When I was ten, I was walking in the woods
and came upon a spiderweb the size of a door
and at the center of the tangling sheet of spirals,
this funneled orbs of silk, was a spider, a Goliath
birdeater-slash-huntsman hybrid with its thick
tarantula spiked legs.  I reached out for it, this
strange knowledge that I would be safe, even as
its eight eyes rested into my thumb.  I turned
the spider, and the door opened to reveal a world
on the other side made solely of crepe and eri
silk and mulberry and chiffon and Muga silk,
a world slick, shiny, entire houses bending
with wind.  I walked in and got entangled
in an elm tree, brushing it away from my face.
I kept bouncing, on the softest path I’d ever
walked on until I got to my own home, a home
now for caterpillars, how they lounged on my
old front porch that was now a new front porch,
so tiny and satiny.  I walked up to the front door,
its complication of webs, jumbled threads, and
gently pushed it open, slipping on the smooth
floor so that I fell, landed, harsh, on hardwood,
looking up to see my mother, hovering, telling
me that lunch was ready.  The door blew shut
before I could run back, see if I could find that
world again, but it would only come once, similar,
I suppose, to how I traveled to China fifteen years
later, returned to the U.S., and found myself
never having the time or money to go back, how
I started to wonder if China was real or dream,
or not even a dream, a place that had never
existed for anyone, even the people living there,
now, and when I look into the deep corners of
my closet and see barely visible spiders, I ask
them if I’ll ever be able to return and they are
so silent that I can hear the building moving,
how wind whispers secrets all of the time.

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.