Is nothing more than a warning
Age 6 face smothered into the neighbor’s cat

He shrieks and claws until I shriek higher

Thin line of sticky red

Dripping

From my elbow, first scar
Reminding me: Be careful, gentle, soft

When blood

Is nothing more than a tangible form of grief
Age 16 the boy standing behind the theatre doors, blood pouring
between his knuckles and I wish I had known sooner
when someone dies you can just punch a white brick wall

When blood

Is a safe space
Age (Teens) it is
a whispered plea
for cotton

in my best friend’s kitchen

through bathroom stall

under classroom desk

When blood is a queer history lesson, I slit my ankle open on the balance beam and stare blankly when my coach says, “is it clean, your blood, is it clean”

In the darkness of our bedroom, he rolls to face me
his hand coming to my hip bone and asks

What’s one of your favorite words?

Epitome. You?

Forlorn. 

The way the first “o” feels against your lips.

What’s your favorite punctuation? 

I consider the warmth of his fingers, the coolness of the wedding band and the callus just beneath it from where his hand curves when he writes.

A semicolon.

When two halves
of a sentence could,
stand alone &
be just fine
and yet when
they come together
they’re fulfilling.

What about you?

A colon. 

When what follows
highlights what is
already known.

~for Diane Pridgeon

In Traverse City they have gutted the asylum. There are traces
everywhere. In its repurposed rooms and new
restaurants and artisanal shops. Hand in
hand, my girlfriend and I eat gelato and step across
the grounds. We know the patients here were treated
with marigolds, their scent having long ago driven
the dismayed horn worms away from these gardens. I see a woman
piloting her bike recklessly down the middle of a narrow and
defiant street, a white poodle prancing alongside her.
Immediately, I prescribe beauty
as therapy. How else could you explain this animal
carrying her along in the tide of its
soft mouth? My grandmother has a bike like hers.
She rides it along dirt roads at the farm where she has lived
all her life. Along the dark light of the fir trees
and the trembling cornrows and the pigs breathing
in their pens. Only now has she begun
to travel, board planes to distant countries she’d never dreamt of
before. We don’t share any blood between us, but she was just a teenager
when her two brothers and father died in a plane accident and arrived
in those portraits above the stairs where I’ve known them
all my life. Of my three grandmothers, she is the one
I most wish to protect. To treat kindly with bright flowers
of all kinds. To take on slow rides across the grounds
in my basket. To sing for. In the summer,
I will be grateful to the orchards, to the blue bicycle
which will move my grandmother from one place to another
without me. Which will take her apple-picking at sunrise
and will offer her a ride home, canvas bouncing happily
against her shins. And she will know that this is good—a teenager again
lying across the grass of the asylum. Mouth to shifting
mouth. In the stems of the crushed bloodroots at their backs, swaying.

I found it in the glove compartment
nestled in its own yearning, something
worse than lust, something I, myself, might have
written. That I am writing to you now: I was always
afraid of you. Your angry grieving. Your stomping
of the house. And night-moaning. And frightening
the dog. I was always afraid of
ruin. So that once I took a report card
and changed the fearful thing from D to B,
a dissection. Botched it, of course,
slashed a line through the heart of it
and decidedly stole into the nighttime storm lissomely
as dirt. I am always running away
to return, shoving my body deep into this mess
of blackness. Treading back to the house
and spying on you, alone, working
at the dishes in the kitchen, your hands softening
in the stream. You were always so
compassionate. So when you interrupted
my eight p.m. cartoons, your hair dripping with the outside
rain like Indiana Jones, I wondered what it was
you’d been trying to save. And when you held my
ink-streaked note to the sky and asked What is this?
I might have answered that it was my first love poem
and might have led you to the other room
to nurse the storm from your body.

It’s not ok to ask my dad questions
One of his teeth fell out and
I try to see what’s behind it
He opens his mouth to swear and a shot
of whiskey falls out and spills onto my knee but I’m driving and it keeps me alert
He replaces his tooth with a cigarette and he starts to tell me about his perfect day
having pockets stuffed with fresh trout and a good woman to prove himself to
I nod and dab the whiskey on my jeans with a lost sock
He yells watch the road! but I’ve given up on that
I glide through stop sign after stop sign after stop sign
I want to ask him about his tooth
He’s still handsome and he knows it
I buried it, he says
The tooth?
No, he says, the trout

My father loses touch with the world we can see
after he cleans out the last drawer.

