(I will sew you into my thighs and crochet my eyes across your biceps)

Here is a feeling that I struggle with: the need to have my suffering acknowledged. It is what makes me consider what it would be like if you killed yourself in the shower, and I had to tell people.

I do not want to be appropriated. My day did not go as planned. I poured myself into him. I dripped liquid.

The scarf is almost finished I will sew you into my thighs and crochet my eyes across your biceps. I hold my fingers in the flames until my flesh drips onto your flesh.

I smash my face into your face. My forehead molds to your cheek. Colors explode out of the canvas, textures and slipstreams bursting bright light.




Dear,

In another life I will marry you. I will hold your shaking hands until we sleep.

(I cling to the seat and scream lava)

Swinging, my childhood friend and I jump-- and land in Mars. My younger brother was allowed to come, but only sometimes.

I have rearranged the plants. The lamp survived the guests. The chemical-free deodorant was inordinately expensive, though the organic walnuts cost less than in comparable stores.

Tomorrow I will buy new pants. I will care about where they were made and how but in the end I will probably buy the pair that's cheapest. That morality should be anything but easy. The old wizard nods, winks, evaporates into the night.

Porcupine quills protrude from the vase shaped by his clay-slicked hands. He prepares at night, for the morning.

If I forget what I have written it's because he has sliced through his fingernail with the bread knife. The tires list threateningly toward the couch; I cling to the seat and scream lava.

She walked down the street, carefully, and into the alley. Every morning at least three rats and one man leering at her, keys slipped between her fingers like brass knuckles at her side. 

Once a man followed her through an empty park at night. He advanced and she said, NO over her shoulder, meaning it, NO. She walked faster but not so fast as for him to think she was scared and she flexed her fists but not so much that he would anticipate the threat and she tried to emanate this energy from her body if you touch me I will destroy you.

Eventually he gave up and she walked back home and after taking off her coat and pouring boiling water into a mug she stood by the kitchen counter staring lifting the tea bag in and out of the water.

(I will weave my hurt into these yarns and my gratitude and joy)

Certainly I have reason to be perturbed. I am suckling a barren popsicle stick and he is making bear noises in the kitchen. He lifts his knees and holds his fingers up like claws.

Certainly there are infinite ways of becoming new. There is a bookstore with dramatic literary titles mashed with architectural concepts I will go. I will read until I am stuffed to overflowing with other people's lives. I will celebrate theirs as my own and feel the needles slithering through flesh. Ours is a bond made by the veins of our hands.

I have flipped the popsicle stick from my tongue to the futon beneath me. The likelihood is high that a gnat has just flown into my mouth. I am remaining calm.

I delight in the give of the keys beneath me, concavities cleaving to fingertips. I really should be brushing my teeth.

It is time,
she said,
to do nothing.

I breathe. God is golden clouds and I am easing back into them, hugged by wool and the faint smell of sheep. I hear bleating, see the wide green and the crags and the hooves, meandering toward grazing and streams.

I am called back by the plant and the book on the wooden apple crate propped beside the doorway. Though there is no door, though perhaps it is more realistically, resplendently, a way.

I have gotten off track. Skeins unwind as my fingertips grow red, needles arcing over and over again into flesh. I will weave my hurt into these yarns and my gratitude and joy. You will wear it round your neck for seasons. It is a token of the words I cannot say because they are not words anyone has yet said and still I believe it exists, somewhere: the way of saying it.

You're a genius all the time. Be sure of it. Find your family and hold their hands as the lightning strikes. Drenched in rainwater and fingernails charred, your shoulders brush, warming the place where you stand.

The movie made him cry and then I cried not because of the movie but because of the part in the movie which made him cry, which would have made me cry had I not been crying because he was crying at the part of the movie that would, otherwise, have made me cry.

(It is a story I tell myself that I need constant love)

It is a story I tell myself that I need constant love.

We are blackened air-domes bubbling underwater. We pop to the surface gasping. You drag me down hard by the ankle. I kick at your face and collapse onto your chest, coming.

We drape in flannel sheets, bare legs stretching from beneath the covers. I roll to my side. You stand up and wipe yourself with an old shirt.

