I’ve been getting up at 5am to
lay in the yard out back and
listen to the birds

The early morning is blue and
Still, the old aspen to the west
Stretches dry white fingers against the complexes

I  tell the Lord I am lonely,

that I am plagued by my past

I fill my house

I yearn

I tell God to invite me out on the water.

Kentucky strawberry moon, 17th year cicada
Puya raimondii blooming twice
The Dead Sea Scrolls fanned out on the table
Midday, a mouthful of star anise and cardamom
The Lord’s Prayer in the hallway, lingering in the heavy sunlight, Jack-a-dandies shifting gently
across the ceiling—

I am lost in this barley malt reverie, ****** in vanilla. Deep brown and tenderhearted
Plaited with marigolds
Preserved in marmalade
I reach,
I reach



I reach.

.

mom tells me that the reason dad
doesn’t tell me he loves me as often
Is because I don’t need it as much
as zak

.

I still wonder, all these years later,
if I am bound to the same rules, the
same divine dream my mother had all
those years ago—
Will I  also be tied into a loveless marriage?
A business proposition ? A contract
in shreds, lining the walls
another reverie I’ve shifted into
the floor planks swollen with stale bath water
a decrepit house falling apart
Around me, asleep in
a place where the lights don’t come on


mom tells me

It’s because I  don’t need it as much

.

I take the long way home after Lydia’s wedding
down 67 into the cemetery off the highway
I stop at your grave where I’m surprised to find
you finally have a headstone—
They’ve moved all of the porcelain angel figurines into a heap, I gingerly peel them out of
the weeds and find the grass yellowing beneath their tiny wings

Lydia got married today, she looked beautiful. Your mom—you know her, she said you were here. a beat, thunder, like carillon bells, rumbles in the south. The bottom of an incus cloud, thick and flinty, rolls over the Wet Mountains
I looked beautiful too
The sprinklers turn on across the service walk,
long jets of white water


I’m not angry, Thomas. It’s okay.


I love you.


.

Back in the summer of ‘99 when
My mom and adoptive father got married
I remember the cream white carpet of the pastors house and the table with a gaudy white cake, my mother’s hair in black ringlets around her face and the white t-strap dress shoes, scalloped around the edges.
I remember the staunch silence of my
soon-to-be-brothers probably wondering why he didn’t stick with their respective moms but being altogether curious anyway, of them looking on with their sad blue eyes.

Years later when they’d tell the story of how they met, I’d romanticize this divine encounter only to
realize in my early 20’s that it was more of a business arrangement, really. And in 2018 when my late boyfriend Thomas asked during a boots and bling gala why your parents don’t touch or dance with one another I defensively respond that they don’t have to do that to love one other but

That was all wrong, really.

In another life;

There is rest to be had beneath the ajisai
Amidst the misty cliffs of takachiho
Asleep in the river, barefoot in the tides
posting camp against Verona Rupes
in nothing but linens and marble berry dust

I know this place, I’ve always known this place
I  dreamt about it once in my youth
wandered there in a briny fantasy
wrapped in ribbon ****, presented
within the sun glitter

I know this place.

I’ve been here.




I’ve been here.

.

can you save him?

Can you save him?

A few short weeks before he’d
tattooed Isaiah 40:31 on the
back of his tricep

I  missed all the signs—
his little sister is getting married in a week.

It’s been five years and
It’s been five years and—

It’s been five years


And.

Somewhere in another life—

I have a family. All together under one roof,
not a single thing is discernible in the jovial
chatter, all amongst the other like
water skeeters, stones on a clear, glass pond
Rivulets of honey slipping betwixt to become a laugh on another’s lips

In adjacent rooms, we whisper gleefully,
someone is finger combing through my
hair absently, past the casement windows
there is an ochre radiance that
the morning glories vine around
and the deer in the fields observe
inquisitively, drawn to us in the powder blue evening

Like licorice, slippery elm and dates
Long socks and linen, hands caked in
flour—

Effervescent, a little salt, a dream


Somewhere.

the RATF in Sandusky, Ohio
Is perhaps the loudest place
in the world according to Guinness—

Highly reflective,
with sound levels tremendous enough
To perforate an eardrum and shake
the vocal chords so viciously one might
feel like they’re choking.

