Chef slams the skillet down and barks something

about being low on eggs. Four tickets in my apron

means he’ll need another carton. Not that I’ll fetch

it for him. I stay on my side of the kitchen.

One time, a nurse said Saddam Hussein saved

bread crusts for the birds. In jail, without

the distracting temptation of dictatorship,

he watered dusty plants, another’s task.

I dated an ex-con. On the anniversary

of his mother’s death, I saw him walking

out of town to her grave. She was buried one

state over. Months later, he raped me.

The Dalai Lama said, Aggression is an intimate

part of ourselves. Once, he said, It’s well-known

that good feelings only cause boredom,

and gently put you to sleep.

Like people don’t know the price of fruit, chef says,

when I hand him a ticket for a yogurt parfait. 

I scoop raspberries out of the plastic tub. 

Jesus Christ, he says, and slaps my hand away.

You have to take the ones from the top first,

or the others below bruise beneath their weight.

His calloused fingers cradle each berry—

his touch gentle as if they’re newborns asleep.

                For Izzy

The day that my insides

                became my outsides (the brown mess clotted 

under my freckled nose

lips curdled with curious disgust)

I stared at my older sister      your mother 

as she brushed her wet hair 

in the bathroom 

                One one-hundred, Two one-hundred

to the same rhythm as yesterday

like nothing had changed

I stood on the sepia tile and counted 

                Four one-hundred, Five one-hundred

My face was red-hit

like the insides that had recently 

                become outsides

I thought she would be able

to read what happened

in the crimson air over my head—She could read 

            so much else that happened

            in the air over my head 

                        like my insides were outside

I waited for her to see that I was a woman,

that now she should start teaching me

how to curl my hair and smell like summer 

              Six one-hundred, Seven one-hundred 

But she glared over with question marks for eyeballs 

                           Why are you staring at me

My mother      your grandmother       must have mouthed

                 what happened in my underwear 

because your mother           my sister

suddenly made me a ruby necklace of her arms

                     you poor thing, you poor thing

and I might be imagining it, but I think she cried 

                             insides pouring outside

              Eight one-hundred, Nine one-hundred

She drove me to the Pacific Ocean

like the salt and the waves could clean

                my blood stained outsides inside

As the waves went back and forth,

I began to count 

               Ten one-hundred, Eleven one-hundred

all the wounds and all the blood

I didn’t know about yet

make eye contact when I nod 

as I recognize the Spanish 

word for lunch. 

He makes special jokes 

for the Spanish speakers. 

I know enough to know that. 

He stands at the front of the bus, 

in English tells us the Mayan word 

for Jaguar, the four types 

of cenotes, the ways we 

will experience the fresh water 

source of the Yucatan—zip line, 

canoe, snorkel. Later, he helps me 

with a body harness, tightening 

straps around my tanned thighs, 

my waist. He gets low to adjust 

my helmet and speaks in Spanish, 

asking if I am scared and I nod, 

because I do not understand 

more than two of his words, 

but his dark eyes match mine 

and today I must be dark 

enough to pass for belonging. 

I wear my brother’s grief

with the story of 

my past: the character 

in a hospital

gown spinning around

pretending to flip

pancakes, being told:

“You will not remember 

this.”— People still

claim: “He does not

remember much,” but

no space held there

for me to reply, no 

air to fly, ground to 

land or stand and I 

want to dance it off, 

this resting in the valley

of post-surgery memory—

forever a distance

cut between me and

the world—in me,

the disease cut out, 

drowned into nothing,

but where does nothing go

in the body and what

does it look like?

It looks like a young boy

on the playground not 

being picked but picked on,

nothing in the shape of 

a head without hair, 

varicose veins, saran wrap

over a broviac, until 

the boy’s older brother

makes it something, 

standing up and stepping in

and the bully backs away, 

vanishes, because these 

are things I do not remember,

it’s just the story of grief

I wear when I hear 

my brother has cancer. 

I know this

from looking

                          into store fronts

                          taste buds voguing

alight from the way

treasure glows

                          when I imagine

                          pressing its opulence

into your hand

I want to buy you

                          a cobalt velvet couch

                          all your haters’ teeth

strung up like pearls

a cannabis vineyard

                          and plane tickets

                          to every island

on earth

but my pockets

                          are filled with

                          lint and love alone

touch these inanimate gods

to my eyelids

                          when you kiss me

                          linen leather

gator skin silk

satin lace onyx

                          marble gold ferns

                          leopard crystal

sandalwood mink

pearl stiletto

                          matte nails and plush

                          lips glossed

in my 90s baby saliva

pour the glitter

                          over my bare skin

                          I want a lavish life

us in the crook

of a hammock

                          incensed by romance

                          the bowerbird will

forgo rest and meals

so he may prim

                          and anticipate amenity

                          for his singing lover

call me a gaunt bird

a keeper of altars

                          shrines to the tactile

                          how they shine for you

fold your wings

around my shoulders

                          promise me that

                          should I drown

in want-made waste

the dress I sink in

                          will be exquisite

                                                          –       for Dominique 

We sink into the cantaloupe snow, mountains 

heavy on our bellies, our eyes ice-blind. This is love— 

This is how we coat our throats, become 

like mothers. The air is made of wool. We might be 

a shoebox diorama: two figures, pools of glue, 

country blues. We could have a home 

in muskmelon, man and wife. Stay, 

skin echoes. We’ve always been la vie en rose. 

