how to claim your birthright

she moved constantly & never unpacked the boxes, like she'd fly away any second & watch the city unfold underneath like a lit-up bruise, with all its looping strands of streetlamps & cockeyed rivers & highways dangling jauntily from the face of the earth.
she spun a symphony beneath her, hung a spindly bridge across the womb harbouring all the world's cigars & half its barren fish.


you could send her a package & never be sure that it would reach her. she never left by plane because it meant she couldn't change her destination midflight & she listened exclusively to bob dylan & sundance film soundtracks. she sent christmas cards in march unapologetically because she believed in proving things & no one knows when jesus was born. she moved constantly & counted on everyone else to stay put so she could show up unannounced at their door at three am with blueberry muffins.  

or so she said

she also once seduced a chinese god (or his son) who proposed to her in mandarin with a fortune cookie & a fruit pop & a shy smile
which she might admit is fiction if asked



-
"i made you a world but it ended"



"it's eighteen degrees out." it always began innocently.
"i know. thermometer's right here."
"i think you ought to be wearing more clothes, don't you?"
"if we were meant to have the same thoughts, we might have been the same person." she catlike slipped the buttons on her cardigan into the holes without dropping her eyes.
"you look like a...you – you aren't even wearing shoes."
she looked down as if to verify it for herself and bobbed her head slowly.
she was all static, the grainy end of a song before the next crawls over to fill the gap, the skin of her feet rough and vein-scarred over the rippling of her bones as she watched herself half-heartedly attempt to point and flex while standing.
"you're half naked and you look like a disgusting...a dirty hippie" all disdain &
real, collar yanking hot & terrible
& it was so real & so vain &
she constricted, pulling the cardigan tighter around herself
as if it could shield her from her mother's words, themselves thick veils constricting the barbed messengers from her father's sullen lips.
"i...i don't -" her mother frowned and took a quick breath, as if having forgotten a line
during an audition. "- i don't want a...gay whore for a daughter."
she could feel her father scowling in each ugly word, and she pressed her bare hands together until the lines of his forehead cut deep and made scars. consecrated, discarded.
she couldn't bring herself to call her mother by her first name. "bye...mom" & the older woman flinched at the spoken acknowledgment of their connection, a reality made tangible which otherwise she could have ignored.



"nah
he accused me of being a lesbian slut &
so
i left."
you suspected there was more to it than that but you could feel her slipping every second, each minute hesitation hammered into your memory with the weight of an omen.  you heard your thoughts threading themselves into comfortable spiderwebs, only vaguely threatening.
"did you ever want to go back?" you enunciated every syllable like they were little daisies you'd raised for cradling in your hands, more impossibly precious than breathing into the new snowfall.
she had a habit of looking straight into people's eyes when they spoke & it was unnerving, someone trying to see into your soul before you could. "yeah, you know...i went back a few times. maybe it was before i knew those blinking stars were planes full of fucked up people."
you rolled the coffee mug between your fingers, inspecting its sun-drenched garden degas print, swilling the dregs as if they'd suddenly sprout wise grey hairs & tell you what to say.  "is that why -"
"want to make muffins?"


she had pored over the cake recipe for father's day & gathered the ingredients into a neat family on the counter. from the kitchen table her mother's hand hesitated at the crumpled edge of a bag of tortilla chips.
"you don't need to use a grater. here, let me show you how to shave the chocolate with a knife instead."
"can i just use any knife? this one?" she held up a thick handled santoku, the light whimpering over the keenness of the blade.
"yes, any really sharp one. so you just –"
"look – look" with the knife she kissed the corner of the baker's chocolate bar, peeling off a delicate sliver that crumpled as it touched the cutting board "– i can do it. it's not that hard. i know how."
her mother blinked, hand finally broaching the bag's mouth with a metallic crinkle, turning back to the television without a word & the air grew heavy between them.
as she grated the german chocolate she wondered if she hadn't been wrong, if the offer hadn't been an accusation of ignorance but an excuse to chat with her only daughter, or a plea for escape from the lure of sodium, or a small gesture of love she knew how to make.


she knelt in the middle of the sidewalk like moses in the toxic center of the city, parting the sea of nervous young men in designer suits & corporate heads with their impatient heels, taut pencil skirts like jail cells for their exhausted hips. the sloe-black dog in front of her lifted his head from his paws to peer out with tired, sloping eyes as if he'd seen her kind before. she offered her left hand, bowed where the last two knuckles didn't protrude because she'd broken them in the ninth grade, as a sacrifice under his nose, watching it rabbit along her curved fingers. she counted to ten in three languages - essentially the extent of her foreign language capabilities - before she traced her hand over the mountain range of his spine, hiding the tips of her fingers in its ridges. her breath climbed out of her mouth & into a raincloud; she sank onto her heels & dropped her eyes to his coral-raw skin & sparse coat, with its insistent black & its greyed patches, probably once white, that looked as though someone had spent years stubbing their cigarettes there.
a whine strangled itself in the dog's throat & her hands flew to the thick knot where he belonged to the bicycle rack, just a derivation of masters, a long chain of them & their sons until they were cold as its metal bars in february, & she hissed as much too, at the burn of steel on skin until the businessmen heard snarls during their siestas. but it is always the wrong ones.
she abandoned the tangled chain & gathered the dog's face in her palms, hyper-aware of his scabs & jagged bones, & wriggled open the collar's buckle with one hand, & her mind with skinned knees at eighteen, in the ice skating rink on friday nights, & in the lobby a girl & a boy with their hands down each other's pants, their mouths a history of finite & indistinct moments. she knew their tired names & their weary act; she watched with jaded eyes; she counted down to the second when he pushed up the girl's shirt with his hands underneath, when he flaunted her purpled, ragged ribs & the hollow cave of her stomach, when the girl's apologetic eyes crawled across the floor.
she began to build words out of sacred, stacking them around herself as boulders in a cyclopean fortress.
sacred, consecrated, scared.