But it may actually be inside my head—
The loudest place, I mean.
The words are all gathering up there;
shrill, in the corners,
vibrating against the concrete.

They say Krakatoa could be heard 3000
miles away but that’s simply child’s play—

It’s all neither here nor there, though.
It’s all hypothetical.
It’s all just a room at Plum Brook Station.

on the hammock this evening
the west pasture filled with thick
mulberry clouds, framed by sheathes of
apricot mist in drapes

I am watching the leaves of The Cottonwood
shimmer, flip their golden underbellies up
like schools of danios

And I’m talking to God about being alone—
I send a couple videos to Alyssa

Somewhere on Central some young boys
rip down the backroads up Fields on
their little bikes, setting every dog off in
the copse mobile home park

it’s not that I’m not grateful

No messages. Just wind, late evening.
Sunday with the Lord.

I am still the forget-me-not on the far wall
A marigold in the back row
A single sunflower in the corner of the yard

I have not yet become all
the flowers I want but

Rest assured I still am one.

After the rodeo they held a
dance in the 4-H building behind the stands—
They haven’t done that since 2017

I still walked back to my car in silence,
the din of a crowd behind me, freshly plowed dirt and pine, warm beer

I’m in this red summer dress, little yellow flowers all the way down to my ankles,
this is the kind of dress you’re supposed to find me in, in the cornflower blue evening, wisps of peach stratus clouds stretched behind the glaring rodeo lights

Deep Wreck and some kid from Wyoming
arced against the masses, wild hair flying
Red checkered pearl snap

You’re supposed to find me here, You.
You’re supposed to fall in love with me.

Turn it Loose by the Judds plays in the little
red alcove, a bandstand in the foreground;

I get in the car and go home.

Perhaps it is not made for me—
I’m afraid if happiness ever prevailed
to settle upon me it
might be swept away suddenly and
without warning

I have feared that my entire life;
every small joy I have gripped with
the hands of a child
it’s tendrils curled in the web of my
fingers, rare as Vigné a Farinet
fleeting,

Always

Fleeting.

After thomas died—

I started getting tattoos because
I was suffocating myself in grief
drowning daily in my bed,
in the bathroom, in the yard
laying beached in the grass
beneath a deluge of confusion
no water for miles but I am still
Sinking

Drifting through the Surrey hallways
as an apparition, his blood
on my shins
Garrett’s muffled voice asking
If we could just clean her up

Not yet, we need pictures.

I am a callow soul, his death has stripped me
my mother is calling me a silly girl for
The Psalms on my forearm
Luke across my thigh  
for Nehemiah down my spine
I am trying not to die and
all she can focus on is
the wisp of a golden girl gone

This is the catalyst,
the turning point, the ordained moment—
I have not had many of these but when they come they are all encompassing;
I am suddenly not me anymore but
Wet clay, the potter has unmade
me nearly beyond recognition

death has come
And the lord has let it shape me

Death came and it almost took me—
I fought for my life and all my mother could say was

Silly girl


..

I’m made of lists
Knocking on doors, I’m unprepared
half my mother,

I’ve been praying the Lord unmake me
Strip me bare, smelt me to my core

I’m hastening to be someone you could love
Could you?

Could you.

Beneath the corymbia citriodora
somewhere in time, an eternally lilac
womb—
the lord knit our ribs together
and blessed the future laid out
above us like a canopy
Every moment strung across
a cotton string, dried orange slices
in the evening sun, twisting to and fro
soft and crystalline, faintly venous—

We weren’t left without the knowledge of
time or the length at which it would stretch
how I might Look for you every day—
have you been looking for me?

