Green Are My Horses

green are my horses

Rachel boyadjis

Published by Charybdis Press New York © 2015 Charybdis Press All rights reserved Printed and bound in the USA 15 14 13 12 4 3 2 1 First Edition Some rights reserved http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

Text & Poetry: Rachel Boyadjis Layout & Design: Jason Blasso Quicksand, CiscoSerif, Rockwell & Whitman fonts used.

For more information please visit www.blackgesso.com www.charybdispress.com

this is for you. *

GREEN ARE MY HORSES

Rachel Boyadjis

C H A RY B D I S P R E S S new york

Contents * * * blood of man/man of sugar equator tropica missing you is an animal i’ve rescued american beauty crustacea blackbird apocalypse demon mercy f(able)d aslan samson and delilah * * * the snow queen huge i met achilles * * * the rapture necropolis it blisters

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wreckage psychedelica mer-people mirth trust too much follies pretty in pink crossed country greener desperade * * * venus starfish witchkiller far away a milder world literal bells hunger has wings lavender parachute

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GREEN ARE MY HORSES

* * * i don’t know if i’m the angler fish or the little one swimming to the light. if my teeth were a skyline that raucous and uneven, i think i would be so hard to love. but is it more important to have the light within you and be monstrous or to want the light so badly that you will break your tiny body to be near it?

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blood of man/man of sugar. there are giants at my window nightly. they loom lenorelenorelenore over my sleeping face, just craven and feverish and gentle, a shadow of diamond between us inextricable. they tread the night-ground slow as stegosaur. there are giants pink-skinned, the sinkswim of wrinkles ripple aged faces, absolutely tombstoned, and a swill of shallow tears, and with eyes a hard soft they watch me, they’re blending in with pitchblack. and almost afraid to turn back. i am reflected tiny in their saucer pupils. they are bigger than i know how to dream. they long to reach in, fingers beluga-huge, and powerline smiles (the shaken sheet porcelain of huge chalked canines) they want to pluck me from my bed, my muscles clenching unknowingly at the disruption of my splayed sleeping form, plane of stomach going solid in sleep. in midair. they want to place me like a jewel in the column of their huge spines, permanent.

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they want to keep me there a secret, a human, a smallsize, a human. they can not because i make giants stumble with a glance a red-fleeced wisp, a doe-eyed flare, with this. and there is you. nightly you reverse-dissolve at my bedside. tombstoned absolutely. you appear straight out of your skinscent, haphazard, all-consuming knight. i can see myself miniature in your giant pupils. i can see myself layered like the breathy vocals of an automated pop. the kind with synth that shimmers. the kind with eyes like rock candy. my eyes. on yours. i snap into focus like Oz did into color. you stand beside me in the dark. you reach out with no sound your feet can not settle for fear of sticking, but your hot hands, your hands are all me. nightly there are giant thoughts at my window, and my heart is so

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consumed by the circus inside me that the lungs have to fight to keep it sound. i kill giants with an inhale they go down.

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equator. maybe it wasn’t under the gums where it started; a switch of searing pink flesh, an ache of rooted white. maybe the palms didn’t quake there in their jeweled soil in the dark. and maybe i didn’t steal the picture frames from the dim room leaving all the photographs fluttering like ocean trash, faces without anchors or glass. and maybe you didn’t help me and maybe you didn’t help. maybe it wasn’t the bones of me gone chalky and tiny in my body under the apologetic skies; maybe it wasn’t me at all. maybe in the eaves of everything i grew without leaves without fruit. maybe i was understood as human even though my mind was vegetation. all the dark green in the world pooled in the place my molar was, and almond trees under my skin, and connective tissue hoping not to sprout and blow the cover; maybe it wasn’t and i wanted it to be. maybe it wasn’t the nail that detached from the bed. maybe i wasn’t made warlock from matador by the people in the stands who falsely loved me but by the bruising in the bull who thought he was me. i was already ugly by the time i came to you, i bled in patterns, my skin cratered in bas-relief, pictographs reflected on each nail like polish, but it wasn’t. i was already creaking from all sides when i crawled up to the doorstep, past the lemon groves that grew wonderland gigantic judged my posture

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and the cadence of my ribs, judged my heartbeat and the angle of my hips, and told me that if i did not crack my knuckles my joints would just float away dead. i broke down the door with a word and remembered that when i was a child i was always looking for the one secret entrance to everything better, that even as a child i was aware, definitively that i was not made for this world. desperate to find another where i could feel not like a human but like myself. i cracked a knuckle and stole from the shelf. kill the gold leaf between the pressed letters, (someone whispered) kill the brief pause between the pressed words. then double over as if giving birth one of those women who is pregnant without knowing it and finds a stranger she was supposed to know for months stranger than my body, stranger than my breath, double over as if it were true i could be doubled. i would wander barefoot in the middle of the night, i mean the literal center, i’d tightrope down its center faultline i’d scale it like a rock-climber, trying to get the view of each side. i would wander barefoot in the middle of the night, stumbling over roadkill and wet clouds of stone, reflection, organic matter unbroken down. tripping over the idea of tripping and wondering who exactly broke my heart and my spirit and my horses.

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the next morning in the comparative safeness of the pale tile café, surrounded by strangers and that reassuring half-morning light and the clatter of unbreakable china, and the burning black scent of coffee, i’d hear them talk about the ghost they’d seen on the highway between lemon trees between their door and their own small backyard. i would forget for a moment that it was me.

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tropica. so i pull the black fleece from my shoulders and it is as simple as peeling off sleeves. as the wax grooves spin music strangled and bountiful, when you are alone with them and they have not yet bit your flesh, only watched with fang eyes, you be bitten. and stand, fully formed and half hearted, against the shell-shocked dome of day which drips rain and light and the mad magic of remarkable memory. and as i turn to you, the snowcap of my dark back jagged against the melting metropolis of my movements, there is a scent of ozone being burned away (as your hands swift swing to clutch me) and a delirious freshness underneath tries to claw its way into our throats and push exhales and gasps into our solid speaking. and i recall with a phantom creep kissing the nape of my neck and the nape of my whole being, and the nape of my whole soul— an open-window sound, the scent of bread burning, apples caramelizing, oranges fermenting, caraway seeds splitting open and releasing the only small spice it can muster. eggs crack over my shoulders, like epaulets, human batter beaten beyond sweetness, being born of its own sweet repleteness, suddenly after i’m underdone and before i’ve started releasing carcinogens which would float like angels from the ends of my hair and from the tips of my fingers

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and from the Hermes heels that threaten always to fly, to fly, the scene snaps away. the dim room, the record shattering like shelacqued and midnight sleet, your mouth open, each tooth a separate head of Cerberus, barking til they’re humming, til they’re whimpering, the braided rug the dust the slants the sickness. and i am not lamblike, no pastures, ivy-less and oat-less, unherded and unheard of. i am standing below a waterfall the pink sand performing necromancy on all my tattered skin cells. as they are resurrected, they scream arias. the stained blues, the lithe greens, the beams of light that enter through the hole where my heart was and fill it. there are oceans and oceans and oceans. and nobody touches me, and nobody watches me as i move all my mountains with brainpower and a little braid of muscle at my back which lifts me up. i do not sweat.

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missing you is an animal i’ve rescued. like a shot dog it strolls through the door choking collar made of mummified spine. loyal eyes that sign-language for more but my root rotting out of its lines. it is not that i don’t love the beast not that i haven’t fed the beast just that there are the things that are keeping my heart beating and the things that are wrapping themselves around my ankles.

Gloom gave me artificial flowers when he went upstairs to bed— i was amazed to see them blooming all of silk and crepe. i thought Gloom lived to eat the manes of the white horses in my head— but he showed me he believed me, he drew blossoms from his cape. it was surrender, i could kill him just by loving you. he made his stomach like a stone and he went home. i’ve been the sickest swan here for the longest of times, my own party dress a pinafore of wreck. i have waited like a lady by the threshold of the gates asked Saint Peter for a time i could not check. i’ve been like a clown with no music to endear herself to saints, to men. no notes to grope the air, to hear herself to make her friends. and though my hands were made calliopes Saint Peter only smiled at me, and told me that i’d simply have to wait. so i’ve been leaning against these bars in jigsaw shapes, battered blackest as the broken beaks of lovebirds.

