Yard Sale Organs

In summer I shed something

Watch over my remains, will you, as I step
from my reeling body, as I prepare to land, eyes open,
heart in a plastic cup rattling on the tray table, skidding
in springtime sleet with my hair tied in tangles
to the overhead oxygen mask — I’ve killed myself
so many times. Now, suddenly, I know how to protect myself.
Pocket knife against the stag, a necessary stake-out,
the least I can do for the kid who must reincarnate, reincarnate.
What I share with them now is pain, we eat it fast like pancakes,
revel in it — we know things now. I feel myself dying, again.
Outside it’s all light like lemon juice. Sour. Between the stag’s ears
it’s all soft velvet, it makes me wonder if the bone is soft, too,
plush and porous, and you, hacking out a clearing,
with a deer skull hanging over your fireplace at home, burning
rocking horse remains and me. It seems I’ve been broken enough
I’ve learned to love the destroyer. It seems you’ve eaten enough bones
to know they don’t nourish.

Something is Understood

Outside the Dollhouse

In the cooling air your face cracks open
like a ceramic dish; you are insane, hungry, harmful,
the knife through the water: full of want, eluded.
For months you have not seen it, time
like discarded flesh draped through your forearms.
You begin to remember the girl with the comb, who
read of green glass hotels and deserts that housed
a resurrected Arc, no sea, and you, still breaking, still
treading water and wondering — who are we, to house
so much blood? When you bleed it is irregular, spotted, too
thin. If you pared back enough of your body you know
there’d be a marrow of meaning, somewhere, and a sparrow,
whistling, wild with want. You know your bones would swipe
the hair from your forehead with a mother’s touch.
You have no more costumes to wear. No more people
to fool. You are getting tired of fooling yourself.

Proof of life

It is All Half Lights*

The androgynous mind sleeps, it is
halting/halted, faulting/faulted —
C fears she might never know if she likes O,
Ever-rageful, stamping out calm like a boot
over mellow ashes, while lamp light pools sick and yellow
over someone else’s lawn, and C feels her throat:
purple, clotted. When C steps on the grass, nobody
congratulates her. Not even O, for all her novelty, and
sometimes, when C stands on tiptoe in that hall
of mirrors, she really can see her final figure,
the final girl where the reflections cease.
That final girl is O, of course. C fears her face
will never be her own, instead every feature
she has ever hated, every feature she has ever
loved — it is too dark, in the sky, and the vein
is embedded in too much skin, and
the bird’s throat too thick.

Before Memorial Day

Weaver’s Way

And the ceilings are high, voices echo from two rooms over
among arches and paneling. Dark water. A river, green
and lapping in a distant country in which I’ve never stepped foot —

I feel sand. Smooth like clay, fine grain coating my ankles.
I feel eyes on my back now, two rooms over, detached
from the conversation, so reticent, as if I could never know

In Italy I learn things that I did not learn

In early spring I see six unfinished statues lined up
along a hall, carved apostles for an aging priest.
What is it to be the artist and die
before your patron ever could, your last days littered
with drops of plaster kissing your face, to die before
they could scoop out the crisp green olives from the chalices,
splay them across your victory? As the apostle, you stare piously
at your viewer and renounce love. As religion, you keep your gates
shut tight. In death you view life as a series of small deaths:
aggregate, confusing. Gold dots the frame of your vision, you can’t
tell if you’re falling up or down, a snake that you painted
bites you in a place where you do not want to be bitten.
Hodge-podged animals direct you to heaven & hell
as a group of phone-less, new people look on.

Mary & Joanna

Girls in primary smock dresses with piping stoop
over frogs at a man-made pond. One is obedient, reticent — the other
flirts with fate. They both know one of them will suffer
& yearn for it. Suffering can pool, do you remember,
walled up inside a stone head, pushing
against its cold, grainy container. I write & my children
stand behind me, face the opposite direction, tend
to one lamb each. They catch innocence like butterflies
and devein every wing. One will grow
strong, kind, and the other, despite my bestest
efforts, will turn mean. I want to bite a fox leg, just to feel
the give of the meat around the bone. I want to catch a fish
with my bare hands & then let it go. Do I write it as though
it is something to be understood?

Inherited

For somewhere, there’s a house that’s burning.
An old man rambles how after a hard day of work the first thing
they gifted the farmers was a potato like a gnarled fist.
The boy on the red-stitched rug pauses, notes the
pause, says I love that. To the enthusiasm and never the
suffering. Earlier in the day the lights direct traffic. The boy is
walking because it’s green because it says so.
Down the street there’s a song playing on the old man’s radio
about the brine at the bottom of olive jars.
How the lover used to laugh when the loved one drank it.
It makes the old man want to eat his own hand.
The boy thinks one day he will live in Italy, in a vaguely religious
castle. He thinks the moon will droop like hot brie cheese, he thinks
he will find a broad-faced man to love in Italy, that they will
pierce thin tubes into each other’s arms and ping blood to one another
like a fetishized donation or the ultimate show
of affection. The boy is sitting in the center row of the
Exhibition theater, now. Third row, below the lightbox.
A broad-faced man bows at him and then the cast slinks
backstage, curtain rippling like black velvet soil
over the fists of potatoes.