she stared at the ceiling above his shoulders & vaguely heard him crying, "baby, baby," with a voice like pearls she'd dug up herself, over the underside of her naked chin, over her naked throat, fingertips, & he was shivering with contempt where his mouth touched her, a stale persecution of her exposed ankles, her naked breasts. she wondered if sex was always like this, an uninspired censure of one another, & wasn't that the point of every day, do you bring all the streets into your bedroom (, kitchen, shower, infested laundry room), do you fuck out on the sidewalk with strangers so that you can bring their dirty brothers into your apartment, she failed to understand. do you spend your day doing this with your clothes on for practice, or is it just that we like to kill each other slowly, & he didn't answer her thoughts in that rotting-ocean foreign voice she'd never hear again & he condemned her lips with his & she continued to elude discernment. discarded, desecrate, scarred.
"i don't love you."


at first they showed up irregularly in your mailbox, invariably dressed in her handwriting, a single blueberry muffin still steaming on top of the uneven folds of her yellowed loose-leaf.  you invariably read them the second you wrenched open the rusted little door & for the rest of the day resented having to read anything else.
by the time you caught yourself trying to emulate her broad sideways scrawl, the messages began to appear daily & the bone-white spider egg in the depths of your mailbox grew violently bulbous, fleshy with disgust.



"i ran to the backyard to break a chair & write on its legs. no one told me we were getting rid of the swingset but someone collapsed it across the gravel, spilled over weeds. the lights were all on in my house & at dinner i didn't mention it
i didn't mention it at all.

epiphany #587: i'm twenty & i'm not ready to grow up"



-
"you need wren to make wrenches"



she fell into a church the way innocent people fall into & out of love, careless & stupid-yellow, her face flushed from the dirty subway air, punctuated by the dispassionate hiss of doors & the hushed grey tones of equally apathetic conversations.
slumped over in the third pew from the back, she considered her eruption, wondering how best to dam up the mess of her insides before they seeped out.  she swore she could feel the heavy convulsions of her veins, could hear the bargain for oxygen in her alveoli, every last neuron firing, reloading, the minute sounds of her human pulp vibrating underneath the skin that kept her all bound together.  without it she imagined she could dissolve into the universe, like death before dying, like surrendering to the air.  
she raised her eyes to the towering pointed arch of the ceiling, reminiscent of the best of gothic masterpieces, & began to suspect that it was an attempt to catch god, to reach him in his infinite kingdom, if it existed, & condemn him to banal animation.  that's the reason for these citadels, she thought, being in the sky is like sitting in god's hand, but they can't know where it really is or how much it hurts, & the farther they climb, the more they can't breathe, there's a logical explanation but they won't listen because it must be god, their merciful god trampling the breath from their lungs, god when you touch me, you touch me i feel something begin to rupture in me, these dams bursting without fear of reattachment, this inside me wanting to be out & out
", when you touch me" she fell again & "again i want all of it inside me to be out, when it's breaking, a reflex, only to spit up everything you gave to me & leave it."
the sermon persevered in vain in the background, the dull drone of a worker bee in the presence of its queen; the sideways glances of surrounding people fizzled in her peripheral vision, frowning at her grass-stained jeans & puckered button-down & dirty fingernails & "i hate it, you touch me & the soles fall from my feet, i fall into believing" whispers, scared, desecrate,
she wasn't sure which belonged to her but she could have been screaming & it wouldn't have rung any louder.


she dragged herself from under the covers to shower & put on the clothes she'd been wearing the last time you saw her, the only clothes she felt safe & beautiful in since you said so. she pinched the loose skin of her arm where it hurt to feel so vulnerably tangible & watched the blood seep slowly into its craters in the pale half-moons.
in a room where the only noise was her breathing hitching as it crept to the back of her throat, the sure sound of a tear falling from her cheek to the pillow was deafening. she blinked seven times & fell back to sleep.


you began to think the baby spiders had all surrendered, lazily died within their pale cocoon, until the morning you wrestled the mailbox door open & a sea with dozens of tiny black legs flooded over your hand & flung itself from its birthplace. you swore & they swore & people in the street swore, & with all this swearing you dropped your eyes to the crumpled paper & muffin you had been expecting, more than an earthquake or eruption of tiny arachnids. you retrieved them & brushed the spiders from your hands & swore some more until you were almost satisfied; you thought sometimes things are not symbolic, they are just things & meant to be understood in the way that they are perceived, & you thought as you let the muffin fall from your hand, as if your fingers had forgotten they were supposed to be holding it, & you shook the last spider from your sweater & abandoned the muffin to the birds & you thought sometimes things are not symbolic at all, are they, like the way i know to perceive & understand things in efficient binary code or proper mandarin,
but this is not one of those times.