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and been called Witch by every child who peered out from their drapes no knowledge of their own teeth rotting, or of rot’s words. they have no notion that we humans have a language composed entirely of cavity. that we understand each other and how lovely braids have frayed only by how, exactly how we have decayed. you took me behind the troll bridge and taught me a lesson, held my throat in your hands until you knew, until you memorized the shape of vocal chords for you to rest in, how your name outlined in my voice would feel for you. and when the troll came ambling home and retching for the password you said i was it, pushed me towards him, stunned by how i rocked you left me alone on baking cobblestones, left my syllables all unheard with the bleaching bones of good men at my feet, as if they mocked you. i have been waiting all the time. this lone star of each hand of mine is shaking it forgives you for the way your back, turned, stutters. the Time that’s riding on my shoulders is waking, and when that gargoyle looks forward, coughing, mutters, the wind chime in my chest is looking back. it is rhyming your name with the lightest breeze you ever heard of come home. i am a woman who will drink down your restless. but it has been a long morning without you. and with noon punching in on its fists, i am losing my lost thirst for this.

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come home, your teeth are aching your dawn is breaking there is a witch woman here who adores you.

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american beauty.

the liberty bells in my eyes feign surprise. and i am the new helium. so to throw darts at these candy-colored teeth of Mother Latex, you must throw them at our two deflating hearts. when it hits, it sticks through the cavity, and though my eyes widen, no word can come out of my opened mouth, just an unfurling sadness, and a small spray of velvet blood. the small meat shredded from the shivering chest, then rolled into links, then filled to the brink of breaking and all the rest of the animals shaking. the most saturated milk-scent of the most neglected hours i slept beside you. when in your sleep, like a foal, you kick so quiet, you hold such heaven, when like a filly i step out of the mouth of a real horse, and like a real horse, i choke on the glue that you take from me. and i heal with the one horn you break from me. and every shell that you crack is raised in a straight line down my back. i am every egg white that refused to stay white, and then liquid starts to pool in my sinking clavicles, into oracles. and you will call me Apollo, you will call me your Christos, you call me your Godiva but this skin that you kiss, it tells you nothing without kissing back. grind up this poppyseed of my inhale, this extract of words between your fingers, and bite down. in a sense, the biting down is a biting down on innocence, and swallowing, hard.

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and in a sense, i will put out my hand to the beasts as they sleep, and the bones in my back will all shake, they all shine. like the manes of the animals shiver with a tinge of pastel, ice-blue, burn-pink, brown eyes burn pink, you hold your bow steady and the quiver quivers, and like a real boy, you leave.

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crustacea. i will leave you when i go. i will bite at the base of the crinoline-cornea and spit out sight. i will break the concrete cap of shoulder armor and spill out the living wax center like dead skin reborn and reconfigured. i will ignore you when your want clusters sweet-ant to white-black i will unknit the brows of sleeping foals who were forced to slow cantering to a shame-soled step-by-step. i will leave swans angular. i will leave you when i go. i will climb from the ocean dripping, flanked by a seahorse and a bruised cherub. and i will touch venus on the mouth but never quiet her. the landgirls with souls like wafers and eyes vinyl will seize me by the wrists and strike, and a single braid— thin ribbon of aquamarine blood will congeal to teal all down my sweetheart spine. i will sparkle of sweat over breathless clavicle, break through seaskin and shake and earthquake. i will hack off the locks of your hair that forced your face to hide. i will coax each fiber of muscle to sing with an aching and holdable belief. and you will close my eyelids daily. you’ll take polaroids, you’ll try and find my ghost in the film and the flash reverberates back, back.

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blackbird apocalypse. first there is a Persephone so vexed that she has re-defined the tailbones of spring. she takes bites from her biceps, and smiles. she swims, beluga-huge, through dawn and makes dawn happen. she shakes her head sends sweatflecks flying her frenzied brow quivers beatific biblical positively gloryhalleluiah and i say nothing i say nothing; i don’t know. then there is a falling. feathers crushing down like seraphim pelts all the saints descend headfirst. suspended in air, they take our faces in their hands, and they kiss hard. they reach down to take the stomach linings out of us. we are scratched mythic. breathing as if carbon is a ghost that will just snap away if we breathe loudly. this hour holds our clavicles together for us, collects them into shapes we didn’t know our flesh could take. we are the alphabet of now that bodies breaking new can make. we are afraid, we are afraid like matadors. and lastly Nike brings the night. she drags it like a mother, by a wrist. she stands on my right shoulder, spits sheetcake crumbs to the landscape of my jugular.

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and she grinds them in with bare, blazing heels so that i won’t forget necessity, or death, or how to feel. and she hovers above this borrowed bed like a racehorse that is broken. she aches at me, she opens up my hands. she does not touch me, but my arms are reaching out are flexed in such sinewed strength that i scare myself. i call out uncontrollably, i touch her face. she feels like old silk ripping. she feels like animals being born. and she lets out one breath of relief. there is a chord that Beethoven would have murdered to discover. and we whisper it back and forth across delicious night. when the morning starts again, i wait until each finger is a palindrome. so that when i press my middle and ring to your forehead, the words imprinted there will be readable regardless of if you are standing backwards or forwards. we we

e l

v o

o v

l e

ve with a breathtaking malice with a shocking abandon.

and the black birds of sorrow deny that they were ever here on my arm. the burns they left behind-- skin bubbling and the dreams leaking out of pores will just be called a fluke. we will know better.

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demon. like a lipstick stain on the back of your name (where the pronunciation part comes in). so they go to speak it, ease out the first syllable as sure as cool rain on the sleek, furred back of dawn— but then cannot find the vowels to carry on. scowl delicately, tiny pearls lodged in the knitting of forehead-skin, tinged green and blue with the prisms of concentration. say, i can’t make it out there, see there’s a well, a pink smearing around the last bend of this word. and you realize your name will not be heard. so you resign yourself to a nameless prelude, palms like planets flattened and affixed around muscle and the riotous bone angels, each a separate entity with wings and words and thoughts, but unmoving until connected with each digit, each friend kissing chalkwhite and calcium-heavy to each other, growling out low harmonies in skating, roiling tones, your hands move and you palm out and canter home. always by your lonesome, a bone without the other fingerparts to make a hand always with that magenta scar kissed on to you, blurring. battered somewhere between bruise and baking you are a whirling mess of misunderstood letters, you pray to green-skinned Osiris for the death of what they try and try to call you. he balks at your petty requests, crawls lithely through your window and touches your abdomen with one minted fingertip til you shake, stutter, a raging heat tantalizing nerve endings, you call out,

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start speaking in hieroglyphic tongues. he kisses you on the mouth and disappears, whispering “the thing they call you cannot die, only change.” then he slaps you on your cheek, his handprint an emerald shadow, and disappears. a ricocheting of your skull in the place where they’d make the incision to let soul in. somewhere, a lipsticked wolf as big as Cerberus yearns to fall at your feet purring with a million decibels of affection and of power. he loved you from the start, called you out.

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mercy. i was bred and born in the rotting heart of a giant who tumbled before they had erected cities, before they had desecrated cities, before they had made love to cities. who had collapsed like a whispered earthquake across the dust, and fell asleep there. i grew up inside one half of one ventricle, i only knew the broken walls of the giant’s greenhouse heart, once the taste and shade of wine and now the phantasmic pale of the tongue of a ghost when a ghost tries to kiss you open. a ghost tries to kiss you open. i drew chalk lines across the ridiculous echoes of the giant’s heartbeat, i hopscotched between them until the patterns of the giant’s blood and living were alive in my footfalls, i could tapdance the giant’s own pulse. i heard the nervous thunder of single blades of faded grass growing. i heard the trill of decent birds dying in the earth where they had fallen from the gasping, careless air. i heard their small bodies decompose like a song. in the giant’s heart, my only friends were the echoes of his organs that had long since decayed, and whose spirits stayed behind to talk about how they had made him breathe. and i grew up holding words in my mouth so delicately, because i feared that if my teeth touched their round edges they would break like a shot chandelier. nobody taught me about speaking names about how you can speak them in plain text or cursive,

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and how they do not break if you believe in them, and brave them. but then i dreamt (in the giant’s heart) and i cried out. so ferocious that i shattered the dead walls, i cracked the place where chest was with that sound. and the huge baleen of his ribs rained around me as i stood up in the new and weary world outside the giant. they told me later that there used to be dead ringers under tombs, that if they buried you alive you could thrust up a weak hand inside the casket walls, clutch the end of the tiny sound and ring yourself a warning to the world. yes, i am breathing underneath this angel that is stone, yes, i am here beneath this stopped heart of a mammoth. believe in me, in me, come dig me up.