Please look for me.



Please look for me

Early spring, a couple weeks ago;

You came over to help me burn the rest of
The dry brush and weeds in my backyard
Because the day before I nearly burnt down the back fence

we stood by the west pickets and watched the
cows grazing in Seufer’s pasture, mostly silent
A perfectly cool morning, mild in the sun but
We could still see our breath—

I made you coffee and we leaned
against the warm gate of your truck
to talk about nothing, enjoying the
Quiet lull, the unusually busy traffic on my
street

You said you had to go and we hugged
because we always do, always long,
longer than we should

And that’s the last time we saw each other.

His tongue is searching my mouth
for who I used to be and I’m staring at the
Amber lampshade above my bed—

His sideburns are thinning, just in the last year,
I have committed this particular view to memory
many times, his arms; Liana vines enveloping my waist, ankles tucked around my calves,
I am a tiny animal
between his limbs.

I am memorizing the way his hairline fades into his neck, the shape of his forehead, the bistre shadow of his browbone in the foreground—

I do this to remember, I do this to hide you away
In an atrium, in the pulmonary trunk
I keep everyone there, so when they’re gone
when they are inevitably gone—
I can visit,
A softened recollection where I’ve allayed the pain of letting go—

I knew this would happen,
but Ive touched;
I’m touching you anyway,

What is it worth—
if I can’t remember?

You’re kissing me,
Im easing you into
my heart—

You always wanted that.

And how do I become known by God?
how do I find solace in Him traversing
the plains of my heart?
how does that become a lullaby ?
I am still
figuring it out in the golden highways
of my spirit, whispering into the
abandoned rooms while I
sink—

Groanings too deep for words
Too deep for
Anything.

I only just realized
what joy can be—
It is a small thing,
I think,

In the back office
at the bank,
If you leave the chair canted
towards the south window,
the sun will warm the small
blue seat around 11:45

It has always been
such an inconsequential thing to me
always out of reach—

But it’s there,
A quarter before noon
every day.

I have fled from this profound
sense of loneliness my entire life—

Nothing has ever felt right, good or
Safe. I have hardly found another person
that seems to speak the same language,
Am I to be a single aldis lamp in the night
flashing across the great sea with
nothing but the stars to

twinkle back at

Me.

And we meet outside the gate—

In the balmy evening with
the sonance of happy voices in the distance,
a dusky star softly gleaming through
The ever-open portcullis
casting damask
patterns upon us;

We there, barefoot, breathing.

A simple life, in cream linen
beneath the foliate ivy
in the brisk morning I am
out In The Garden—
Lying in the dewy grass
Perennial hymns on my lips
reaching into bee hives

Calling lord,

Lord.

I don’t think you understand —

Of course I  want to travel—

But I want to do it in Moab
where the mountains crumble and
Rebuild in a day, and the red dust is
Alive with the spirit of a child
leading me here and there
the land marked by ornate tree lizards who
praise the lord

And when I lay down for the night
in the streets of Pakistan, the birds
singing softly in Punjabi, the crisp white of
snowdrops sprouting between my fingers
Not a soul will seek to harm me—
Nor the sun to scorch me,

When I drink from the Atlantic and am sustained—
When its waters take me in,
down to the den of leviathan
where the seabed gave up its dead long ago
And I breathe in the deep green algae,
Anglers like stars in the night

My fingers in the mouth of a lion
pulling nesting stellulas from their jaws—
I want to travel then—

In a world that knows me.

A world that knows me.

Keep calling for me
in the hills when I go astray—
I know I do

When I have lodged myself
somewhere dark and deep
and the forest around me bends in
when I am stricken and tangled
in the bramble
Call for me

I will come home,
I want to come home.