"i pin all the loose hairs to my head & tempt you anyway, i miss my favourite parts of these songs, i only read words that sound like you could break their necks with one finger, easy.
i will write a letter to the president, i will ask him where to buy fresh bread, i will demand to know the best part of his favourite song.
i wrote lairs by accident, i misinterpreted your silence, i suspected holes in the wall of being spiders with cracked-wood legs.

epiphany #002: it meant more than i intended"




-
"REALITY OVERTAKES THE GYPSY
(the new york times magazine 31 july 1938)"




she ground herself up + into you, making herself small for the places you left her
she measured the angle of the wall against the ocean, drunk the way she imagined gulls winging – out slicing existing
across the geometry of homes made by ants
a secession of plane after plane from sky
she said god – is punishing me & she let the red leak from the horizon
as part of a decision to die by blood loss she said
god – & grew apart from humanity + its lines unnaturally straight
she said god – & dangled your convictions over edges of the tallest places she could find



you collapsed into a park bench cradling in burning fingers the muffin you had brought for the gravestone you had not found, would not find
crumbling it for eager pigeons you thought god –
& grew world-heavy with knowledge
of existence



she contemplated tossing the tiny plastic cup out onto the grass, frowning instinctively at the thought of littering but imagining doubtless some animal would find it,
a member of a forest animal collective, probably
knowing a young shrew whose tongue could sidle up to the dregs of syrup caught thickly in the corners, overjoyed,
& picking it up on his behalf.
she shook with the proximity of corners
with the closeness of her daydreams
with the endless chill
with her hands, assertively, & impressed people, smiled, thanked them
with the impossible cold laying siege to her marrow, full surrender
with the feeling that someone is always watching.
there's no one out there.
this is an old house
after all
she shook with the cold & listened to wolves calling each other without names
from across the lake & they were saying i miss you & i'm over here run this way & i found you.
first one & two
then three wolves
giving each other love language
spreading their voices as nets over the lake


i am a statement of fact she thought
i am the real here
here
i am a statement of fact & this world & everything
is dependent on my sphere
too. i am the truest bluest true
she thought, whisking eggs & cooled coffee
into the flour, sugar, & cocoa powder
with a fork, i am the statement
of fact for my world. & it is a wondrous
& terrible thing
to be responsible for perceiving
the world as it is, being born into
duties of collaborative creation with strangers
to be trusted with the recognition &
conception of the shared
experienceable world.
the glory of infinite uncertainty
in everyone you call neighbour.
the terror of knowing exactly
what you are doing.
she shook a loose curl over her shoulder
& dropped a handful of chocolate chips
into the batter, thinking i am
the necessary subjectivity, the unseeing
judging eye, seeing as creating
as making relevant to the lived experience.
thinking i am a statement of fact
which makes it truer than any idea
which is the basis of all reality.
thinking where all things are not,
i am. i am reality & the all real,
the wondrous & the terrible.



"it just sounds like something you would have said
something that got lost after you stopped breaking all those strings.
i look at you too long & you wither
& the rest of the world begins to look the same.
it's always either too long or not long enough & this is why we are never satisfied
it's always the difference between here & there that kills you.

epiphany #623: all the beautiful people are dying"



-
"weren't they human once"



she dragged her body out, cocooned in the same stained winter coat that whispered when she moved her arms. she dragged her body out to the wharf, spreading herself over the water. she dragged her body to a bench, nothing still frozen over but everything paused with cold, holding its breath for the spring she could forget if she blinked. she dragged her body
& arranged it on a bench
hugging her knees or maybe not. maybe just once.
she dragged her body out to the wharf & anchored her spine on a bench, rolling it
over the thin planks, old & smooth with wind & rain & aching city backs,
to feel the anxious little ridges exploding, one vertebra after another. she dragged her body out
to watch the water taxis, green lights & yellow lights, delivering passengers to the docks
to watch the airplanes shooting from the earth like restless stars, spinning their homesick gravity out of control, confusing it to get back inside of the universe. she dragged her body out & away, bloated with desire for the womb of space, effortless as forevers from the lips of fifteen year old lovers.
she dragged her body to the edge of the harbour, punctuated with garlands of chains painted black with links as big as her head. she dragged her body along its belly, settling herself finally with legs crossed underneath, arms limp over the giant chains, watching the water slowly stop breathing.



she curled around her knees, feeling the low notes of her throat, feeling a kind of alive that bothered her with its vague restlessness, feeling a moth's wings dislodge a single piece of dust from the slightly dank plastic sheet covering the fluorescent light in the ceiling. the rest of the moth became a universality, a reason for world hunger. a trick of the light, a cancerous mountain underneath a sea that moans with its inability to recognise & be recognised.
a kind of alive that made her crave it, want to feel it more intensely, a kind of alive that dragged her from her bed to be seen by other people who had to know her as one of them, even if she wasn't quite



each of the shrink's borrowed offices beamed with early morning sun through their cheerfully wide windows, blinding in the reflection from the immaculate grey hair & answering smile which transformed the mouth into a welcome mat.
it was the shrink's idea to name the child.
to pretend the child's needs made sense, tangibly mattered, compelled
at all. any feeling.
to pretend the child's needs were her own, so that they could matter,
could compel.
the shrink smiled from underneath the neat black glasses, cheeks rising sweetly as the steam from fresh apple pie.
the shrink often starred in her dreams as the fairy godmother, but only years later & because of lethe. the shrink never flicked a wand or smelled like deep-summer pit cherries left out in the sun or held her close enough to get a perfect grey hair mussed with tears.