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f(able)d. rinsed your mouth in mint and unreason, made your body ready for the weight of improbable dreams, scrubbed out the strange canal of your sickened throat like a chimney sweep, whispered all the breaking baying of autumn’s daughter-dogs into your own mouth til you grew as clear as splendid stark as October. tumbled your hair onto the shredding silk of caskets, let it be braided by the bone-fine hands of ghosts who never loved, who wanted you to love, slipped your body into the palms of a coy and safe god, who passed his hushpuppy hands over your forsaken skin til it was scented in white cedar, in burnt honey, in the sweet wreckage of the sea, (when it leaves things behind in pale morning), bid the door in your kneecap open, let the shattered security of your childhood tramp out in a ragged parade screeched banshee-jubilitious til the stained glass in your retinas broke clearing up your second sight and third and only.

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untied the frail, the most delicate, the most secure of nooses from each wrist, studied the rope burn there like crop circles, licked the crumbling blood away and plunged face first into that maze of air, this uncertain labyrinth you’re lost in. you’re falling in love with the minotaur. no matter how clean and how dazzling, no matter how frayed and filthy, you cannot make yourself a nature-abiding animal. and yet you seek out his old hay scent, his cloven hooves, his mad eyes. you begin to dream the dreams of captive beasts.

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aslan. you wake up in the belly of a lion, you panic. it rises (the panic) it heaves (the panic) at the back of your throat it blossoms like a pansy. it is so palpable and searing that it becomes more real than your anatomy and you think i am growing a new throat made all of frenzy. you know you are in the lion because when you press your hands against the lining of his stomach from the inside, he emits the kind of growl only a king could feel entitled to, you swear that you hear him call you Rani. and when you have shouted your throat to the sugarcane splint of lost voice, you curl up in the slick, dark thing and try to sleep. when he prowls, you know what he is stalking by the cadence of his hip hinges as they carry you. by the precise hymns that the pads of his great paws make quiet for the small and craven mammals, crushing loud for larger beasts. you begin to put your hands down as his own prints are made. he steps and you put down your palm as a step; he steps, and you let yourself step. you begin to know the lion’s fears because his heart is hung like a mosquito light above you, attracting nothing but your interest and your hesitant affection. you reach up to taste the lion’s heart and find that it beats at the rhythm of your own.

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you can’t remember if this pace was yours before the lion or if it is a product of living in him. and soon his fears are absorbed into you and dissipated. and you are both of you hunting the horses and you are both of you eating them raw. but one morning the men come and cut you out. they knew because they saw, as the lion walked, a strange angle in his stomach, they saw the feminine curve of your leg as it unfolded like a moth wing under skin, they saw your ankle bone outlined as holy as grace. they find you curled like a fetus in the lion’s belly. you stare up at them with cloudless eyes disturbing in their bell-clearness and their very slight tinge of being feral. when they pull you from his body, your wrists and fingers all get tangled in his mane. and even the sailors do not know those knots. you adjust to the old life just fine, except they say she never was the type of girl to wash with men’s soap before, she never was the type to smell like spice and power. but you do now, when you walk by them, you do.

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samson and delilah. it was the secrets in the whites of his rollercoaster teeth that made you know despite his faltering smile he could be free. and if you stretched the elephant skin around his wise eyes. if he bat his four-inch lashes enough to make a wind, then it would reach you bright as smoke signal, would paint your face in clouds of dust and you would let it. underneath your clothes, there is a lock, there is a birdcage, like a whisper. you lift the pieces and you tell him to look past your sternum like a star, your mourning dove breasts to the real bird that is a thousand, thousand wings. you watch your love become a tree of ocean salt and ten fingers. when you see fear speckled in his eyes, you put out your hand like an animal tamer to lay him down. put your hand out into the still air. magician. and everything hushes, the deepest, darkest schoolchildren amazed. he curls into you, into your chest. but when he doubts, your skin flutters on your bones and you shout. and when they take you down, the broken clowns to pin you to the floor, you struggle, and they whisper through the white do not fight us, this is for your glorious good. you shake them off. you approach him like a harpy to the light. you stumble forwards with the garden shears he bought for cutting bloom and bloom from meadow. you take his head in the cradle of your arm, hold it like his skull is an infant horse, a foal breathing. and so you cut.

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and once you’ve hacked away, you back away, lips apart, the shears quaking in your fingertips, trailing fistfuls of his hair, you sit outside until you are sweating with sunstroke. are full of faint. you wear his hair like a cape til strands are pilfered by the clutch of angry breezes. he comes to you as weakened as pastel. but still his brows move in a quickstep that you know and know so well. and he will kiss you with the fury of primary colors. you see the shape of his skull for the first time. when you open your palms, his braids slip to frozen ground beneath your feet, and are buried. like an archangel he takes you. like a sleeping beast you roll into his shoulders. and when he touches your mouth you are not silent. he touches the side of your shoulder. you falter. he touches the back of your neck, and you stand. he puts out his hand like an animal tamer to lay you down. but you’ve lifted all the nervous ardor from where it hung bravado and lace about his face. and now he knows how to weep, and while he watches you sleep, he collects you in his arms, awed by eyes darting under lids when you are dreaming. and is terrified of what he knows: that you, quiet queen, can creep into his bed, and cut his hair. can see him naked and still love him.

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when you awake (your bruised eyes open), the sheets are crumpled into knots like they gave up. when you awake, (the muscles in your arms all singing the remembered weight of garden shears) thrust out your hand to touch his brow, to press into his heartbeat, to find the planar olympus of his back, your hand will either meet the promise of a breathing body bigger than your own, or you will find yourself alone, and find him gone.

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* * * it is a strange, cloaked thing moving under shrouds of wine cloud. it is asking children seriously their thoughts, is is asking them to pronounce ‘rabbit,’ mouthing the syllables from under the fine. in moving viscosity of both veil and human helm, silently encapsuling the letters and black lipsticked is it a strange, musk thing. it lifts the bone helmet from solider skull just to hear the sweet creak of the lifting. to hear the entranced whine from the parted lips of the boy. it steals the pale pearls from the nightstand in fistfuls. it eats the small wails from the canary as it goes. it shifts in shifting, it lifts without wing, it unearths vallied, hay-scented fields and cities, whole breathful seascapes, green and light and salt in lonely backyards, digging madly with lavender fingers til blood comes, throwing fistfuls away as if for a grave and lets you peer then at what it found— whole worlds beneath the ground that you did nothing to till or throw your body to. it draws out the silent film star in your body, your own shadow girlishly hidden, suddenly steps from you sideways, her hair a tincture of burgundy and bruise, her eyes sparked supernova where yours are engine. it installs a new heart in you, puts up mahogany walls where your throat was, polishes til shining, its hands grow strong from all the baking,

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from cutting small men from dough and frosting eyes on. it controls tides but only the ones in your mind. it calls the moon down only to chastise it so violently, and with its lips so close to the neck that the moon shivers, that you shiver and grow jealous.

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the snow queen.

she seeped through the skins of battered books, they had no choice but to allow her passage to this side. i stumbled when the muscles in my back ached, those stalks of sure sugarcane splintered. put my hand there. she breathed out the remotest shards of northern light, she chilled even our paltry mememto mori to the bone. i erected statues in the honor of my dreams upon the stegosaurus staircase of my spine. i did it myself. she shook dusk like a tapestry of her own making, she took a boy child from his home, she made him love the cold. i shivered in the light like the dust around a long-forgotten handprint, and drew the patches of dim color all around me hoping they would somehow look like wings. she felt my steps when i whispered by, the succinct autumn of each of my footprints burned garish valleys in each of her shoulders, and hot tears melted her face. i stopped and went as green as Toulouse’s last bottle when i saw what i had done, and i backed away. she threw out a frosty hand, she held me by the wrist, she spat curses at my heart, but it would not chill. i struggled in the pale light (the boy scampered off). i wailed until Persephone dropped her pomegranate seeds in six simple notes, and stared up at her ceiling (which is our ground) and Hades had to say

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what is it, dear? i screamed until the banshees flew out of me, i screamed until my heart flew into me. she melted. i do not believe in freezing.