After worker comps comes in
and the last bill goes out paid.

After he has written down every login
and the first four characters of passwords.

After the trees are pruned,
the rosemary and cilantro clipped back.

The acres and acres of grass mowed.

He was a man who kept tabs
and the last tab was closed,

While he sleeps,
we watch his body in shifts.

I take stock of what I can see
of my father’s belongings.
when he left my mother, he took
the good art only– Not the Smile, Laugh, Love kind:

A photograph of a bee in love
with a rose, a vintage boat obscured
by fog on the Ohio River, a tasteful
sunset that doesn’t try too hard
to be a sunset.

He took no furniture,
a memory foam pillow,
bottles of pain killers.

I go through drawers his quietly and shamefully,
to see what secrets tucked away
he couldn’t bring himself to clean—

anything that might suggest
to us he was more,
than we thought.

And don’t we all wish we could fold in
a few pieces of cherry blossoms here
under our eyelids, between our toes—

a poem or song there
to carry with us on the long ride out.

Every time I leave my father
for the last time,
I pull up cilantro by handfuls,
mint, rosemary—from the root
to take home, but it never
survives the journey.

I can feel his close wet breath on my neck as warm
clings to his saliva and seeps
into my pores causing my blood to sway just a bit more

we move silent as all else becomes loud with rhythm
and voice as they creep around the room
demanding / failing for attention

hardwood eyes, his ears, his scratchy chin hairs
are eaten whole
broken into their essence in my stomach
now —
part mine
part his

he speaks with my hand on his person
where the vibrations travel up his center
through to mine then south and south again
to the floor where the glasses shake slightly then spill

the droplets scatter in that moment of chaos
springing into space and onto an outlet that gives out
as the screen streams one last chromatic display
before it too gives out
leaving us again in quiet and in dark

You are a campfire and the bear
in the woods we were warned about.
That VHS tape with all the white lines.

You are the overplayed movie about
the campers who befriend a wild
bear by sheer magic and only one

of them gets eaten. You are the berries
in the bear’s stomach the eaten camper
strings together to make a rope

to climb back out of the bear,
chanting a tune his father sang
so in bad moments, like a bear’s throat,

he is really in a kitchen toes on tile
watching his father love the radio.
Then suddenly you are the bear’s teeth —

mouth wide with surprise as the camper emerges
healthy though a little sticky and slathered
in berry juice. You are the flowing canteen

and applause, the newspaper headlines,
the forest that disappears in darkness
only to return the next day and the next.

You, campfire black and cold as a shrine.

To be eldest is to be the sentence
before the trial.

Even the exodus left me to wreck
and conquer.

All for a heritage
of lack.

I’ve ruined, drunk, and promised.
Botched my anthems.

I was not born here,
I could never.

I’ve had my own zip code
for years now.

I am tired.
Mine is a country

of excisions.
A citizen unother.

Give me your weary-to-the-bone American Dream myth
and I’ll give you the cab driver in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn

who says that he’s a secular Muslim, Ottoman Turkish,
and not the sort of man who spray-paints Allah Akbar

as imprimatur on the brick street beside the Paris dead.
But, instead, the sort blathering on about the iPhone 6s

with the feature where you press and hold the picture
for a sunroof-movie of crossing the Brooklyn Bridge

into Manhattan. He wants riders to hear him translate
the constellations of gang graffiti on the infrastructure,

as if all veterans of the barrel bombings in Syria speak
fluent Blood, this wicked-consecrated city a press-and-

hold Heaven. He brakes. Blares the horn. Says he owns
the 1977 Smokey & the Bandit Trans Am with the T-top

and the wing-splayed raptor decaled in gold on the hood.
Says it in a voice of guarding the pass so others can travel

beyond war, beyond battlefields and the carrion feeders
whose riotous deportment some know better than God.