I close my eyes and trace fingers across her lower spine. She is damp with sweat. I feather my chin along her stomach. My eyes lift to her cheekbones, dark hair curled against her temples.

He throws me to my back and I spread my knees and the wind blows out the candle.


He cannot stop cleaning. My intestines are impregnable. Try. Make me.



I don't want to write I don't want to write I don't want to write I have finally clipped my nails. I'd been meaning to since Christmas.

He keeps his wallet in a plastic bag because the zipper has broken. My words are your interpretation. My words are ivy clutching yellowed lattice. I once was a romantic.

Your eyes are becoming my eyes but only sometimes. At the same time I am growing more willing to let you see. I light a candle by flipping a switch; battery-powered flames.

By its flickering light I am knitting a scarf. She is made of a sweater, all stitched together with different colored threads. My words are the needle and the erasement.

(Africa)

A whole tubful of water down the drain and yes people are thirsty in Africa. Can we stop pitying Africa long enough to acknowledge that it's full of some great people and some shitty people just like everywhere and meanwhile elementary schoolers are being shot and we lament lament lament and never talk about the fact that kids die every day in Africa.

What I mean to say is that it matters every day. Today it matters just as much as it does tomorrow and four days ago. My heart squeezes squeezes works to keep, as their faces play across the screen hung from the ceiling while I run and go nowhere on a conveyor belt that goes nowhere it is surreal, blood pumping through.

What I mean to say is that it matters everywhere. What I mean to say is that love is important. I should love a man if he dedicated his life, the whole of it, to loving.




I have straightened the apartment, except for the dishes. This seems to be the way of it. It is growing late and my hair is wet and I am typing on someone else's computer. I will lie down soon, on the mattress, and my hair will be wet on the pillow and when I wake up the fabric and my cheek, whichever one I was lying on, will be damp. 


Once I awoke with twigs in my hair. Once they grew into a bird's nest. Pigeons fought there. I screamed, and plunged my head into the lake. Bloated feathers floated to the surface as I drowned. I dined on marsh grasses and green foam bubbling up from the sea.


Contort me blue crowels hammer ducts slamming into alpine poles and cumming. Crist my limbs and saw through half of my torso. Leave the rest to the birds.

(here is the only thing I can know)

Here is the only thing I can know: What I am experiencing, right now, in this moment.

Even that can be somewhat nebulous.


Right now there is a man wearing a flat brim hat that says "hustle". There is another man bent over tomato soup, toast, fried plantains. Still another man bows to me with makeup smeared across his face. Clothing dries on the rack. I finger a piece of plantain between my teeth. I have started flossing again.

A small boy is rolled into an Oriental rug. Men make jokes about molesting children. My mind works to determine if their tongues tip their cheeks.

What is my moral prerogative. There is a large hole in the right knee of my sweat pants, and also the left cheek. I am talking about my butt on public television.

We cut snowflakes out of construction paper. He coughs. We make popcorn in a paper bag in the microwave. His parents will ship us a tree.

Doesn't that require a lot of energy? Constantly I am assessing some thing versus another. Ecology versus Christmas spirit. I stand with both, though some days for one or the other.

(I bite liquid and own your flesh)

Vodka takes to my veins. I eat grapes, roasted zucchini, chunks of ginger. I hold your face in my hands and I kiss it, squeezing. We were born from spiderwebs and the foam on the sea. Rivulets. Eddies.

Remember when we were walking. Stopped on bridge stone muck beneath our feet. Egrets once stepped here. Soon the waters will rise, footprints dissolve, mud fill our boots. They will take four days to dry on the cabin's porch. Even soaking in sunlight.

You ready the vapor. I hang scarves from the sofa, tuck plants into jars. I am not wearing underwear.

I am the believer. Vodka soaks through my canines. I bite liquid and own your flesh, the soft skin on the inside of arms.

I fell once, into the river. I had crossed four times with shaking success, heart spilling through my teeth, muscles clenching. Three feet from the bank the slipping, first the branch then body submerging, currents pack soaking through. I walked six miles to camp, laden with fishes.