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huge. the thing about being a saint is that you have to die for it. before they tease the creaking glow from either of your temples, before they make the little cuts to let the light leak a full circle at your crown, you have to bleed. they do not tell you that they hide their hands in robes because they are clutching at the broken ends of bedposts and at daggers, and you reach out your own because you want to hold a hand. the breaking of horses happens in your backyard. you wake up in straw dawns with the taste of dreams still dusting the back of your tongue, and when you open the window, you see them. the black muscles are braided in fatigue, the hooves pound out the morse code of an inhuman language, and the wild ones are tamed with such a delicate force that your breath is snatched away from its hiding place within you. the place where the storm happens is the ragged hole that shows beneath your heart. the framework shakes like human limbs in frost, and you are wind-whipped internally, your teeth are punched out by your smile and then re-grown again in seconds. there is a ball of different planets crushed together in your brain and it is bursting. you are a swirl of the impossible world, you cut the tempest with your voice, your chest is beating like a heart, your skeleton sings you huge. you clamber to the mast, the pieces of the windworn wood break off beneath your hands, your bare feet scrambling.

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you hug splinters into your arms, you cling, you laugh. when you reach the top, the roiling sea below you and every gruesome fish beneath its surface waiting. you keep your balance (somehow) in the maniac breeze, in the pelting and the terror, and then you lift your arms above you as whispering and gentle as a ballerina fainting and you let yourself slip off, you plunge, you break. the thing about being a saint is you have to die for it. as you are sinking, you feel the edges of a light pierce the skin of your temples, you feel a warmth.

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i met achilles. i met achilles at the side of that road. at the time he told me, the street sign he told me. he could not hold his head up, not even with his hands. he was so tired that the pealing shadows in his jaw slipped as broken bells. that his face was slack wonder and with a pain so bright his eyes sparked and faded— electric candles mysteriously reverting to plain fire. i watched his coiled muscles breathing like foals and bears and leopards. waited til the orchards of his eyes with a single black apple in each met mine, bewildered. how perilous honest tragic magic terrible and brave i told him. to have a weakness so small huge vital breakable and known. he touched the tiny nile that his tendon was, a river up and down the back of his ankle. never in danger of drying out. always, always in danger. his face went bleak and roiling and his godlike ardor lightningstruck and quickstepped. there was pity. and he said you know what it’s like. he laughed a rainbow of sound fit for toucans, fit for wings, and when my brows braided up in question, he pointed to the place where my heart is, and he leapt up and ran away limping.

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* * * i live in the sticking sweetness of the preserved walnut brain where function ceases to an earthy kind of reality that is paired well with bitters, with ice. that burns on the way down. where emotion once was, fired like tiny ribbons from owl-call casings. and now there is only the maze of seeded meat. i live in the burned-off part of the morning on the sea, (not that sea) the thin film of lightness just above the green/salt/cool distorting reflections and dashing pores out of their comas. then the reflection clears to crystal definition of your jawline/forearms/ hipbones, and when you look down at them in real life, they are blurred. i live in the firmamental dawn between a weeping and a breath and a weeping. i live in the dawn between sleep and not sleeping. i hold you in the palm of my hand, the literal palm, though you are not palm-sized and my palm not god-sized. i adorn your neck with black diamonds which do not cut it. and lift the delicate swath of your eyelash from your field of vision. i harvest a wheatlike hallucination from that field i try to get it to grow in the soil that i swallowed to make my insides a garden,

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but it is stubborn, it is bitter, and ice. then the sick hollows out into hunger; it is an eating, fire on rolling paper leaving living ash— it is a rampart crumbling with time-lapse momentum. vision. then i realize this is the world i’m in. and suddenly, my bones seem too close to my skin.

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the rapture.

Dear Time, i thought we loved you so much that we told you to end. but now my trombone spine slides upwards and falters. i still go all maroon when you walk by i’m blood clouding up in water. i’m stumble-backable with the truth of your poised, broken seconds gasping on like this. i didn’t picture you this way, word angel. and i feel the soles of my feet steel-heavy with my attachment to my own choice to sin.

Dear This Hour, you got it down to a science. the half-dressed stage of healing that punches in on kitten heels after bruise. the shade of green like your whole body is a springtime which heals capillaries. leaves faint tracings of the little, brilliant pains. i want that moss mist like Queen Mab must have open-mouth kissed me, (and you know how she kisses, that shake-monger, how she takes the point of your chin in the meadow of her palm, and grinds bluebells into your tearducts until you’re blind.) i never pictured it that way.

Dear This Minute, you trailed the chalk parts of separate prophecied doomsdays, a flaking femur of the last judgment the larynx (done in green) of the final flood, it was like these pale bones would form, any second,

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some archaic, lumbering animal, loping giant, hooved, winged, living proof of our human blight. but they didn’t. so i picked them up myself. carried them. i tried to fashion rough models of that mythic being but they all ended up looking like my own cheekbones.

Dear Five, my rosary knuckles whitening. my uneven mouth snapping into peppermint my left pectoral cut away like a room in a dollhouse.

Dear Four, all the windows in my chest exploding open. they shatter.

Dear Three, the pinwheels churning under deltoids ripping up muscle with how fast they are spinning.

Dear Two, the flitting machinery of speech speeding, motored hum is it- time it’s- is it- time it’s- is it- time Dear One, the zero never comes. and i’m left standing at the edge of this city looking up into a sky that believes in us enough to stay clear. i look down then, and for the first time i’ve got a bruise. this proof

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that my insides are so eager to tell the violent, perfect tales that they are clamoring to meet the outside green. (we set our watches for the next apocalypse. we stretch out our arms and hum the same notes.)

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necropolis. i have been watching myself turn into pyramids. the delicate crumble of each of my pupils is made holy by the fact that i am becoming ancient. i have been straining to hear (my neck tilted all the way, my jugular just learning to stare down the sky) i have been listening to each of my shoulders. as they morph from flesh to limestone their whispers get softer, and their language changes. i have found that when i weep, miniature Niles run down my cheeks in parallel lines, i am finding myself weeping all the time. i have felt the dead bodies of pharoahs turn in my abdomen, throw their arms before them in dream, reach for a figment of an outstretched hand. i feel them cling to my sternum when they are told it is time to go like children hanging on to strings of clear balloons. i feel their bodies get heavier as soon as they commit to this leaving. i hear my shoulders insist that if the human husk gains weight the moment after death than the soul must be lighter than secret be lighter than ghost. be lighter than air. i hear them mumble that what is streaming from my tear ducts is not sadness, and it isn’t. there is a big love that lives underneath my pillow and it is dividing into blocks and blocks that i store in the tombs and tombs of me. each block painted with one letter, and i can spell words, and i can spell prayers, and i am an alphabet,

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i am in hieroglyphs. there is a mammoth-sized hole in the moth of my soul, and Osiris comes to my bedside to fill it when day breaks, carrying in one hand glue to patch the thing together, carrying in the other just two flakes of his green skin to fashion wings for me, he sings for me and disappears by the time the sun is up. i am finding morning glories in my eye sockets, but they bloom only after dark and i wonder what this means of my mornings.

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it blisters. they lined us up naked among terrified bare trees. we tried to pretend it was springtime. they shook the twins of our shoulders, told us to pay up. when we shook our heads, they forced tubes of neon down our throats til we dropped to our knees as if in prayer and coughed up our stories, which writhed and protested like broken baby sparrows, which they cupped between palms for a second, as if in wonder and then ate raw.

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wreckage. we, the city, wake up in our own ashes, dip the pads of our fingers in the dust, apply it to our browbones without mirrors, without lights and walk into the day to fix ourselves.