I will come,
I want to come home.

i had a dream i was rising through the trees

i had a dream i was falling through the ground
on docks calling a name i've never known
sitting in empty studies with the lord
calling mine
bad news used to sound like footsteps
down the hallway, used to be my mother's
hand turning the doorknob
and now it is a rotating hubcap
or a night without stars
full yellow moons out over the
complexes in the west
it sounds like empty milk
cartons and the tone of my own voice
it is people demanding that i be open
the most tragic of flaws--

i am meeting people just like me
telling them I want something more
can the wounded want
more?

i am sure she is
just as radiant in
the sunlight, without
trying, as herself
and you in the doorway
with a mouthful of her
name, light and lovely--

*new.

last night i dreamed my memories
were lined in quills and nettles
soaking in jars of aloe
they played on underdeveloped
film stock, across slabs of barbary fig--
out in the desert
like a burning bush.

I love the way books cannot be
unread, cannot erase the sweet oils
and thumbprints like black oak tree rings
they are there for all the slivers
of sunlight and literary cafune
soft knuckles pressed into their
spines
they remind me that while I am not new
I can remain unknown, that though
opened by some I am neither novel lying in wait
or closed into his old bookshelves,
a thin draft in a library of what-ifs
he did not get to k e e p you
however you did, you did
found your
way into other hands, without much grace, albeit,
baltering from home to home
a solivigant prose--

this way, and that, small bind
paperback.

there's a stack of
cheap pianos at
lowtide in County Louth,
Ireland

that reminds me of all
the ways music
should be heard

i don't want each month to
become a benchmark
i can already feel
myself like a steel stiletto
scrawling each day off

anxiously waiting for time
to heal when it's only been
the tick of a metronome to
Scriabin's best

holding the slick undone
slivers of myself together
as wet kindling, an offering
that I hardly know how to give.

would he love me
with a bounty on
my head, with two
six shooters and the
audacity to leave

would he love me
with scars scribbled
down my back, the
tacit agenda of every
one before, every thing
ever said,

would he love me
would he love me
with a bounty

can medleys
be self-aware
could i recognize
myself in all the
people i've met?

I ain't ever belonged to no one--
not even those that came before,

those frightened immigrants and spanish tangerines tumbling
below deck, toppling into the scattered bed rolls that still smell
like cumin and tarragon, sea and spiced salt seeping through the strong lungs of every youthful San Fermin boy in Pamplona
the raised voices in Seville singing San Jose and my mother's
maiden name--

i fumble in the dark for things to keep me rooted
the strong arms of working men and their weak hearts
barely beating
secondhand boys breathin' dollars an' truck exhaust
lookin' for their match, someone that'll fit
or do 'em just right
sharp things that'll sit pretty and
look good in lowlight,

and me with my tulip bulb heart
plantin' myself in wax, in muck,
in Utqiaġvik, Alaska
during the Polar Nights,
in my palms, beneath pillows, sproutin out the lungs of
those unassumin' who think i'm healin' them
of all the silly, misplaced  ideas

but they got me creepin' out the sides of their cheeks
hookin' these delicate stems
leaving thin perforations all along their sheets
gratin and sharpenin they's teeth--

used to think i was the sun
real pretty and smooth like them stones
you find down near the river
or leaves just 'bout to fall, clingin
to low hangin' branches
just askin to be plucked or swept away
but i'm not any of those things

just a girl
lord, the awful truth
just a girl.

there this old
zipliner who wheels
through town, you see'im
ery'where-- at Brother's
and on the corner of Kate's now
Neon's and up just about ev'ry
street in the middle of the night
long hair brushin' the back of his chair--
he's prolly in his late twenties maybe
but they say he came down from the line
and cracked his back on some big stones
near the gorge
an' now he's paralyzed
they say he don't like no one
pitying him, but neither would I, really.
sometimes when I drive past and it's around nine or so
I feel his anger press all 'gainst my doors
over his arms pumpin' up and down.

