little wife

for both poes

before the ink was flat black she
eased the paper from my fingers

the smallest hands
hiding the absinthe

thirteen and coaxing ravens
to her window with strands of raven hair

such whiteness her face
whirling

have you ever looked an angel
in the mouth?

maybe she died the day we met
everything glistening

kissing cousins
sister bliss

thirteen won’t leave your side
of the family.

i wrote of young girls
their already-dead-ness--

her hands back
half bloodied from the coughs

memorial for a girl i never met

The sun is getting flighty, and
I'm still eating ice, and shivering, and
eating more.

Pink eyes
for everyone in that chapel.
Crumpled tissues on the floor, glass stained blue,
I cried for her tree new in the ground
the leaves still shaped like hearts.

B changed his nice shoes for boots
and as I waited he told me they were
Wedding and funeral shoes.
"I've only worn them five times. Now six

I think that was both.”

Who did she marry?
Her depression?
Or is it the survivors marrying grief,
marrying a crater?
The chapel marrying
its blue windows to the sky--

Marry me, suicide
and I will hold you until your ribs break
and your strings of sadness don't
I will hold you through skinny lightning
will hold your Norse vigil
will hold your only real question in my hand
and forgetting it's there,
worry it to shreds.

adenode

o small lumps of flesh
where even were you in my face
that i forget you're gone?

now here you are with accordions, singing
jangling wheezing heaving that old song:
"you're gonna miss me
when im gone"

don't think i didn't notice
the graceful way you bid goodbye
to the other soft shapes back there
i was there, knocked up
with anesthesia, down
by a scrubbed nurse in booties--

gone are the days of big fish mouth breathing,
middle school voice muffled
the ends of words indistinct
(people debating whether to ask me to
repeat something) gone

goodbye adenoids
thanks for the codeine
now it's gone

Dona Nobis Pacem

I'm older now but I used to be a young boy and when I turned five my mother told me something that nothing I've been through yet has erased. She said Baby, honey, we love you and we're proud but you're big enough and strong enough and it's time that you moved out. So I packed up all my things, my teacup and my fairy wings and I took the next bus out of town. And some guy tried to beat me up for looking at his peg leg funny and yes he knocked out a couple teeth but they grew back in they always do.

Once I got to town I bought a full beard off a man's chin with the money I'd earned from the lumberyard back home. And that made me look a little older and people didn't give me such a hard time, especially when I squinted as I did. And before you ask yes I met a few birds but they were a little young for me and I told them so because they couldn't read yet and I wanted to be clear.

I stayed in a laundromat for awhile and slept in the dryers mostly because the washers made me awfully damp. By that time all my clothes had worn to shreds so I made new ones out of single socks but once the manager found out she made me leave. I had a lot of friends though, and we had some good times since Toby was six and knew how to drive. All the rivers in town are paved and Toby drove this golf cart he borrowed down the sides and across and up through eight feet of water and that was how we bathed, once a year or so.

And I go so many freckles my skin couldn't hold them in and I had to grow a little bit and it pushed some hair out of my head and funnily enough it's never gone back in.
I met a lot of people and a couple monsters and sometimes it was hard to tell the difference, especially when I started carrying around knives and then everyone looked like a monster and I looked like a bearded dwarf with knives.

And sometimes when I wasn't growing freckles or hair I grew terribly lonely and didn't want my body any more, none of it, I wanted to be the water scooped up in someone's hands that could drain away if they weren't looking. And what I realized, like a salmon, was that it was time I visit home because my seventh birthday was coming up mighty soon.
It took me awhile to get there because I had to carry my whole collection of knives but when I got there I crawled on my belly underneath the kitchen window. And I poked my head up and there was Mama in the kitchen baking a cake and singing and this is what she was singing:
Dona
nobis
Pacem, pacem

and she was crying into the batter so hard I could taste the salt through the window. And then she saw me and pulled her shotgun out because of the freckles and the hair and also I had all new teeth.

But then she saw me for me and opened the window and pulled me into her arms and shook me back and forth and said Baby, honey, you're bigger now and stronger now but I sure missed you, kid.

[to hooligan]

Don't hate your hands, hooligan--

small sousaphones
large moths
gyroscopes

Don't hate your profession, wrecking ball--

getaway driver
guerilla anarchist
Tallahassee's accountant

of the year. Don't hate the world
(when it asks you politely
like a child)

why do your hands spin so fast?

Nana Eating Roses in the Hospital

"i have to go home to Mother.
i have the bread she wanted. it's stale as a grandfather clock
but what do we care?"

she’s not with us. shaking
like suicidal petals in strong wind
she fetches the bread; gets
on the train to Yosemite; meets
my grandfather; gives
him ultimatums about living in the West,
converting.

and I have blinked twice,
she is off again
substitute-teaching supported by
unlit cigarettes and Sicilian squinting—

making star pasta for grandchildren
tugging at her lemon apron--

what are these words shaping in her mouth
but not emerging?

i lean over the disposable bed
to give her our name to inhale
she bites
because time is fragile and she is not.

a moment ago she wrapped herself in her mother's skirt
turned when boys called "hey giraffe!" on the schoolyard
(the long walk home)

in this white room with sterile tile
and MRSA swept in the corner
and bed rails, and kidney pans
she eats roses
blooming with time.

Childhood

we were carving away.

quick jabs into Ivory soap
small hands on plastic knives--
we whittled till the bubbles, set free,
surrounded us. the
white slivers smelled like morning.

left with a fragile boat
or wolf
or house
we kept carving, into other things
smaller and smaller each time
like personalities tried on before moving.

stoves burn,
beds break,
plants poison.
pillows suffocate, and
children fall
slivers to the cold tile
and earn scars learning the intimate
dimensions of pain;
of layers carved away.

each accommodated and filed properly
another fear or hate.

my sister next to me on the cold bathroom floor
finished and looked down at me
--our haphazard carvings like a hair salon--
and we pressed the pieces into the shape of our hands
because something there was missing.

and maybe we knew then—

growing up is not a growing but a carving away.