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psychedelica.

like a freezing shock of water down the castle of your throat but if you didn’t have a throat, but if there wasn’t water. like if, vestigial as appendix but graceful as the breath before sprint, you felt the non-shock down your non throat where your non song comes out and you want beyond wanting just to doubt. but those ghouls of condensation, long evaporated, peel up from invisible graves. and the stalks of what were once your vocal chords bloom, as in violet, as in batwing breaking slightly out of shell and there is nothing you can do to quench the quell. it rises, halloween din through all your june twilights, this column of ghost water, a weight as noxious as the flanks of triceratops pressing their three points of cool down, cool now, cool down. but the pink heat of you, which begs to speak words impossible, which crawls against the walls of nonexistence to declare, which hums a ragtime through your heart and heat and body, that clanging lilt, angelic tunes ricochet from bone to bone to bone, you stand, aching for a drink, unable to ask for it, unable to harmonize with the splendid sight of song that is before you, this person, your fists they ball at the ends of terrible wrists, your legs stand still and splintering as the ancient scaffold legs of old ferris wheels, you are burning up brighter than sunshine reaching earth from outer space. you are burning up, you want nothing but the fine ice of relief, you have no voice to beg, you have no stream of calm and if you asked you’d still be burning all along.

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it’s like that—affection. to kindle.

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mer-people. you float. for a moment. like a diary. when the tide comes swollen anxious terrible and brave, you don’t behave, you spread your barbed arms to the glory of an impossible gushing of your legendary sadness, out into the still and unapologetic air, a dissipating of your slow melancholy into the broken afternoon, into the afternoon-sized ocean that you’ve stumbled into expecting to drown, you did not wear your good shoes expecting to riptide your body open, you wore your best dress so that when they found you, the unraveled threads would serve as symbol, as a place for them to put their horror instead of on your mangled body, they could say but that silk used to shine that shame used to shine. people give you wounds and you love them. but you don’t have to be afraid. because you don’t have to be afraid. because you don’t have to unravel. because there is a god and she is you. because the sandcastles are being eroded and re-built inside your body every second

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by armies that you do not have to hire— they want to do this for you, because they love you. because they are you. people bruise your body and you love them. you grow gargoyles behind your ears, they will hang earrings in the piercings, they will whisper solace through the bad things, they treat you as a church, and they sit still. you will be swept up, you will be carried out, from shore to deepest depths. your legs will dangle at the surface of the blue. you could wait for the crustaceous terrors to break you at the ankle, or you could look up to the matchless sky and cry out that you’ve seen the way to truth and it is in the eyes of another person and it is in the parts of another person which make you terrified of the affection that is unleashed (like Cerberus, but as a puppy when he was just a three-headed babe without a bite, clumsy and sweet, perhaps with an unsettling tendency to bark at the innocent) you have seen the way to truth and it is in the eyes of another person

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who knows exactly where you are broken and still loves you. you can break you, you who can lead you to the water can make you drink. you think you see a ghost. you look again it is your reflection. correction: you approach the ocean in your best dress. you are swimming out to sea. you are swimming to the shore. choose one.

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mirth.

he will bite her black, and she’ll bite back. i speak to you in english italian and greek. what i can remember anyway. nobody will quite comprehend the ink-blots of bruise left, which clamor like phantoms under lucid-tan skin, no one will know except that they will want to sin. i speak to you in german and russian and french. what i can extract from passing strangers. they will watch the marks bloom like photosynthesis reversed— will watch the clouds come bluely bleakly, watch them foxtrot boldly meekly to the unders of her eyes and curtsey there. they will watch a rainbow darken over each of her shoulders like epaulets. i speak to you in tongues and tones and timbres. they will feel, as they see this happen, goosebumps raise like tiny choral voices on their arms, will be alarmed at their shark-heavy want to behave badly,

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at their lamb-soft want to open madly heart-hinge and let the gentle world in. recall that want is nothing more than phantom limb. what giant ghosts of sound my chest can press out, anyway— i speak to you in seconds and minutes and hours. there is a ladder that loves her, it leads lunarwards, it passes birds and breaks the hollow bones of them in lifting. it grows like orchid, it shuts like eyelid. it is a wood so eager to mirror human emotion that it’s petrified, she climbs. i speak to you in hundreds and thousands and millions— and as the wind whips her hair, until my voice is split, until my brows are knit, and as the great blue wondering falls a dust-laden pearl— as stars cut at her shins in broad daylight, draw blood with all the artistry of portraiture and medicine, until my hands are shaken, until my teeth mistaken, until my back is arching, until my throat is faded,

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as a great clear pillow of air breaks out from what she thought was the limit of the sky and as the light of it moves all of them to cry, as it grows upwards as stolid as a spine, pterodactyline dream, quiet gleam, i speak to you until my voice is blooming. until my throat is lucky, until my mouth is meadow, until my heart is shod, and cantering, until my head is aching, until my mind is desecrating cities to build cities, they are watching as she climbs, limbs unslung, rung by rung, until i could faint, snap dead away from the moment, until i could re-do my whole life backwards, just to get to the right pronunciation of the word, and have it heard— i speak to you in songs unsung and bones unslung and ladder rungs, until my skin is sparkling, synapses gone to stars, and chest heaving, believed, boundless, until i am sobbing, until i am singing, until my voice is singing, they are watching her muscles begin themselves, they are watching her heart start to define whole senses that were almost undiscovered, and just before she disappears, their eyes will widen, retinas sprout small hands to cover themselves

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in shock in terror in blazing delight until my forehead touches yours to make a word. they will recognize the bruises on her arms and down her back in an instant, as a language, as a symbol. they will know it wholly and will see it as a soft as a quiet as a love, as love, as love. as the wind whips her hair, he is there. i speak to you until you understand and understand and understand and understand and understand.

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trust too much.

a confident girl walks into a parlor. no. a confidant girl walks into a bedroom. made of malt and three-inch heels. with the small-breasted power of tombstone angels. splits in the sides laced up bone-corset style; and a heady blue collecting around ankles. (the better to tread and the better to leave footprints). a scintillating blue. sequins dust shoulders like flakes of searphimskin; and fall every time the bedsheet shakes and the girl steps through unfazed. who dreams in the aftermath lactose of spilled milk, who cleans it up by licking the linoleum, wiping the cupidsbow with the back of a hand, the skin a disarming shade of artificial light. who is blizzard-skinned. and who doesn’t know heaven, because it exists curled

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inside the lock of the bedroom door. this girl does not use keys.

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follies. there is a silver shell covering each cowering breast. like a hand clamped over a mouth in shock. there is a polyester blend mermaid tail a scalding sucrose pink and there are plastic sunglasses shaped like screams. the merman in me is a woman. and the shade of my luminesce is a terrifying black. and the shade of my loveliness is a terrifying black. there is a silver bell covering each quiet. there is a caged bear all miniature and faded in my stomach. i am a bear of a girl and i cannot stand to stand up and i cannot take you sitting down and i cannot break the chains of braided human hair around your wrists until you do.

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pretty in pink.

i’ve got a private andromeda in between my sinuses, bruises like blooms like capillary rosettes, i’ve got a hope that’s dusted with crystallized salt shoddily posing as sugar i mean it’s sugar i mean it is. i am the ugly side of ballet, i am glue in the cracks of old silk pointe shoes that is so deftly applied to hide the imperfect, i am the gilt and the guilt of sad dancers. the only white doe in a vicious iced December and you reach for me but you don’t reach for me. just reach for me. i’ve got a minute genocide of What i Deserve crammed into each molar and in each single bead on my dreamcatcher, the synthetic leather is kelly green and then white and then green and then white and i only create such fantasy things to cover my stomach

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because my abdomen shrills to be noticed not for sight of the skin but for the way it glitters the way i glitter like nobody else does like you know she doesn’t.

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crossed country.

this is a cream-filled slice of strange barren land, this is a solar-plexus bone in the chest of simple snowscape. velvet linings to the lungs of every barely breathing beast, and cellophane crinkle underneath each angry eye. this is an overstuffed socket of a coffin-sized world, where the planet itself is the skull. and jersey is the pupil. this is a memory-well where pixilated faces are drawn up daily and drunk. mason and dixon do not want you here, only southern lights and the way your mother tried to love you, only high school fights and northern insights. only the three-step motion of an orthodox newborn being taught how to cross herself the right way.

