You’re from the cornfields, I tease, but not really. Your parents, professors at U of Illinois, both versed in the theories of music, both of them concert pianists. They play hushed, reverent duets

I grew up in grass but here / everything is bladeless, // hair thinned past feathers, / sheets slick enough to grease a boar.

We walk to the edge of the continent / and there in the sand I turn to her and say, / look,
this is where I buried myself 

 Most nights we stayed behind, Tweety Bird / pajama shirts stretched over our knees, waist-length hair soaking / our backs as we sat on the floor and thumbed glossy 10mm prints.

I’m going out
to snag a man. 

my parents taught me to say ‘surrender’
in a dozen foreign languages.

the night of the attack

mother did you hear them
they had tongues like lightning
and forked through the forest
shooting the heads off sparrows.

mother did you see their
bonfires

Subtraction, division,

rabbit bones, rabbit lives

sometimes i wake up in empty fields, waiting for the aliens to take me. they haven’t yet,  but any day now, i’m sure.

And somehow I’m supposed to get dressed in the morning / when most days arrive like a gold chain tangled in black chest hair.

 Please, I need those thick markers from the craft store, you know, the ones that color far away from each other; you turn the corner into golden golden golden any night

You will etch your name in the most lunar dust. This world / may be large enough for none of us, saddest darling.

 It’s simple, really. / You, like the other yous / are gone,            returned to the God of metals.

After being hospitalized in 1968 / for an aortic aneurysm, Rothko’s doctor / prescribed that he only paint and draw / on mediums less than three feet tall.

And what is essential for me to believe is that / the plants themselves were changed by Joan, / that bathing with her in the light and fragrance

spirits in the trees / hush love hush love / go’on fly home

 how you came with shadows, / but not darkness, like the other person I love, / the type of darkness that lays like a quilt.

It’s bronzy August and I need this to be all over. / Most of my poems are shaped like crows, / so what’s eating you?

A man spills a red solo cup down my shirt like hands. Hands bury in my skin. The speakers bury in my skin. I have never felt farther from the sky, or from my own spit.

The pinwheels of my mourning, having moved to a windless town.

Rarely do I think of death while gnawing the bottom of a vanilla cone.

every great sadness has occurred because someone / decided fate with their bare hands.

My Left Arm

I was a fruit cake meat loaf of influences –
my name was Sloppy Joe,
I was canned pineapple slices
left out in the sun.

I called you soft names
against all reason,
on

my body is an american / casket, shove the corpses / through my eyesockets til they spill / from my mouth

When my children walk by, it will be like looking into the sun. Your children will have to bow their heads. My children’s eyes will be the color of electric blue icebergs.

I want to walk in where I walk in & not think about me or you or anyone else we know—I want my recycling to be perfect.