Northeast Regional

Absence

Before you were the body with the medicine you were
decomposing (composed), crusted gelatin in the sun.
Before you were hunter/hunted, a rounded rodent in a liminal
forest, you cried and your wail sounded animalistic.
You threaded wires through your fingers, ate sunflower seeds
from clouded plastic bags, pet a blonde dog, swallowed a clear
pink bead. Lucy is in the Sky with Diamonds as long as your cousin
plays the right colored notes on Guitar Hero. Years down the line,
you will profess your love for the eighties on a cobbled street
in Antigua, you will learn that it was all about drugs, all of it.
Oh, how you’ll freeze for a moment, despite your being too old
to be scared by psychedelics. There’s a flutter of hands as the people
who you claim don’t know you flock to your aid. Faces in a gray,
hazy dark. You are crumpled, hard and unyielding flesh
on a faux-tiled floor. Then sound is minced out of you
at the river, early in the night-morning, while a man with a guitar
walks by. You thought he’d clock your pain. Write a ballad, write
something. It is always you who writes. You whose voice floats
into the river like a light boat that still observes gravity. Plunks silently
into the glass water. Soars downstream.

Siren

Blood Gone Red

In September there is an edge of things that returns. Yet you feel
the film lift, dissolve, like the clear liquid of an egg or
the shell, pulled back and discarded. You are no longer
the red goat, no longer unrecognizable to your mother,
you return home and your homecoming
is acknowledged. In God’s hot car, the windows slide
like the reel of an old projector, show you a New
Hampshire highway and let in some pine-spiked air.
Before life started you used to live in the Pennsylvania woods
and trace the veins of leaves onto scrap paper, you used to jump
from couch to futon in the yellow living room and sing
reggae, ignore the red at the intersection
near your grandmother’s house and feel shame
when your sister snitched you out. Now, when you reach
away from yourself, you don’t feel the embryo of yourself
but air, space, a puppet who has crossed some line, and now
you are alive, blood as red as the goat child, blood
as red as anyone else’s, and your skin may be wood and
your form like a chess piece but you can hurt people now.
You can move diagonally or forward, to the side. You can
wrap fairy lights around your neck like an awful necklace and it
will allure someone, they will follow you and translate things for you
that ought not be translated. You will forget about the letters you wrote,
the stamps you never bought. You will forget that people
aren’t puppets, that you could never utter those words, no, you
could never phrase it all quite right, could not send them
to the puppeteer. God’s hot car sails
along the northeast coast of a stolen land, streaked and
yellowing with light trails like dying fireflies. In your palm you press
fingernails into flesh, like a doctor who checks the pulses
of things.

Blood Song

Verona

Been thinking a lot about orange and blue.
Sun on brick and cerulean skies. How you’d see it
and from what vantage point. It’s feeling like
Romeo and Juliet, these days, all wilting iris petals,

damp scent of moss in the air, twilight, & I can feel
love waning, just like those two heady imbeciles,
clutching poison and knives and each other’s hands.
Your hand was always cold in mine. It was like

Gatsby

To see dawn’s red face, angry against a brooding
horizon. Your dowdy eyes, your tears: pearly,
lactic. Two fingers pressed to the roof
of your mouth, the prickle and the purge. I slice
oranges one after the other and barely glean
the juice from each half. Blade and butcher’s block, carrot fingers.
To cut the kitchen knife like the rest of them.

And I, I tell you—the panic like static, white noise
filling the jester’s box in my collarbone. The parking lot
outside the stir-fry joint where I cried thinking of nooses
and my friends fought fifteen feet away about their breaking
relationship. I’ve seen love shatter before it was built (a tale fed to me
like milk). I’ve seen the credits of the ballet roll and not worked up
a single tear. The terminally ill patient and the dying dog.
Double-o-seven. And I’ll cuff you over the ear, if you give me
a shot. Stand within range. Put down the niceties
and metric-measured tonalities and say it:
I never loved you. How could I?

On Creating Demons

A chicken crows evening in a hideaway hen–
house, songs of remembering and choosing.
I left my vitality, once, in the arm
of your apartment, a crooked yellow elbow. Do you remember?

Do you remember the sun? How it used to shine lucid and lemon,
distorted rectangles over honeyed hardwood,
and your cooing that all would pass. Edelweiss
and a stinging certainty that feelings stick