When I woke up this morning, no one was sure I would make it through the day

Not me, not the pillows holding my head, not the sticks of incense
mourning their possible uselessness in my absence from this world

I rose from my bed a little shriveled arm cracked free from a cast

an ear cut from a face and thrown to the wind

a dislocated shoulder of impossible coordinates

At 11 I made coffee
At 4 I made an attempt to heal

At 6 I cried until my body was waterless

At 10 I sat on the floor of the shower watched soap
circle the drain while the water turned my skin red 

At 10:30 I put clothes on hangers and picked up pieces
of my heart and hung them to dry on the hooks that hold my earrings

At 11 the snow had piled up to my window on the second
floor, so I imagined myself within an igloo and made friends with my body

At midnight, the best thing: the hanging pieces of my heart
came together to beat once more

Between midnight and the moment of sleep, after the candles
were blown out and the only light was the moon and streetlights
reflecting off the snow and into my window to lie
across my floor, I thought I heard you whisper my name

but it was only the frost on the window melting from my heat.

Must we say goodbye with silence? 

What Is Left

It is only a small fear that burrows into the marrow of my bones

small like a black hole or the splinter in my heart

Seeking shelter or maybe sustenance, this parasite

suckles at loss and wanders through my body an orphan

To say the words in the dark that I cannot say in the light:

I am finished

What this means is that the chinaware of my heart has stopped

collecting dust and has shattered and rains on me wherever I go

Disregard the blood, it’s just a part of the process now

in fact, if you could consider it the red pen edits on this page
you might not find it so alarming.

The bones of my eyes are salt-sanded and fine.
They wait for you to excavate them.

They hold a meaning in their hollows, like a song in a flute,
like a message in a bottle.

This morning, breath rising through the thin air of winter’s sigh

I walked by a thousand smiles and every single one shook my heart

I swear the salt and ice beneath my feet whispered your name.

I will live again, but you won’t recognize me.

And maybe that will be our salvation. 

If I've killed one man, I've killed two--

And then we were finished. As if it never began. Or, as if it were yet to.

These are not real people you are speaking with. They are avatars of bank tellers and grocery clerks

They are fine replications, but they are not your friends.

Those you’ve begged for at the door like a dog, they are not good for you.

You are getting soft with souls.

When you lie down to sleep, remember you are not alone.

The weight of flesh from everyone who has ever lain

next to you has sunken into your mattress

like so many snake skins hanging on the wall.  

Like so many notches on the bedpost.

The numens who carve their names into your skull as you sleep

slip back into their place on the bookshelf when your eyes twitch open

and you wake with skin under your fingernails

We dare not say ghosts for waking the skeletons in the closet.

We dare not say goodnight for fear of who will speak back.

We dare not turn on the light for fear of seeing our own reflection

Resplendent with sweat and sex and totalitarian cheekbones.

 

At The End of The World We Fell in Love with Silhouettes

i keep cross-threading the light bulbs
while standing on piles of dirty laundry
rubbing my knuckles raw against the spackles

the smell of my memory is in these walls
(when i punched into pink fiberglass i saw my father’s smile)

the wallpaper is yellowed with our stares

the silverware is tinted with newsprint

clean isn’t clean ............it’s dissolution

lye eats away the layers of dirt and skin

heat activates the bleach
i burn my hands piling in the whites
chlorine steams up the basement window

make sure you store the glasses upside down in the cabinet
and hand wash the wineglasses so the soap doesn’t stain

drink this in remembrance of me

i made you a sweater from the lint in the trap
it was the shade of moon craters

i have been trying and trying and trying to clean out the attic

if i don’t get it done before the roof blows off will you forgive me the
many times your name has been scratched off and rewritten on the walls?

anything will do

i did

Will be done

i wrote my name under the welcome mat with the spare key

as it is in Heaven

i’ll leave the tea but take the kettle
i’ll leave the salt but take the pepper

don’t forget to look out the window on clear
mornings and count the seagulls flying inland