"i ask you questions like i don't know the answers because i want to know your answers.  can i live here, in a place that isn't meant for me?  the light is perfect but i have no motivation.  this is like heaven, & things you meet with heaven, all orange-cautious & a single leaf floats up from the abyss with your face in it.  i'm always doing that, seeing your face in things, like heaven, like things you go there to see.  if there are angels they are sitting next to me.  if there are angels they are far too close.

epiphany #021: it's okay if sometimes all you get is half a teacup"



-
"watching things grow from carousels, from glass"



she worked for a company that manufactured
crucifixes for churches, maybe for a sanctuary or
a blank wall.
it had the effect of unfocusing
her eyes, she was hired
to be jesus's designer. a dior, perhaps
or versace she held the scissors that
sawed holes in his loincloth.
she had time to wonder why people allowed
the son of god to be depicted without
his masculinity.



she wondered if anyone even knew what all those saints did


she took off her clothes,
thought: just like a woman, & smiled,
unbuttoned her name & flung it into a corner.
every day the weight of an invisible snare grew heavier at the back of her neck, balanced there in a basket that wept with coins & names & lists of things smaller around than oranges that people hold most dear, or lists of beloved things unable to be measured, or lists empty of words. her hands reached up for the electricity of her own hair, humming it wild, the unname of her, the restless capacity for description in human language that bared its fangs for her, that still seized her in the clutches of herness, the woman as woman created by man. & this truth stung her eyes until tears fled from it, seeking safety on the underside of her chin.



as she curled up uncomfortably in her seat on the last bus of the night her eyes snagged on a sign for freedom fertility. she thought sure fertility seems the opposite of freedom. she thought fertility might be the heaviest
curse, the deadliest burden you could place on any life.



"you are a romantic thing much like tapeworms.
the inside of your mouth edged with photographs, a dust jacket. when you laid on my bed i felt something
solid, the very small sound of tapping your foot, i became tangible but only
for a second. this is you on fire.
this is what you would be on fire,
an electric-hopeful kind of time bomb, there that is my bedspread with the
blood on, there that is my belief in
this world & you are trampling it. & dragons also, they touch you without & i
allow myself to be unglamourous, it's this part i know so well. you touch me
& i begin to spit up spider legs in your sink.

epiphany #472: the cookies you gave me are stale & misshapen but they still have the sprinkles on & i keep them in my nightstand drawer"



-
"an even number of petals"




you seemed like a dream for a moment she thought, attempting to pick bits of pretzel from her molars with her tongue.
& you made a big perfect mess.
you are beautiful in that momentarily stunning light brimming over your window way. the morning's long arms curling around your floor, the lazy loving they do before you wake up, a beauty whose simplicity aches in her gut, the syllables of a name flicking at her ears, your your your your name  !   she stirred her eyes to it over black coffee in the downstairs café. she discovered it on the front page of the college journal.
she hung her breath on it after the sun trickled over the carpet, daisy-patterned, loopy lines & all. she draped her fingers around a mug, its swirling victorian letter shot through with trickling coffeestains, warming herself from one tip of her body to the others, without you – terrified by the immediacy of missing another person – she spent the morning reading the same page over & over, every other moment staggering into the daze of suddenly impossibly crazily missing.



she loved you in a dream thirteen nights in a row
& each time your eyes hung the slightest tinge more softly, bluer, as you evaporated, left her arms wrapped up in themselves & after that she only slept
with her face buried into you so she would
know when you were gone, itch with the need
for you in her lungs, the bluest
slight-blue softness.
one night it wasn't a dream & she fumbled your love, cat-&-moused it,
half-lidded beaming stupid with love,
the deep-husk laughter after sliding over you in the dark & falling onto the floor.
you captured it at the source, tongue & lips nestling in the sweet rumble at the base of her throat, dragging your teeth up the collarbone & tasting the full roundness of shoulder as her spine rag-dolled, surrendered.

she loved her lover
(you)
slowly
sweet & sour
cat & mouse it's true
she all at once she everything togethered & not unisoned
but muddled &
sometimes cherry-topped
though in her dreams she'd slither, perfect seductress, endless siren
& rarely translate it for her body
you know
she coos, grinning, eyes aslant & bubbling over at you, twisting your arms around her back & tugging them tight,
your mouth yanked into reach, conquered, taken hostage,
she playing at the blackest of widows



"the desire to darken someone has a glow
like the idea of satan, wreathed in sacrificial blood, but sometimes it is your own
& sometimes you feel like darkening yourself or end up there anyway. sometimes
i lay out nasturtiums as pigment over water-softened rocks but
the paints aren't quite right & the petals melt from my bones, loves-me loves-me-not,
& not a single powder blue.
i slink back under the deep earth, loose & fertile, the desire
of a womb floating in magma, the wanting profoundly for shoots, little fingers pushed into the soil, blacker in its warmth than the corners of the universe.
i can grow into you, can lend myself
to the gnarling branches of a cherry tree or oak. i can make myself whole from seeds & shells, sun-bleached, tree, river, & earth. this is the way i make sense.
bring your fair hands, your unsullied fingertips & i will show you
how to plant them far below the deepest roots,
how to find me when you think i've gone.

epiphany #193: the first people i kissed & fucked were blue-eyed & blonde foul-mouthed angels i wanted to darken"