the construction
outside my bedroom window
finally stopped--a groaning
heaviness that rattled my
insides, made me feel like
there was air missin'--
a sound of normal i'd
lost

i turned over in bed
sure as the moon
that it was sunday
up at the dried sycamore seeds
still clinging to the tree
climbing the north facing
wall, twizzling down
against the double paned window

i imagine once all of this is over
that's what it will be like--
a sound of normal i'd
forgotten.

have you ever swam through the dark
and the lights switch haphazardly from on to off
whoever was on the shore has long since gone home
a pair of footprints sunk into the waves

and when you realized you were the villain
did the water become deeper? when he told you to be honest
did you feel every lie creep up your spine? not a shiver
but a steady climb,
each fib a hand dug into a thoracic foramen
squeezing into the spaces you hid your darkest self
a leak in the structure

you're crying give me love
from the bottom of sandy trenches
open palms that are only raging deserts
it's not a question but a statement of fact--
why love the things that still haven't learned
what they want? the weak kneed girls
that leave trails of broken bones and healed boys
slivers of metal wound in their hair
and just enough poison to really '
work it in
be honest he says

*on

when you learned to blow
on hot tea, when you realized
good love wasn't an old wivestale
when your body suddenly became the
least of things to keep a man
and your ego just a badly kept
garden full of weeds and
borers
when you became nothing
dust and bitters, people began to
ask you how you saw yourself
and where humble and quiet
used to stand in you found
an empty ship, wineless drums
everything now seemed alarmingly
true, maybe you weren't more than
the sum--and how long had that been so?
how long had you been tolerable,
how long had beauty been your stand in
for a personality, how long had your hips
spelled your name, gyrating to the
songs you only wished you could sing--


I have only now started to laugh aloud
or walk knowing what's ahead and not
every inch of gravel beneath my feet,
deep breaths are my saving grace
i have traded anxiety for faith
i started dreaming again,
I opened my mouth and
not a single word came out
but i had left port
laden with
more.

i spoke through a keyhole
come find me
in the middle of the night
god read a chapter out of ephesians
clear as day,
and since then i've been
hearing myself
like my heartbeat been
a tiny pulse, pyura chilensis
split apart to see i am actually
here
I've been beatin' this whole time--

and we learn too fast we made of stardust
but that was all ash and seed
before we ever came along
we've got sweet pea and
cardamom in our bones
all the surly wiles of our mothers
a mix of turpentine and
spanish flame
come find me

and i'm whisperin' back
*alright, i'm comin'

everything, ever'one and they mama
remind me of you
god******
songs you never even sang
and every western movie that doesn't
star Wayne (I kept him for myself)
people drop you in
conversation real casual like
and I still go a little cold
like someone done pour
icewater down the back of my neck
but I can't admit to how much
it still hurts to talk about you
'cause that would be some ***** ****
so I smile and let you roll off my tongue
as if there's not a single thing in the world
that tug at my heartstrings anymore but
you still do


you still do.

i'm finally sleeping through the night--

and for a couple days I'll wake up and
not think of you at all--
people say your name and it sounds like an old prayer
each syllable a funny amen

I've been shadowboxing myself, my old friend
i've been been relearning to to be comfortable with silence in the end
neither of us kept our promises but that's no unforgivable sin

i've considered a hundred thank yous
all lined up  on the lawn, white pickets to make a nice fence
and sometimes I've stood in my kitchen and stared at the mugs
whispered i don't know myself but that's why
i left, wasn't it?

i'll admit to being jealous of your happiness,
i've only so many faces to keep, and i only want one

it's taken a while to own the fault,
i see  every shameful thing and dust off the
way i used to hold myself

I'm finally sleeping through the night
a little bit heavy, no less able to dream
and i hear part of you like i might
the soft hurt i left in your bed
so, please forgive me
when you get the chance.


please forgive me
when you get the chance.