When they clear the streets, I find myself 

sticky with sugar, plucking stray pulp 

from between my toes. I’m tired of missing you. 

i don’t care if you leave me

bruised, purpled skin under blue

eyes. blood dripping down

your lip, marks made with

nails (i don’t remember 

what it’s like to feel 

safe here). i can feel you breathe 

above me, can feel the choke

before you grab my neck

(we will never be 

a love poem, only ever 

a wrestling). when you throw

me, drown me in throttle,

i will know what it’s like 

to be a rag doll: to have stitched

red lips drip insulin, your thirst

to my mouth (i can see your green

eyes tremble in the light).

The half-light before sunrise flattens the field,

doesn’t leave shadows yet, draws the road

with graphite stillness, the flat mesquites

that spike against the toneless sky, fences

as monochromatic as the memory of pain.

Watching for mule deer is the main thing,

because they are as gray as the hill

at times like these, will leap in front of you

with wild desperation, some mislaid instinct,

their eyes a flash in the headlights

before the quick blur of sharp hooves and 

splintering bones as thin as a bird’s. 

The dented front will tell it, the stiff short hairs

hanging off the curve of the bumper.

The suffering thing you don’t know what to do with.

The way you’ll walk back, hoping no one will know it was you.

I’ve heard that, if you know you’re going to hit one,

you should accelerate right before you do, 

so that the car will hunker like a cat

and glance it up across the hood, increasing your chance

of survival, if not the deer’s.

It must be this light– it’s the light that does it to us.

Bright enough to show the form of the world

without giving any definition to it. 

The way the early morning makes no promises,

might as well tell that nothing at all is there:

not the car’s headlights fading into the gray light,

or the road that looks like it closes behind you.

Not the invisible city that soon the sun will rise over.

Not the brokenness you leave behind 

that carries your name.

Every day I think you have to talk to her.

But mornings go on blithely, sinus rhythm

louder than my will. My tongue takes

no part – I give her a book, my heart

loves books. I find it hidden under

the gall bladder. I show her Metasequoia,

teach the term invagination – she reaches

up to hush that lullabye. My heart wants

her blood to be the thing she never
thinks of, unconscious rush. My heart 

will not become another organ – 

oh, uterus, my heart does not wish

her future to unfold the way you have.

She wants to chatter with the other hearts,

swinging in their pericardia, giggling
in those heart-hammocks, eat cinnamon

candies while they dip tampons into red
Kool-Aid, learn this new term – staunch.

and this I’ve never told anyone—

the winter after we bought the house

I took you down to the creek 

which seemed safe enough

when I was young

Not quite three,  I guess

you didn’t know the terror of stop

(you rarely learn things that aren’t 

shouted) and I didn’t have the breath for it

slipping on mud walls where footpaths used to

ease towards the water, lazy barefoot steps

between weeds and rock patio, beer cans and

graffiti, puddles cupped in rocks where we drowned

minnows, trails I knew by taste

on my silt-caked toes

Once, I thought you could grow up

this way.  That I’d teach you the lingo 

of cicadas, the sanctity of creek-stink

the way that trees hold down the dark 

even at noon, the way things slither and crawl

how currents     tug, but not enough 

to scare you (as long as it hasn’t been raining

too much, like when August storms in, the way the water 

eats at the meadow then, erases it, and keeps coming

like everything you know about boundaries 

is ignorance, like how they didn’t tell me

boys died in that water, goofing those summer

swells, they only said be careful

 it’s deeper than it looks) I should have listened

to a mother’s instinct

he’s too little, no one knows

where we’re going, maybe February is different

maybe things have changed

the way the house has 

bigger cracks

smaller rooms, and all the ghosts gone quiet 

in the years that I’ve been gone  but I was full 

of everything I had yet to show you I was once

a girl 

gliding 

down 

the spine of a frozen creek

an initiate

in the secret middle 

world 

between 

 earth tree bones       and sky

once I walked in the crystal palace quiet

of suspended life—

I knew what magic was

and I wanted you to know it, too.  

But you are not me.

You tend to play inside, now, and how can I tell you

that childhood has a way of not staying 

how you left it, that things erode, give out

like trails gnawed down to edges, that you

sometimes find yourself alone

stomping inches in the snow, while your mother learns

that fear tastes mud-cold, like creek ice

that feet can forget how to speak

to the ground once you step away

that time

like falling 

happens only in the one direction.