-
"whoever isn't you"




synthetic moments began to undo her sleep:

lethe glares helplessly at her until her furious eyes twist in her tiny head, surprise with an idea, then yanks one hair out at the root & cradles it in her direction – lethe sees & believes, a thing in itself with hairs to be pulled, a thing with a body & a name, to be seen & believed, messiahlike, lunar
lethe can't/don't/won't stop, ellipsing, finally her tiny fingers full of snowy threads & grabbing
more & again
unravelling the loops of
her es disenfranchising
the twin loops
of her elastics as the hair
they clung to
disappears, not seen, not
believed
unseen, unbelieved, messiahlike the dead as the unborn
as the unhaired, the dishaired – the unbodied
as every flake from her snow
angel head, imagined as created,
the possibility of being seen & believed, breathes itself to the floor, hangs shimmering
then brutally tacked to the linoleum, butterfly-winged in every act
of disbodying:

she is mulled
into the corner, trampled into a shrill,      a clutch ,  the disbody
of terror & self-terror, the multiplied
& multiplied disbody, the unselfing bent crooking her arm toward the window, only
the unbirth, the discreation of unhooking the shade to find a darker one underneath & covered in snow & she begins inventing
neurosis she invents neurosis & she & she &
she invents neurosis. &
she listens, the undoing listening which unselfs, which discreates
& then they begin truly to terrify.




"could have made you a mixtape but i curled up on the toilet seat in my brother's brown sweater & chewed my swollen lower lip so the cut wouldn't heal. watched the pieces of my hair fray in the corner on cold tile like a nest for ants or roaches.
it's the kind of day where i screw the crackers & eat nutella straight from the jar.

epiphany #019: pulling out your hair is never as poetic as it sounds"



-
"the human heart unglues, decamps, unroots itself"



the moment she fell in love with you:

when you were always laughing or smiling
when you made barbecue sauce mac & cheese for dinner in a sweaty kitchen while she watched a film with your friends
when she laughed with your mother
when you insisted she drink water in the heat
when she sat on your hands to keep you from picking at scabs
when you said she felt normal to you
when you tasted her lips in a fountain
when you couldn't help touching her
when you admitted you'd envisioned picking her up at the airport
when you apologised for everything that didn't matter
when your smile caught the sunlight while she curled into you on the 114 bus
when you'd look her in the eyes & speak earnestly
when your hands fretted over her waist in the metro
when she offered bits of bagel you ate straight from her fingers
when you read over her shoulder in the library
when she wanted to be your lover at large




she poised herself over the oven, wielding
a rubber scraper, hair knotted carelessly at her nape.
the minutes trudged into an hour
until they collapsed at the edge of their trail
& she flung open the door, unleashing
a vortex of slow baked air
on her pinking cheeks. the pan sizzled on the rack
& her thick mitted hands prized it
out into the fluorescent light,
sliding into the cake's virgin skin
a knife drawn back chocolate specked
but clean. the space settled into
its own warmth as a drowsy cat
in an easy chair & she thought how
to practise grace if you have none,
how to grow up certain
& flawless. she thought how nice
it would be if everything
were memorisable & almost perfect
as the moment the blade reappears
with just a crumb clinging to the serration,
the cake just underbaked,
unhesitant, precise.



"you were everywhere, perfectly
carefully nestled into everything i thought like a motel bible in the reverently opened identical drawer
so i drew you on the first page of every one i found.
you were telling me how your mama said keep your running shoes laced all the time cause all the girls here are just looking to get married
& you were laughing, curling yourself around me, toes tracing islands around my ankle
& i was kissing you down the left side of your jaw, humming & promising myself i'd never get married.
i was promising you & myself, breaking your jaw,
& divesting, undressing the bones of your face
& your jaw discomposes itself, uncrafts & dislocates under my mouth,
the tawdry society bending human animal, the tiny curved instinct
in the lower lip,
the keeping together of laugh lines, the underneath you that becomes you,
the structure of you from my hand
to my head, once, forever
i was promising to you.

epiphany #803: i keep an apple & a pencil in my bag all the time & never unlace my shoes cause all my thoughts are just looking to stay on the run"



-
"here be dragons"




"promise me something?"
she leaned gingerly forward in the broken armchair, her slow smile building itself from the corners of her lips & thrusting toward you the apples of her cheeks. "of course," she answered before the smile had fully flowered, holding up her neck with her right hand, elbow crooked & balancing on her knee.
you licked your lips, hesitated, looked at her again for the love in her dimpling cheek & the fluorescent glitter of near-black eyes.
a please that shook "
please eat more" & that was it & you began instantly to wait for her, leaning for her, hands ready, itching for the prayer of her dark-freckled skin but she
stopped
her body a caution, welling up in a plea
immediately
the question slammed her shoulders flat down, slumped her eyes & stripped them of reflections, drew together her embarrassed & frustrated brows & you tilted further, begging for her face & lifting it tenderly from her chest with two fingers, her cheeks gouged with tear tracks, lip clenched painfully
under a canine to keep them silent & her arms banded around her centre
she felt much too much, she ached too heavy,
throbbed godawful immense
& clumsy, twinged dully undesirable
in too many mirrors –
"please
don't" she began & couldn't finish & looked down & you looked
you looked at her bones wreathed in flesh suddenly appeared since last week & she curling against the hard geometric lines of the upholstery, rocking over the chair's single broken leg & your hands ready, your hands unglued from your mind & across the air separating you & her body, your mouth trailing softly over the top of her head, dropping kisses in her hair & coaxing "hey-
hey.
is it always like this?"
she nodded miserably, a growl of disgust emerging from the depths of her throat. "stupid fucking seesaw body."
you hummed into her hair, shaking your head softly, wedging yourself between her & the chair & gathering her into your arms.
"perfect." you nosed closer to her face & pressed
your mouths together, eyelids whittling shut as your hands roamed the valleys of her new body in the new dark, repeating
& repeating back syllables of love caught from the fluorescence in her eyes.