How I Say I Love You These Days

Why we come to coffee shops on Saturday mornings is beyond me. We both hate it. I keep looking for an outlet on this brick wall I say. Is that supposed to be a metaphor? you say, because we have been fighting. This is me gaining my composure I say, and paste a lipstick smile on my face. I flash the paper I am reading flat across my lap in a loud wrinkle. You are like that woman who got breast implants that exploded from her chest as the air pressure in the plane compartment changed. No, you’re not even the woman. You’re the implants. Changing and breaking things. you say, although the arid tone of your voice has a little more water in it. Wasn’t the pressure changing because the plane was going down? Wouldn’t she have died anyway? I ask in mock sincerity. You answer by jamming a toothpick into your teeth pointedly because you know it makes me feel like my fingernails are being peeled back. You are like the small men in my dreams who lived underground under that tree and who mined for rocks. They were neither good nor evil, but they were ignorant as fuck. I say this, even though it is not my normal tone. I am trying on new things, making new faces in the mirror. You make a sound like a car backfiring and say: that was Fraggle Rock. God, not even your dreams are original. (I am not crestfallen because I am remembering the fight we had years ago in which I said or you said, in response to a real complaint, a line from a song that was playing. The line had just been sung. The fight limped on after that, because how can you fight for real when you are laughing?) Is this original? I say and throw my coffee in your face. You unflinchingly reply: The motion is not, though it’s usually a martini or something classier than coffee from a coffee chain. Why do you like this place? I answer by coughing without covering my mouth, which you hate because you think I am like a rat carrying the bubonic plague, and because you think the saliva from my cough carries germs that the saliva from my kisses doesn’t carry, and because you blame me for every cold you have ever had. Wet t-shirt contest you say, even though this is not your style at all, (now we are just posturing) and throw the cream from the metal container marked “The Cream” down the front of my dress. This is a dress I say, disgusted with your lack of attention to detail, and continue: you are like that preacher who embezzled sex from all those prostitutes. I don’t say “homophobic” or “male prostitutes” because the situation is way more complex than that. You mean he didn’t pay them? You ask, stunned by the lack of protestant respect for work ethic. Yep. Big scandal. Big sandal you say, and slap my soggy backside with the bottom of your flip flop. That is a flip flop I say, rolling my eyes until the sides of them hurt. Then we go home and paint the entire outside of the house a different color than it had been, but only by two shades because we laugh behind our blinds at the thought of our neighbors trying to figure out if the color has changed, or if they had just never really looked at it.  We imagine their conversations with each other full of pleasantries and ellipses. We show up at the block party dressed as Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love even though you are taller and broader and better looking and I am a brunette and not even close to drug-skinny, and even though it is not a costume party. It is an excuse to wear flannel and combat boots and plastic heels and a nightgown as a dress. We are ageless in our mirth. It goes without saying that the love we make has never been made before. The scale of our pleasure has never been imagined, it is wider in its range than the human ear can hear, and more exact than the tiny particles in the paint of a pointillist painter’s depiction of a point. This is how we burn to ash, in the gaze that never breaks, no matter how much the earth’s horizon curves in the distance between us. I half believe the earth is flat because I can feel your eyes even now.

This Is How It Will Be (a love story)

                                  

Other people had already set the table, so we wandered out to see about the yard. There was a plot of dandelions that had puffed out their seeds. The day was still, so we began blowing on them and flapping our arms to create wind until we were dizzy. A man who had been standing like a tree, said, the dandelion blowers are over there and motioned to a field of kids, tall as corn, somberly blowing the fluff to the ground. He shook his head. Maybe you can do something about it, I am busy pretending to be this tree here, so when the rest of the world peers in from their living rooms, they won’t know we’ve killed off all the bees. He snarled his barkpocked face in a knob and said, child labor. It’s disgusting. No one said anything about wishes.