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greener. i turn girl scout green an undecided blush of envy when they tell me i am only human. my body goes strange and speeding with the weight of truth that is this fact: what is in me is not contained in me. when the gods have a food fight it’s all the sacrificed innocents, limbs and pale hearts and throats that couldn’t help themselves, the terrible hair of virgin girls coming loose in the wind of the diner as the girls themselves, limbless, loveless, are thrown across the tile, the picnic tables, jubilitious tragic. the blue-skinned and the halos, the many-winged and splendid— with cheekbones as large as mountains catching ravenous and florescent light blood, tail, toothache, wonderful mistake— toss about the human bits that fortified their strength laugh (a sound like the dying of young oceans) they hit their friends, their rivals, hardly any sound. the pheromones of gods are not an inward code raised up like braille beneath their cloudless skin. instead, these strange attractions are excavated from their most private sides, and sent into earthly atmosphere as changes of weather, the only physical expression of their wanting. the cinder-sweet the crying split of lightning is the mark of one god falling heavily for another, their need to reach out gargantuan, ghostly fingers, touch their love

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and not cause a world shaking in the process. when they whisper, giddy and hesitant, the gods’ heartbeats give us aneurysms, and we tumble feeling strangely at peace. they dry us out the way hydrangeas dry at the edge of Septemberpale, paler, palest but never losing the strangled note of their original color. we crash with our hands tightly gripped, our world shaken like a modern Pompeii but still our tiny flutish fingers are nothing compared to their behemoth affections. we do not know how they turn mountain green at the sight of us falling away, how envious they are of our ridiculous talent for holding each other even in wreckage even in death even swaddled in the quick loss of hope. they turn, their backs scattering whole planets like nutshells. they cannot watch us disintegrate because they know that if it were they who felt defeated the gods would jump on winged heels from the planet that they burned find a new one dominate it wholly and alone. while we, the ruthless reckless meek, choose to go covered in stains of not virgin tears,

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not infant sweat, but milk and wine and sugar, the breadcrumbs that we hurled laughing at each other embedded in our nails, tea and coffee in our hair, and melting sweets, and frozen cream messily, we will die clinging and kissing. tiny, breaking, jaws asunder but hearts knotted braided calcified. so much that angels have to close their eyes.

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desperade.

I. Blasphemy lives in a lawn-chair, her eyes as artificial as the rubber strips.

II. The slatted rundown of a sunwashed streethouse where light is steeped in lemonade that the striped-shirted kids charge a dime for, (which means ten cents is the price of their childhooded dreams, this is what you’re buying,) when they ask for warm milk you drop Aztec coins into modern lactose just to scare them into believing that they are not permanent.

III. The porches collapse into themselves like the scaf[folded] hands of the mothers who crouch upon them after dinner. They’re picking the last timid flesh off of crumbling wishbone, melting into pools of vanillin, kneeling on cracking haunches made of sugar and flour and a fear of inadequacy. Palms to chipped paint, folding-lawn-chair spines unfurling, voices raised in breakfasted rasp, Oh: Deliver us from the wicked ways of starving summer shadowdays, the plastic of our hips ache from the soapchildren we bore and carried upon them, hoping they would cleanse away these waking sins from our tiring skins, Oh: deliver us, we’re scared of this constancy, constantly the minds inside beg so hard for a seaside that the tears from these decaying eyes are calcified to pearls. Instead of this shell-oven mumbling in baking stroke of metal incisors and of burning dough canines. . .

IV. The difference between undone and underdone

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is three shaking batter-covered fingers. We are reclining into the frosting, crying into the cakes, Oh: deliver us, oh dear Blaspheme, deliver us, we want to dream.

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* * * the ambling eaves of your breastbone are rising above the ashes of your lungs each time, regardless of your crumbling, they breathe. you are the inside-out of a patchworked wing revisited after the falling, you are calling from the rafters of your blasted alabaster, from the churches of your love which took you down. you are silvered and gold beneath the unrelenting dust of trusting child within yourself, you birth a hundred tiny horses in a ragged carousel, they age you but you watch them nonetheless. because their tinkering and their nonstop is amazing. because you are breathless at the wanderlust of these tiny muscled beings for just their endless circle. the calliope throatsong is broken like an eggshell to you, who sees only a merry go round, but they— the fillies— they see the weeping panoramic of a whole uncreaking world as it wakes up. heaving its sleepy shoulders as it roils and rocks and opens— the vast beyond. they, your children, have been given a sight superior to yours, because they are evolved, and because you made them. and you can only break back on your swollen heels, and watch them run.

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there is a gem or pit or fragment that is lodged within your shoulder and it stunts your magic movements, knots itself into a frown each time you try to lift your arms, so that a motion of ambition comes out all crucifix and crumbled caliber. there is a rock the size of mammoth molar that stops you from clawing at the crescent moon, from sinking your nails into her perfect lunar flesh and loving her. and until you shrug it out— like you are upturning a tomb, like you are unrooting an entire mausoleum of doubt, like you are raising up the fistfuls of a newborn truth to eat the sun— you will not be able to lift your arms to their full their glorious. take your hands from where they rest over your vision. peel your palms from your eyes and take this view in. be speechless, be a dumbfounded god. a mute angel in a heaven which was hidden. and then gasp.

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venus.

okay, so the truncated torso all marvelous, marvelous abalone mystifying marble of a woman, the body twisting as if to hear a sound that you let flag out billowing like you turned a maypole into words, the waist not wasted in the least, a full description in its diameter of molten strength and harvested affection, beginning as a boiling in abdomen ending in a whole field of bended love. what happens to venus’ arms to make them tremble so to make them shake til shatter to make them believe so much in some uncarved thing that they would break themselves from her body, pull themselves across whole meadows with clawed fingers, caking dirt, to get to it? leaves her without them leaves her famous for being unwhole. so, i am standing in a field like a scarecrow i am blowing the breath of October i watch (daily) the ancient steps of buffalo that lived beyond iroquois arrow. i watch (daily) the foundling steps of arrowheads that grew legs and tried to shed their own danger ashamed at their capacity to kill. i am standing in a field like a river i am standing in a river like an ocean i am standing in an ocean like my feet balance on a single pearl i am armless at my want to hear this sound i heard that was uttered

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like a maypole into words i will twist myself to sculptural proportions just to hear it i will rip my arms from my shoulders to claim it. they call me marvelous, marvelous, marvelous.

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starfish.

we are all awake here. it is the center of a night, we have collected like tears in stale corners of huge eyes. dim shores of morning unwrap themselves. tides are heaving asthmatic, are creeping. are lilting only to the edges of this waking. they give us space. and we are thousands, and we are strangers. each face fuller than each of the stomachs of the holy calf curled at the base of this broken brain. which says nothing of my three acre heart.

Lady Poseidon stretches angry her blue fingers across the dust, and all for us, but cannot touch. our colossal stories crash through our own chests and this aches us awake. the sleepish way cerebral curtains cortex open. infant trachea amusement park heart. balsam forearms breaking with the weight. tiny dinosaurs dying in the molten folds of lungs and being reborn with each inhale, every time. we stand a labyrinth of excuses for our own magnificence and when we see each new eye shining open, we crumble. the conscience in each of our throats lisps “you will not find another. ribcage like glass. each fingernail blooming a miniscule orchid cracking clear through the nail to get out. each wrist a river styx that will make

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your whole body want to enter through pores, and float. you will not find another. tailbone as smooth as tailcoats. each hand a serendipity, each heel a separate carving of a separate unnamed saint and every bone singing like a struck tuner.” we give us space. in our stupor we offer you are lovely, in a chorus and a chorus, thousands, answers back, no, you. and we stop short because we thought ourselves grotesque. and my muscles have trembled enough with the atrocious truth of what they understand. i have turned names into the skulls of canaries held in both palms. and they have shattered all the scaffold bones within me. but the black bethlehem where my tiny dawns were born is unharmed in the center of my chest. so i reason with the children that are sinew. i kiss the left bicep lightly, reassuring and when my achilles tendon threatens to snap and pool at my heels, i run my fingertips across him like a harp, i make him quiet like the movies. and i realize the crowd has disappeared. so i burn up like a kamikaze dream beneath the sheet, i wake alone a spit-up somekind of selkie on the dim shores of morning.