"but you have to
want a baby sometime,
right?" your lips kissing the words into the air,
careful, all powdered sugar & cream,
silky as sweat in the groove of the back.
"you could still have one, right?
it just doesn't seem
natural
you know?" your fingers crept
to the hem of her skirt, smoothing
out the thin cotton, playing over her bare
skin like blinking holiday lights in a dark
room. she eyed your fingertips & said
nothing, thinking
of the womb that wasn't,
the black hole where nothing human
became or befell or bewitched.
where nothing human bleeds
& the witching hour collapses
into the unnatural silence
in the absence of mothers,
the missing goddesses of
drooping breast & swollen belly
where they unfold the world into itself.
she said nothing
cradling the double nausea of
sterility & excess
with a limp hand on
her stomach until finally
you pressed her fingers & she gasped,
waking from the dream
of your daughter, saying don't worry,
i'm sure once i'm off the pills
a few months i'll be welcoming back
the red tide, the undiluted
potential maternity, please just
don't worry.
she didn't say don't worry
i plead for your daughter
at night she didn't
say please don't
worry i never wanted kids
but i want yours. she didn't say anything
she meant except
don't worry.
don't worry, that's all,
betting on your easy smile,
your tender hands.




"in the places where elephants are born there are humans carved from monsters, not the other way round.  where people by their nature wonder what it is to feel a heart in their teeth.  people are dangerous enough without weapons, without voices for killing.

i am finding out worlds in you, the kind where monsters are not humans first & colours are not derived from colours & light.  it is sometimes the edges that come second & sometimes not, when you begin the forgetting, the distances from here to edge, edge, frightening your deep self.  

someday we are elephants & we know the places to be born & the best places for monsters.  someday we think of things like balancing the earth you know on top of the earth you don't, things that conquer realisation & awareness.  they shred things up that only monsters know are right, & then they become human & they know it is wrong but they are born there, in human fear.

they cry, without humans there are no monsters, without humans there are no edges, they make them all up everything.  without them there is no monster, no map for keeping people scared of what they haven't written down.

epiphany #988: this is where elephants are born."




-
"how to unhinge your nightmares"




she made a cradle of her body, rocked her little
cousin as a seesaw, tiny legs caught up on the hem
of her skirt, on her yellows & greens & purple helixes, on her polka-dotted concern, argyle heart, all the symbols meaning please don't leave or let me go, the stay & read me another story tremble of the lip, the braid my hair before bed eyes, the drooping goodbye shoulders that uncentred unseated uneased her, the terrible fright
of wanting to gather the little girl's body into her arms & never let the angel's feet touch the ground again, of wanting her forever, the miniature fingers growing longer on the palm of her hand & more awful still she could imagine it all
only from the comfort of your arms



twice she counted the number of steps around the complex of office buildings that held the door to her doctor:
perfectly one hundred & sixty seven point five.
she had never before gulped air
by the lungful. she couldn't handle
the answer she knew she would get, was seeking & dreading, was anticipating as the end of the world where it bounded itself at her edges, where when everything expanded to the margins it fled only to her skin & recoiled, where everything exploded in the second she saw the plus sign on the first of three positive home tests, where before she called you she called the doctor without seeing the numbers on the buttons her frantic fingers panicked over,
where lethe grew more tangible with every step, knocking on the insides of her belly & shattering the boundary that made her a distinct being & undoing everything that she had ever perceived.



"i am unpoetic, the toad's face, less than cheek boned. amorphous, like the poem, my feet, both swollen with bacteria because i never wear shoes. i regurgitate a gecko with a blue tail & a green body & it tells me all about the undersides of squat bushes & i feel lonelier than ever. the toad's face. the toad's face. i throw up my medicine which doesn't sound as good as regurgitating but it's what happens. the toad's face. i'm a gecko with the wrong colour tail & all the other geckos hate me. i have a face like a serial murderer, & a blue tail, & red hair & an extra finger on one hand. i wander the streets pretending i look like everyone else. i wander the streets with a cigarette behind my ear, with a gecko's voice in my throat. the toad's face. i hate my cheekbones & my swollen feet & my bloated fish body & i wander the streets & no one recognises my face. i wake up. i am unpoetic. the toad's face. the toad's face.

epiphany #061: to ruin yourself stare in the mirror after you wake in a cold sweat."



-
"if you require diversion"



sometimes the things that come first don't end up coming first, she mused over attending to a loose string on her jacket.
what to do in your absence was baffling
sincerely disturbing
to crave your breath on her neck
the treacherous hot & sweetness of it under your lips a body-entangling poison
you're a fucked up fix
maybe this addiction works for you, she thought, wrapping the string around the first two fingers of her right hand as she grabbed the base at the hem with her left thumb, wincing as she yanked & the tips of her fingers suddenly whitened
with blood loss until the string snapped thinly & her fingers grew back from stone.



her hair grew thinner, she grew longer,
or vice versa
or both
& the winter whitened, whimpered, hushed itself with its last breath & went limp.
her skin whitened along with it, flaked & fell off, dusting the sidewalks behind her with a faint snow. the rest of her grew fine white hairs she promised a glimpse of the sun every few days to see if they'd darken,
maybe grey, maybe she could plant herself on a rooftop & stiffen,
her scapulae growing shoots & hardening into gargoyle wings.



