Go, Bettendorf!
Go, Bulldogs!
Go, next-town-over!
Go on with your bad
Selves.
Because, people of these
Towns, in 30, or 25, or 12, or
4 years, you'll blink, and find
That you no longer recognize
The place you can't call
Home any longer.

coyote
          tried to take
a girl

          sunk his teeth
in to that girlflesh
          and ran

shot dead
           by the cops
in less than a day

strange
           that we are
judge
           jury
executioner

lawmaking
            legislating
binding
            animals to our humanity
when they know
             nothing
of our lives

            the girl lived
       bearing the mark of teeth
forever

the coyote perished
            for human vanity
revenge
            reciprocity

She wrote a line 
about drawing a line 
an inch from his shoulder blades.

She wrote a line 
about stepping over 
the teethmarks her father made.

She wrote a line 
that said **** lines 
and broke them with a comma.

She wrote a line 
that said blood 
and nothing besides.

on top of a mountain, dressed
in purple and frozen in December air,
we were flying through western Oregon
with our shoes in New England and our
hearts in the forest.

you would shake when I saw your skin,
turner both softer and more rugged as I reached your bedrock,
eroding like sea glass when you showed me what
makes you tug tighter in the dark and
sob at sunrises.

your tears were velvet garden shears-
I don't remember how much blood there actually was,
just that it poured out of both of our bones
with a symmetry that my eyes never spoke of,
and that it still stains the skin of myself
and everyone I've talked to in the last eight months.

you are a ghost under lampshades,
like a florescent fairy in love with tying
the night sky into nooses.

you are libraries,
volumes filling viles with memories of moments when
the darkness left your bones,
only if for the flicker of a flashlight in the backyard or
of a match,
giving me minute fractions of eternity
to see your disposition light the sky larger than stars.

you are teethmarks in my skin,
scrubbing with salt and white
body wash and oatmeal without sugar,
warming our endlessly evanescent December.

******,
filling the ceiling with blue whales and
mountain ranges,
i am a stain on the map in your backseat,
buried under used napkins and neglect,
while your wings take you back
to Oregon.

My skin keeps raising in a certain spot,
the surrounding veins looking like orange juice pulp. I think
about my boyfriend in Florida, how he ****** my
calf right where the spider bite will return
again and again, and maybe he has sent his teethmarks
in the papery flesh of grocery store containers.
In that case, twisty-ties on bread bags are fangs I can finger.

He says I have the look of white chocolate everywhere
but so do zits, teeth, and milk, if we want
to use logic. He tries to make me seem beautiful but

it mostly falls flat, not until last week did I believe in bruises
as a method of communication or appreciation.
Now it would make me happiest
to mix our blood and call this relationship romantic.

There is this disease my friends complain about
called a “food baby,” how after eating it feels like small feet
create rocking chairs from the dull edge of my ribs. I
feign labor and birth nine months later:
she’s yours, congratulations. It stopped being cute
after the first time I made my boyfriend’s face spark up in
confusion and fantasy, it makes more sense to
say there are maggots getting married
under an arch made pale by my intestinal track. I say so now.

I miss my boyfriend in Florida very much,
although I only have to lift my thigh up and he is here.
He leaves scars on me from insects that need to escape their
venom, I am the Golden Gate Bridge
that they climb merely to jump off from, to die.
He would probably say they are just strawberries on my
hips and hands, white chocolate that would not melt for him.

We were flowers, twisted ‘round each other in red thread
speaking soft words under soft rains – hard park benches
pretending we didn’t love what was in the other’s head.
We were flowers, one flower, ‘round and ‘round in red
lipstick that stained and teethmarks from words left unsaid
We were pacing old trodden paths digging old sodden trenches
We were flowers, cut at the stem bleeding love bleeding red
Speaking cold words in floods, sitting on lonely park benches.

once bitten, twice shy.
makes perfect sense
but i'm pressing the teethmarks
she left on my chest
and i've missed this tender aching.
i've missed the misery that
summarises me when we're apart.
infatuated.
cross my masticated beating heart
stick a needle in my eye
once bitten, twice shy
i'll try to fall in love once
before i die.

It's said that it takes seven years for your body to replace its cells.
Memories die.
They wither away;
become unexplained hints of familiarity in a stranger's face.
Scars are replaced by renewed skin. Bruises disappear, erased as though by magic.

My body is a eulogy for your touch.
You were a merciless lover. You scratched your name into my skin. Your teethmarks are still imprinted on my tongue. The bruises, around my throat.
"Here lies he who commands my breath".
My lungs are still learning to forgive you. My muscles are still learning to forget you.

It's been four months and two weeks. I can feel the ghost of you restless, haunting my flesh. It wails at night and I still cry myself to sleep,
longing for dead things to remain dead.

perhaps it was his love for
the salt and the sea
perhaps upon the desert of waves
he awaited a vision to awaken his dreaming heart
some beautiful illusion
spoken aloud by a drunken bard
let loose his devilishly smooth voice
in the small hours of night...
she was there too
with her loose skin revealed...
she will be tainted by his warm breath
she will bear its teethmarks with voiceless pride
till the end of her days
it was his hot blooded passion spilling its
cruel seed upon her
and she smiled like a young nymph
displayed her shameful state like a peacock strutting
like a wild animal rutting...
except in the night where she held it near her lonely heart
a single dim light in her dark world
she is his love of life incarnate
she is his lust uncluttered by romance
all hot hands groping for pleasures given and received
she is a lean warm soft creature of night
that slips away to sleep
and yet dream still
of his warmth upon her shoulder

With your sinful smirk that the devil would envy
Cunning eyes, brimmed with your lies
Burning fires in those iris'
All you saw was that ******, devil's red

Grace my thighs with your wicked hands
Bet your bitter self was once bitten
So bite me now with you ******* ways
A bundle of teethmarks and undiluted desires

She said give sobriety a chance and
I recoiled at the mere idea
So tell me, are they your teeth marks in your tail?
Cause you look a touch dizzy

To laugh in falsetto
And bribe with toothy smiles

To flatter men
And politely degrade myself for minimum wage

To ignore the lacework of frown lines pooling around each of our eyes

To etch teethmarks deep across my tongue
From every almost slip

To remember the script
To save 15%

To say “Thank you very much”