i asked nick
what year he
felt was the most
wasted

and he said even
one step is a step
forward--

but there could be
no better embodiment
of anger, it is there every
morning telling me that
he is home that I am
a body, that i am a bad thing
it rides in the bed of
every dodge ram
and permeates every dream
where i hear trumpets echoing
in the mountains, in valleys i stood
with my father and
God's voice thundered from higher
from clouds like a ***** through the earth
heavy rainfall across miles
and miles of unsodden land
and we were crippled
into the dirt--

I asked nick
what year
he felt was
most wasted

and he said even'
one step

is a step


forward.

when you are travelers
your conquests are
passages highlighted
in yellow
dog earred pages spoken
in pictographs
but when you are conquests
with velvet letters painted on your back
rooms filled with red thumb tacks
girls with names scrawled all across
their thighs, passport stamps carried
from country to country
milling about with scabby knees and
raw elbows
a noh mask to hide your shame
and not your face
a push pin on an unlisted county
barely within a three mile radius--
he's a photo up on the shelf and
you're just another notch in his belt.

i keep tellin myself you don't have to
feel that way, you just gotta find the
right thing, the right song, the right man
and every time I've been on the couch
at the fair, on the floor with
an arm draped around me
and his fingers tracing bittersweet
intentions on my side--
I'm thinking of the  back of your head
of you fingers with the cuticles you never pushed back
of the birthmarks beneath your arms
and of a girl's body that i've never seen naked

because i collapse in on myself and say it's not time
and scientists say that black holes are things from which
light cannot escape but
I am going to let it matter
so when he leans in for a kiss
and i see your hands on her hips
shoulders bunched up in the cold
you're standing out in the snow
truck growling in the driveway
I say it's okay,
i am not out to
bandage the wounds
that need to breathe
I told her I am just
going to let it hurt


i am just going to let it matter.

love a girl like pyrite
when you found me in the mines
shook me from your baskets
saw me glint in the sunlight
said my  irises shifted like tiger's eye
i was never what you thought

love a girl like pyrite
if she's your gold then i'm a
shade of amber, a copper quarter
if I was hard then she is soft and
quick in your hands like a gardner snake
faint and without teeth, tangling through
the grass and you love the silent chase
the girls that flip belly up and
kiss your corners, kiss your
borders, rub away the ash
and lay themselves over your grenades
your sticks of dynamite you blew
me away with

love a girl like pyrite
because I was a fool's gold,
the normal luster of something
grand, sieved through your tables
back into the river, the unspoken
daughters of not-good-enough
lying in wait, picked up by farmers
by men who sell, who hock, who
pawn, washed down in Vindicator Valley
run between thumbs, turned up amongst
rocks the ordinary, run-of-the-mill
we can only be imitators of
the greatest


love a girl, who's fool's gold
would you find her?
would you keep her?

this message has
been on my lips
a train of thought
stuck to the tracks
woven between teeth
a mesh of necklace
lodged behind my ramus
a chain of words working
into my tongue
i am convinced there is
less light than I thought
that i have never smoked
a cigarette in my life but
i am blacker and deeper
than any ravaged lungs
made of  about as much water
that sees Atacama
on a good day
and I am

raging.

those wings on your
back weren't meant to
keep you up forever--
even eagles land
clouds dissipate
and great travelers
come down off the
mountains.

do all wild things
return home?

I used to say I wasn't--
that the blood of kinder animals
ran through me
                                      (although that may still be true)
I think i've bed down with coyotes
made off with predators
dressed in spots and stripes--
but could i have reaped
the benefits of a life so severe?
                  we are all wild in our own
varying ways
                                 not all of us howl or rage
some of us leave home and
feign courage, pull on our
faces, don't hunt or scout but
wander, and the others all
convene and say
              you are so unlike yourself
and the worst don't even ask and
say they like this new you--

this new you
a lost you
wild is not always
is not allways.
and I am not always

picking my way back
with little knowledge
of scents and markings
the lay of the wind
is all foreign
because I am not
truly a

wild

thing.