one day, some more blood,
crystals smoked, lit up, held to the lung in a blue alley
with a chipped glass pipe, three tabs
on time, & fucking under the bridge,
the whir of cars & stares fading where there are
stars about her head, &
the stolen puppy whimpering, nose buried
in a pile of jackets, with cans of beer &
the two cans bumping the front of her calves through her coat &
she smiles, thawing over you
or the idea of you but you
sound so beautiful in theory that you couldn't
be any less, & your fingers, haunting her hemlines,
a death in every second of your breaking smile, & you
tragic awaiting the death of her love,
but she won't say, so she says
everything has the potential for
movement so you could
set anything in motion
if you wanted,
one day.



she once dreamed of getting tired, saying no & seating herself, crossing her legs at the ankles & folding her hands in her lap, letting the beginning of an om resonate off her lips
into the air into the atmosphere
where it bounced,
joyous,
rebounding a saviour,
bouncing her out of her little consciousness, it began to throb
out of her body out of her mind it began throb
throbbing
it began precisely to hurt, the long o, moan o of pure hurt
from & within her real self
rebounding outside of it with intense imprecision,
woe painfully not ending
& until her broken out consciousness danced around the world &
she tapped its shoulder demanding more
knowing her little consciousness was no such thing,
a pile of words
the universe, more, that's how much
more
you see?
& the self resists, stretches inward, abashedly belligerent as a child
with a trembling lip & pocketed hands,
kicking rocks
you see
it doesn't have to hurt, simple as that, she thought
& her barely-consciousness
snaps effortlessly
smooth as a bubble
& sharp as a riflecrack
& it is there



to always think
what would someone else think



the shrink asked after lethe.
how's lethe doing, the shrink wondered
aloud, though the shrink wasn't wondering
but asking, though the shrink wasn't
wondering at all, so
she sat silently, wondering about the shrink
wondering about lethe & deciding
that the shrink was more likely
wondering about the ragged hem
of her jeans & the worn soles of her old
sandals. the shrink was more likely
a person with less to offer than any
wandering hobo, who probably
wondered more in a minute than the shrink
allowed in a decade or two, but
wondering is one of those things
that doesn't divert other people when it happens
in your own head, & the shrink repeated,
lackluster, no wonder,
how's lethe doing.
unescaped she traced the floral patterns
on the arm of the couch, nodding, smiling, then
shaking her head, saying,
who is she,
who have you invented
thinking that it's me
or my wonder or needs.
& she shook her head, shouting
i have forgotten all of
the things you were wondering
but remembered that you most likely
weren't wondering them at all
because you don't wonder & at least
you don't wonder about me
& you don't wonder how i wonder
about you or anyone. & she shook,
fingers & head shaking, toes trembling,
screaming, if people are filled
with wonder & you don't wonder
how can you understand me at all.
do you pretend to wonder or
do you take pills every morning
to make it stop. are you a wonder
hunter, are you even slightly human
she shrieked, shaking, shaking,
shouting, filled mad with wonder.
filled wide with hunger.
who is lethe & are you alive
she wondered
but stopped saying.
the shrink nodded, started
scribbling on a yellow legal pad.



"THE MUSIC WE LIKE MAKES US BITTER the music we like and we hold up politicians to our ears and they roar sea inside. the music we like is the same every place but not for people, we like to be bitter in our caves epidermis, we like to be angry.
here we are and we listen to music and we build the bitter sunflowers right to the sky and her theories about kennedy are mostly illogical but they keep us from becoming homicidal; we all kill ourselves one way or another and until then we smile bitter, we accept our ribbons and trophies, we are the new generation of idiots savant.

epiphany #104: interrupting yourself only creates the impression that you have multiple personality disorder (which you might)"




-
"the welcome back that hurts a little"




in moments, usually in books, she dreamed it could even be nice
to do the whole bit, get pregnant & rear a child, to read her poetry in spanish & english, books on tape in mandarin & french.
how much knowledge she could give another creature to drink in
how wonderful it would be to sit for hours & read to her own creation
to have a permanent first audience for every new poem
creations for her creation, at a shrine for this primary, frighteningly bodily new manifestation of her
how terrifying the power & responsibility
she gazed at her stomach, vaguely horrified. she imagined that body, ballooning her arms imprecisely & shuddering with distaste.

but she wondered what she might produce,
wondered what crippling neuroses she might pass on
wondered if she could be a parent to be proud of, if she'd leave the child something beautiful, if she could help create someone worth loving
but probably
probably not, she decided



she dreamed of heading to africa & fostering orphaned animals for a year,
maybe two,
researching, loving, creating,
writing & rewriting by hand in endless notebooks
so she'd be sure she loved every word
to death
to its miserably, criminally ever-joyous inclusion
somewhere else her pen might drop it
so she'd come back with the most beautiful thing she could have created


she dreamed of heading to africa to bleed dry,
to grow full & warm,
to brew her bush baby in the deep savannah
in the womb of the world so
she could trust she'd craft the purest tangle headed
string limbed miracle, awash in the emphatic incense
of wood fire caught in the down of round
cheeks, snagged in a dimple or the cave above
the lobes. she breathed the essence of
your maybe child until it laid siege
to every pore, without the venomous desire
plaguing main street & wall street &
every other corner store,
without the selfish toxins
of entitlement & expectation, without
the lessons of social contracts
where smiles become bargaining chips
& withholding kindness becomes
business. she breathed never
neglected laughter, the pulse of opening
arms, the anticipation of shared
adventure. she breathed a love
that didn't know to quit, the light
of a star that broke only
when she stopped looking.
she dreamed of your crooked smile
enjoying the tiny face of a new being
& she panicked,
eyes burning with tears, searching
the aisle markers for words that blurred,
grew foreign as soon as she read them,
& as the purple basket slipped
from her fingers she turned,
clamping her arms about her stomach,
pacing away from the cans rolling
toward the stiff bank of freezers.
as she dry heaved out in the parking lot she
realised that her favourite solution
was to back away
slowly until she could run.