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ocean seeping up. swallowing the bed. but i am all awake here and this is swimming skin.

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witchkiller.

Dorothy knew what she was doing. i know because she hoodwinked both cherub-sized eyes at me as she did it. i know because she put one finger to two lips, said, i am so lost inside my blackandwhite that i will put soles down heavy until they land in some color and stain. she could not control the twister, she could not help but slip inside it like a lover slips a hand inside a blouse. and when Miss Gale, the sweet assassin, blinked open baby blues, dug the dust from the tearducts, and saw where that wooden place was heading, she did something. she took each side of the screen door’s threshold in each fist. she put every ounce of her tidy pounds into that bending oak, and she steered the whole house her-shaking-self in the direction that a rainbow was insinuating soft (the dullest tones of a weeping harpy) in her ear. she followed the crazed laughing of one eastward witch, until she landed. she could not help but help the house break a spine so much darker than her own. she broke green skin like Christians break bread. when Dorothy landed, Glinda did not just waltz blind, cocooned in pink cellophane to meet her, No. because i lived on the edge of her lower lip for a while, and i heard when she whispered to the girl, little lady, the harpy is the rainbow’s sister, did you know? and she can rake talons through flesh just as easily as her sister harvests that magic under human eyelids, darling, they are not so far apart

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and you aren’t either. i am so alive i am breaking, i am so broken i am scaffolding my spirit. see, inside that suit of tin was no man, it was me. and i watched the pretty girl murder two witches in just an hour and a half. each time she nodded, ever so, before she did it. and my gasp, my startled exhale came out in a cloud of silver just like my painted cheeks. and now that it’s over, now that my pancake makeup has been smeared off by some quiet man in this real world, by an inch of warm skin against flickering dream, i remember Miss Gale. i remember how just the faintest little banshee of a smile took wing across her lips as the broomstick woman melted, i remember. she was no innocent who had just been told of a perfect infant flicked into her stomach by the giant hand of a dove-shaped, distracted god. she was no white-haired child forced to let them eat cake, to lose a cranium like you might lose a necklace. and she was not in Wonderland. not Dorothy. she was the only one who wore blue gingham for armor who swept in like an apocalypse rider, touched the foreheads of her monsters with just a fingertip til they fell for her. and if i could find her number now,

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amidst the dizzying collection of papers that are stuffed beneath my chest, if i could dig it out and find her voice in Kansas, i’d tell her first that every cackle has a lullaby inside i’d tell her second that i would have stayed in Oz.

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far away. we used to wear fur, and silk, and scabbard. we used to fight. sometimes war in the morning sounds like bullet casings full of birds. sometimes the stabbing music jangles so resplendent and so wrecked, that you begin to be convinced that wretched sound is a calliope— it smiles at me— it sings. but once, the tired organs started singing at the thought of morning warring. once they sifted through the splendor of their unused parts, their white notes, they found the tones beneath the dust layers, grace between the naysayers, and stumbled into note to tune to song. once they made the whole world breathless with the need to sing along, and we (the breathless) stripped ourselves of Notion and of fight. painted that day a nativity. painted all ourselves without halo. when i dropped unused grenades like bride bouquets behind me and held the door for you, you crumbled at the frame, and you held on. told me chivalry is not dead as long as you’re alive. and we walked until we broke. and we broke til we became the elegant alate. it was not easy to walk into the sun with solid steps. our joints screeched and collapsed and skittered at the seams. it was not easy to feel our skin slip, melting from our bones drip down in golden splendor from the sky, to feel our retinas widen like begging mouths until they shattered at the glory of a blast so much brighter than the comets of our paltry human spirits.

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when we reached the center of the sun shorn of our muscle, it all been adopted

by Apollo’s gentle fingertips, clawing, claiming. we were down to our sapphire bones charred and sweet and smiling, we were home. and we had never looked that lovely in our lives. all of our teeth shined in choruses that matched. and now the black bloom of my breast is singing with the weight of my whole devil of a soul, it sits cross-legged where my chest bones meet their matching parts and hold each other close to form a ribcage out of calcified affection. i watch with unsunken ships of eyes as you fight to fall asleep and as you fight to wake when dreams sit where your chest bones form a cage that you can’t break from. and i am the last to crane my neck to spasms at the pale pronouncing sky, to screech it open with the muscles cloying deep within my mouth, the maw of morning is the last to match my voice. we once walked through the belly of the Sphinx. erased the riddle from her thigh where she had scrawled it in ink and pushed her skirts down when the architects and emperors searchlit for signs of cheating. we looked into one of her eyes (big as your body, stone as your lonesome exhaling) and she wept—

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spoke clearly for the first time in her life. broke dawn with the heave and heft of speaking. i watch you move, you soldier, who is fighting in your sleep. i hang a bell in my breath in the breathing attic of my throat. and i let it replace my exhaling. we used to wear fur. and silk. and scabbard. sometimes, when i least expected it, i could feel the heartbeat of the animal it used to be. at first just an echo of my own heart i thought, but then, if i listened, the ghosts of many, many rabbits running.

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a milder world. the seasons come stubbornly now, abused dogs and once-white horses, horns broken from brows, the other two heads of them battered. the seasons come stubbornly now, shrinking from the hands that painted them, petals curl into themselves, stain themselves dark; snow breaks out in fever and obliterates itself, suicidal season, falling brightly like an angel that we accidentally shot. and our bare shoulders like wet rocks. the v of collarbones like flocks of birds mid-migration, our bodies in mid migration, exposed for longer in the year, the sun bolder in her science fiction power. we prance for longer now, stop for less water, rip from our bodies extra pieces to make confetti, celebrate a milder world, a softer planet, where the toy Cerberuses (bred specially for our lithe hands, for the bones of our fingers which are keen to break like the backs of fairies if bent too far) those dogs do not frostbite us where the season Fall has been re-named Stagger. we celebrate a gentler weather in the atmosphere, we watch the sweat form epaulets on our shoulders in wonder. we do not miss the cold, our skin forgets to turn blue and we smile like sweet sixteen like wedding day like folly. unaware that while the planet goes milder,

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hot October, lamblike February, we become ourselves more wretched, we become ourselves tantrums in our skin. and Mars and Venus, their fists balled, their tears choking back, watch as our shadows, frail and skeletal and huge and bountiful and brash and bleating, as our shadows morph to echo the exact same form that the dinosaurs did before us, how they screeched, locked horns and bit until they disappeared in molten miscellany. we love the milder world, we count each grain of sand on each beach and we get each grain of sand stuck in our molars. in our privatest of places. we plan to live on the lunar face of the moon, we plan to sink our heels in every virgin crater. what we don’t see is how the skin around our eyes has started crinkling with a fury, how our hands twitch how our necks spasm how each day we look more like zombies and less like souls. we don’t know how we sleepwalk with our hearts ripped out of our chests, and held tentatively forth, with shaking hands, with our hands covered in blood, and how each dawn we sew our chests back together with the finest thread and the most melancholy cross stitch. we don’t notice how alive we are until a drop of starved snow

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dares to lick sweetly the cheekbones that we bare. there is a carol in our hearts still, faintly and beneath, see, it is there.

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literal bells. under the bridge the troll is crushing cars with his molars is confusing the cracking of his knuckles with the popping of abnormal human skulls. he is lifting the children out of their car seats with a forefinger and thumb, surprisingly delicate surprisingly understanding of innocence. he is letting them take his portrait with their crayons and construction paper. he is letting them ride on his shoulders. he kills only the grown-ups, the steering wheels rolling like pinwheels in the trapped mist, away. their coffee spilling down his fingers, staining his nails, their frozen-open eyes registering not fear but regret. he lets the children live. he does not speak to them, but he loves them, reminds them I exist, and dreams like me exist. we live under bridges and in corners all the time. it is just about whether you choose to believe in us to see us. and the children who lived, they grow up. they grow up with very few teeth, because the troll will have raised them on particles of boulder and wisdom and crumbling believing. the toothless adolescents, they wander the streets in invisible capes that you can (you swear it) you can see. and they see mermaids in their bottles of spring water

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and they see giants in the flicking flames of their lighters and they see truth in the face of a terrible unraveling of the world. they alone are soldiers of a splendorous new living, they alone cup it in their hands. i was one of them. i lived, he let me live. he plucked me from the backseat and looked into my eyes and said excuse me, miss. that wasn’t for your purple eyes, miss, and looked into my ears and said the shells that live there are meant for beautiful crustaceans to claw out of to walk out of the ocean, look, the ocean, look, your neck. i was one of them and now i am grown. and you to me don’t look like a man you look like a boy hiding underneath a man’s face. you are looking and he is looking. as you are looking, i brush away the horseflies from the air with the palm of my hand— not the back of it, i’m not hurting them, just moving. i pull up the corner of my shoulder skin, and underneath there are the black and white stripes of zebras. and you are unfazed. and you nod. we are one of us.