I couldn’t remember the beginning of things. Adrift, bereft, you repeated, fingering the place on your rumpled coat where a button had been. It was you said, made from the wooden teeth of George Washington. Carver? I said. I don’t know who carved it you said. I tried to remember who GW was, if it wasn’t Carver, and could only think of the white heads of dead flowers in the hands of children.

Where are we going I wanted to say, but the question came out like this: Going where we are, and the question mark caught in the space between my teeth, so we walked until we got back to where it all began.

What if our names aren’t on the list? You ask, nervous and itchy. I scrape my nails against your back to plot our location. Ah, right there, you say, (you are wrong, we are over here I say and move my finger lightly over your kidney) but really, what if our names are not on the list? We burned off our fingerprints long ago. No, they melted I say, long enough ago to be our grandfather clock. In the blizzard of 15? you ask, shaking off the rain. No, remember? in the fires of 20, I say. Our faces melt in the acid falling from the sky, but we are bone-close and I love the smile of your skeleton.

We click into the house finally, our soggy bones sticking from the humidity. Dinner is still being made. The children are drunk on dandelion wine (what did you think was going to happen, making them work all those hours and with only one song playing over and over again, the national fucking anthem says a youngish woman to an oldish man. They have no hope she says, propping a sloppy 7 year old up against a rubber plant which he wraps his arms around and says he loves). Can we help? We ask, opening and closing our fleshless hands to stretch our tendons.  (will we scare the children? we say to each other, and then chatter our teeth in a thousand rough guffaws. They have seen worse you say, tenderly touching my cheekbone).

I wear the phalanx of your smallest finger around my neckless spine. You have carved my new name into your rib right above your missing rib.

Now that we don’t have flesh, it is like the garden of Eden again. We are shameless and thin, and we can talk to animals through the teeth marks they leave on our femurs and clavicles. Also, you point out one day while we are sneaking into abandoned malls and trying on clothes like hangers, we can travel anywhere, and no one will know we are from where we are from. Where we are from slips through your teeth like oil.

The word feels like a coin with so much dirt stuck to it that it jams up the machine, when all you wanted was a rubber ball to bounce or stuffed animal to smooth, or a plastic gem-stoned ring to wear: something to pass the time, something to help you remember where you’ve been.

Where we have been we remember in shivers at night, while we rename the revised constellations. Orion has lost most of his belt, and the Pleiades are down to only five sisters. Little bear is gone, and Ursa’s low growl has become a bed for our bones, which are grinding down faster now that the oxygen is gone. The only thing that makes us sad is that the dandelion children never got to grow up. As for us, we lie in pile of tangled parts, and, when we are a pile of dust, we say excitedly as we fall asleep, we will REALLY be able to travel. Even beyond this world I say. And you nod in a sort of shimmering of particles against slants of light from the shadowy moon, whose long work is almost done.

I traveled so long. So long. Over winding roads that kept abruptly ending at roadblocks. Get out. Climb over. Somehow, in the next scene, which always appeared as a continuation without any transition as is the case in dreams, I was again in my shitty car, clunking towards an uncertain destination. When I arrived he was in a tiny garden. The dirt was loamy and dark, and still somehow moist. His sleeves were rolled up mid-forearm. He was tanned by sun and earth, a dark brown of health and deliberation. He was uprooting plants. Small, square root systems, dripping with dark ground sprouted green leaves, small and bright. He was laying the uprooted plants carefully to one side of the garden. He did this until there was nothing left in the garden but the soil. We talked. I don’t remember what was said. I realized foolishly, staring at the small green, still living but disconnected plants, I had traveled all this way to see a stretch of dirt and clay, our uprooted garden. I woke like a kid from a nightmare. Heartbeat in my throat. I started the day with muddy coffee and a freedom I had never felt before.

In your wake the beads of the abacus fall like apple blossom petals. This world is too heavy to bear with moth wings, to disparate to hold together with cobwebs but this hope is too beautiful to relinquish. I see the cut of my cheekbone in its mother-of-pearl sheen. Treasured set of combs, I have cut off all my hair.