"you are my full ghost
carefully understood & preserved
in ink, the miracle of your existence
like green argyle upholstery & candygrams
the moment you receive them
from a stranger & contemplate joy
or dread. you are important to me
like the things people keep on
their windowsills for aliens to see
from their ufos. the full round of you
undoes me – you the quaint – you
the huge floppy ears of a small dog –
the shy boyish sun's brilliance, the mountain ranges
of van gogh's impasto. you the impossible
love, the bundle of human history,
leaving & returning the hero & leaving
to be found again. you are important
to me, you my charming heavy ghost with
fingers at my hipbones, hello again, you.

epiphany #425: i'm sorry for the love letters & i'm sorry for always waiting"



-
"how to create possibility"



ambiguity
she thought
certainly has purpose
on the grey planet maybe nothing gets done
maybe what gets done is art
& only art

like dreaming of the people you could be making into breathing beings
people you could make real
people who feel colours & wear bracelets
who really love the idea of bullfighting but can't stomach it
or people you could drown in tequila
people you could starve to death & never feel a thing
people whose existence could be crushed with less than a thought
those people, unbreathed, unlived, those are art
unrealised,
neglected



there are moments
she has moments
too fleeting to worry over



she stirred herself into the cold
panic of the could be maybe baby,
churning over the perhaps of its existence & loss
in a less than breath, the conceivable
conception of the helix headed
tree child she might make & never know,
the egg plus one
full threatened in the womb
with hunger, with her inability
to make herself matter
in her own mind,
with the uncaring unselfing
instinct toward the ache
for aches, the necessary ill
palette deepening the face,
creating worry outside
the caves it calls home.
the need to feel alone
which builds & decimates
with the same calloused hands.



clutched around the middle, she stared
at the computer for an hour before
touching the keyboard. its letters
screaming their own names drowned
her voice somewhere in the screen's crystals
of light. the semi students
chattered in the beyond, twirling hair
around their squirrel fingers,
perfectly tapping away, content,
robotic in intent & execution.
& it diseased. suddenly
she stood, bounded to the bathroom
gasped at the door & flung herself inside
a stall, sweeping the hair from her neck
& locking the door, bent over with
relief spreading as her throat opened up
& spilled into the toilet. finally she breathed,
wiped her mouth & smiled into the mirror,
heavy lettered & poisonous, floated back
to her stool, sat down & started typing.



"lethe stampedes five years down the stairs, queenly dressed with hair bow she loves & she looks lovely.

epiphany #277: we shop secondhand but all our words are secondhand & life's enough"



-
"how to greet a dead fish"



she ignored the pizza shimmering with grease in front of her, contemplating the sickness of the indoor
fountain, the pet goldfish.
the gleaming unaware
unwary existence of sunlight filtered
through the sieve of domed atria,
the artificial velvet
of smooth rocks never polished
by free tide, never glossed over by the moon, the freckled
purity that haunts skin never purpled by the purple sun
of the equator in late july.



"watch out
dead bird"
someone sad
said from a group several paces
before her on the same trail & for twenty minutes
she stared, held a vigil for a bluejay
when she should have been looking for a crow
& she started back up the mountain
grown heavier with the soul
of the missing blackbird. she thought birds
must have only one life
or otherwise they spend their whole existence fighting to fly
only to figure out their cloud bodies will lose the sky
as soon as this life ends. no one
could bear to live again
after that.




"we strap metal blades to our feet, thought let's skate on this frozen water, before us no one remembered to be suicidal.  we cut patterns in the ice and they are not beautiful. they are not beautiful at all.  like the scars on the tops of my feet they are all wrong and require stitches but i am lying.
there is deep deep mud in this lake not wet because it's solid through. but we still call it a lake and we still cut patterns in its ice all wrong.
we cut patterns in the ice like trying to swim closer to perfect breathing seaweed except we don't get very far since we're just pretending, actors at wanting to die.
we don't get very far since we're barefoot without blades and we try to find scars in the right places.

epiphany #220: when the lake is lonely frozen we can reach out forever with our hands and not touch any fish. we can reach out and never touch any fish at all."



-
"you can dream your own death"



the shrink wondered about you
but didn't ask



"THE SUN DOESN'T SET WHEN IT'S
SNOWING, I BEG IN T O  F ALL A
WAY, IT IS THIS ABOUT ME THAT YOU
ONLY SEE WHEN I'M SLEEPING

FALLEN LEAVES ARE NOT THE
RESULT OF YOUR FUCKED-UP LOVE
(AUTUMN HAPPENS WHETHER
OR NOT YOUR HEART IS BROKEN)

I AM NOT ALWAYS SLEEPING AND IT
DOESN'T SNOW ALL YEAR, IF YOU
LOVE ME IT IS BECAUSE YOU ALSO WANT
TO KNOW ME WHEN MY EYES ARE OPEN

epiphany #719: most dreams should never come true."