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you are sailing backwards in a bottlecap boat and i will be here when you come back with bells on. we will do this ballet until the dizziness reminds us of the car crashing the bridge bending the troll reaching down like a god to retrieve us. we were rebellious children, you and me. sixteen years apart we knocked over the same ink well after dipping it in the pretty girl’s pony-tail. we clapped the same aging erasers together to make clouds of chalk dust that we couldn’t open our eyes in because it would hurt. how we knew in such a youth that opening your eyes could hurt like that. how we were told (by an ancient being) that it is a necessary thing. how if you want the pain to go away you must believe in the magic of the pain. now i am hidden by my own moth wings crumbling in the mid-afternoon slanting, in the sighing that starts with morning and ends with a figure bent back completely but on absolutely solid, east-facing ankles. i watch you build a house from scratch. i watch the knots in your back coil themselves

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in tighter, tiny scowls. their sad faces. i watch them contract when you lift door frames to build door frames, i have x-ray vision and i can see inside of you. i watch you build a house. and i breathe out. what’s right of me is left with the scent of your palms and no qualms. and i lean forward when you sleep, to remind you that we can spirit ourselves away smaller-waisted Saint Nicholas. a fingertip to the edge of a face a trip down a black hole without shoes on. the madfantastic skipping stones of my vertebrae thrown across the river of my back all shaking with an unrepeatable tune, whipped by a wind that i cannot name but which can name me, excuse me, miss. that wasn’t for your purple eyes, miss, can call me forward from the real world and pull me by my sternum to my homeland.

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hunger has wings. the fleet strands of its hair move as if breathed on by dark aquatic beasts. onwardsonwardsonwardsonwards, shake the night glitterblind, whisper forth in giant stride. teal like cuts and roars, teal bloodily spilling out in gusts on strawberry hair. wanting breaks it, wanting breathes. single pearls hand stitched onto bodies that fit less with time. first containing nervous flesh, then constricting, and then Broken By. the triumphant body like a black swan slowmotion pealing. and then it’s four and five and six a careful cradling and then a tipping out an ‘oops, i dropped the baby;’ bursts of broken wings that fix themselves in takeoff and the pearls begin to snap off roll uncontrolled and uncontrolling to a better kind of place, ecstatic. skin hugs the wounds til the red bleeds out. scope chokes the sky til the stars come out. and the stars and the stars come out.

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lavender.

it started with a door. (i knew there was one; i didn’t know where.) i don’t need the promises they promised me— false as green whitebirches. i’ve got air. i’ve got this perverse, pearl-crusted city in my head i’ve got climbing, i’ve got air. i’ve got a tiny, private oracle in the dip of solid muscle near collarbone and shoulder, and i can ask it anything i want just by flexing— i’ve got circ us. when the ghost children of Expected cropped up from the impossible tendons in my possible hands and floated, i looked into the undereye half-moons of unsleep, i laughed. i stole a horse from a heaven and fled. i kicked at the flanks of him with spurs i made myself out of just teeth and my most barbed ideas, i shredded white hide til the muscle showed, its pink fingers roiled slowly from the gashes “get me out.” i dug my heels in until each half of Gemini covered his brother’s eyes in horror. (they had never seen a thing flee.)

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they made me as a Gibson Girl— my heart. they coaxed me to lift skirts and show the most innocent of calves striped white on white on white on no black to make it sweat. but i undid the piles of my hair til they fell clear and cumulous to my feet and braided ropes around my soles and bid me walk. when they asked me if i fell from the sky i said “sometimes.” so we were looking for the door that led us out— my horse and i— that led us up. i did not understand that to search for something with a desperation like that is only the reflection of a lack of gallant faith in your own self. i did not realize i had answers in my hands because my fists were clenched, i did not realize that i crossed my fingers in lie because they were crossed for a luck i did not need. i missed the heartstrings of my only white horse snapping. i got distracted. because to you, i said “make me ugly, i will understand.” if you learn to bend the shapes of my irises from perfect periods to awkward commas i will be changed from finite phrasing to just a breath inside a wondrous sentence, the suggestion that this face continues

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(behind the eyes). if we make love— and we will— our skin cells will trade each other for each other we will unspiral from each other wearing coats of each other. they will be invisible, but we will not look the same. we wept for days, the horse in tiny, valiant rivulets of sand and me in crazed tides of black. we feared that we would never find the way in. i thought (and the trees around me thought) it will not be birch, peeling white, brazen like a girl shedding one petticoat for each year of her living. i thought it would be made of a wood so enduring and apologetic, that it would go up in invisible flame when we approached it. that it would melt under the touch of my shy and human palm. i thought wrong. a metal taste in my mouth a silver taste when i got there and no door. just the taste like when i eat the blades of your shoulders (to remember) (when you fly off) i did not hear the single note of my horse dying at the comparison of this luscious door to a naked man to a man with a naked smile.

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but when we got there (and we got there) his flanks were broken, and the blood spelled out words, tacky from days of drying. quaking from thin perspiring. i stood before the lock with no key but myself so i thrust every appendage into that space each arm flung through and pulled out shredded each leg kicked in, recoiled, demolished. i went to dive my head in, and my horse said “stop.” i let sickles fall from my pierced ears and cut open death on the evergreen ground. i find myself still breathing the quick, heavy infant breaths of slumber when i wake. it is like i’ve caught myself naked. it is like my body is a secret it is trying to keep from me. i wonder if you could love me from this distance i wonder if you could measure the anemic, pale creatures of dawn against yourself. you can punch the heel of your hand like a miniature body into my tricep (it will receive you) but you will need words, real words, to break up the lactic acid of my aching. it will take more than glue to repair the lavender bones i’m breaking. and then i broke. and as soon as my heartstring snapped, i was standing alone, on no steed but my own colt legs.

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i was standing alone, except i was standing with you, except i was standing alone, and there was a door. that i opened. some feathers fall, so grace-steeped they are heavy. there is a particular science to molting.

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parachute.

“The trouble with baptism,” he whispered, or maybe it was a she, all crumpled in the wing-red valley heat sheet of the place we lay, dreaming of water, “is that they don’t require you to learn how to swim. They expect you to stand and be held by the neck like a small, bad mammal in the teeth of its mother. Limp and milk-identical, rainbow-columned throat all dim and tight.”

And I— who had never been and would never be baptized, ever balanced like a one-winged dragonfly poised for the other to be ripped off irreverently by a child— thought: What must it be like to feel the pooled up notions, shocking and cool and sputtering, echo deep even in the shallows? Swarm cells and beg for webbed digits (but my fingers will always stay separate), while they never question what would happen if their male manicures slipped, distracted by the passing of an iceberg or the leaves on their hearts eaten by moths until holy; what would happen if I slipped, lungs-deep in the holiness, found myself upside-down, stalactite of bones. Trying to preserve that lava rock dry desert-molten soul of mine in the cumbersome greenblue encased in one ragged bubble, ready to iridescently break now.

She looked down pointedly at my hand, and I saw that the poison ivied dips between fingers bubbled audacious and violent, a black bruise shelaqued and burning like marshmallow fire. It was the place where amphibious webs would have been, had I learned to exist in the brink.

He peeled the sparkling/ditzy skin from his wise scapulae. It was washed silk, it was fine rope. She undid each string from her clavicles, from muscles, he handed them to me one at a time with delicate and marrow-bold fingers,

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and I took her, held her out, and fell down through the column of earth and stained firmament, watching him shrink above me as I vanished.

She buoyed me, and my girl’s shoulders grew a fine and princely gristle (which sang).

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C H A RY B D I S P R E S S new york