All the best parts of me and you will never even know her,
(Something about the morning after a rainstorm here:)
Darker between the slabs of concrete, lower panes of the window fogged up,
I missed it but there’s whispers of it here everywhere.
I prayed to God that you could meet me, you knew that,
I never told you but you might have guessed.
Hugged the backs of my arms and rocked back and forth on the bed,
Chewed my tongue and the insides of my cheeks until I tasted electricity,
Kept all the lights off so I wouldn’t have to forget what her mouth looked like
When she said the words.
(Something about October windchill here:)
Sharper and colder than one was expecting,
Tips of ears and fingers sliced with the shock,
Passing under the shade of a tree for a minute and, oh, here,
Here you are, here you have been.
You didn’t even sound like you in the end, didn’t look like
Any of the yous I had known,
Smelled like hospital hallway, tilted like Autumn equinox.
I wish you had gotten any version of me except the one I was that year,
Shaking like a little girl while I held the pill cutter,
Kneeling like a penitent to double knot the shoelaces.
Mary Magdalene and Simon Peter and all those other disciples
Wailing in the garden, my brother pushed the elevator button.
Someone was handing me a Coca Cola from the upstairs vending machine,
Someone was filling out a form, someone’s phone speaker was playing Johnny Cash.
All the ways you picture the end, but none this noisy, right?
None this frayed and crackled
Stretching wash of time?
(Something about a downstairs neighbor practicing guitar here:)
I catch it when the window is open, when I’m standing on the left side of my desk.
All the loveliest parts of me and you will never get to hold.
All the strongest parts of you and I will have to search and search for.
cried like something shaking apart
once the mottled dark bundle of tape came spilling out of some
cavity inside of me,
and it fell upon the tiles in a form
so near to one i think i may grow into!
and the song it spun could have been my laughter, the old laugh.
i used to think that it was wrong to go on living without you
there to see who i was becoming.
but after the cramping-
three years of a migraine,
when i pushed through the dirty flood water and emerged in front of
a bathroom reflection
the thing that sprang forth was familiar and unremarkable and i
wept to realize it-
that you did not die before meeting me
because, of course,
no one dies not knowing themself.
Someone comes for you and my body makes itself small in protest,
Invisible and butterflied- I can't stop biting down,
I can't quit armrest-squeezing.
I must have come out desperate,
Been born with that instinct those animals of us have
To keep vital parts close.
Swallowing my lips pale as a razorblade,
Tight as a footfall, red and red and red and
Red
Like latex, like surgery.
Tilted picture frames and loose bootlaces.
Barking and shaking and biting my tail
Something rabid.
I try to love you back into myself.
I try to list one country for every letter of the alphabet.
I have been trying to flee from the X-Ray ghost of my outline
So hollow around all these bones of me,
These guts and nerves and promises: Here for ten more years, a lifetime.
For the graduations and the second dances and the 7AM panic attack phone calls.
I try to exist without you. I try to cook rice and take photos at the art museum
I wash my hair. I merge across two lanes of traffic.
I can't quit bruising my knees against the shower wall, though.
I can't stop leaning on the horn behind semi trucks.
I taste bile and artificial grape and hear Roger Miller on the radio.
I disassembled a pencil sharpener and did my best to hack my own limbs off
When I was, like, twelve,
I'm acting like a baby out here, man.
I'm acting like you froze me in place at seventeen.
I catch myself closing the tab to the job application.
I realize I have to get stoned just to walk through the detergent aisle.
Good-for-nothing splits and cowers,
I am untethered without you.
No glory in the knowledge that you're living on within anyone else,
Not even me- orphan daughter, veins emptying.
And so, the universal blood donor faints at the sight of needles.
We will allow her to be selfish, this once.
a back porch. a door with a busted up lock.
the set of silverware my parents got as a wedding gift.
the urgent question or the procrastination that stills the reply.
when you turn the radio on to an abandoned channel and hear
the staticked half-lyrics sneaking through surfing
those rebellious airwaves.
i get too high by mistake and start convincing myself there's
some long-lost way i used to see the world that only
sativa in all her frightening mystery can help me access again
and i am at once twelve and twenty-three and seven.
a hunger pang. a voicemail, deleted.
the delphic bible verse i highlighted as a teenager.
the lie i seethe at or the fetid honesty i cannot stomach in answer.
when you clean your bedroom and discover
torn and humiliating diary entries you have no memory of
your earnest childhood hand penning.
i drive too fast on the off ramp and my car
fishtails and i feel my palms turn slick on the wheel as
the beast grows suddenly massive and machine beneath me
and i am at once weightless and ageless and full of regrets.
to euphemize it into interaction. to say one thing and mean another
to sell it.
to turn to my left and see it sitting there, apart from me
at last.
to stand amongst the rubble and cast myself as protagonist
before this.
i pretend that it is beautiful when they say that grief is diasporic love,
or perseverance or the plastic bag of evidence.
i feign i am moved when i read the metaphor about
cells regenerating, the skin around my eyes regrown into
some novel me-thing he never pressed his lips beneath.
i fancy myself a poet when i tell you about
jonah scoffing down at nineveh
as if my bloated, waterlogged words could ever feed five thousand starving, salivating mouths, but
silly, sorry self, stretching again for the meaning!
it's too hard to make this part sound nice.
soft thing with toothed skull and
cruel as a little girl,
screaming bundle of sharp and sickening.
made space in my womb for you,
infant cancer cell.
for you to exist at all i'd have to undo myself-
to mend my oldest socks, dye my roots again.
reformed the shape of me around your baby girl body,
tried to touch your baby girl hands,
kiss your baby girl gums.
i could have devoured you.
could have laid down right there in the middle of the road and let it happen,
mangled or set ablaze,
unrecognizable and yet
distinctly me, distinctly mine.
i should have let my tongue live on a hundred lifetimes without ever having to memorize the shapes your name hoisted it into.
i should have gotten on that train.
i should have loved that man just for who he was, i could have
been a decent wife.
i miss me. i long for myself.
but the becoming is different than what i once believed-
lonely, and lonelier still.
i must have tasted like saltwater and stale camel menthols that night,
i must have tasted like confession.
oh, They make me want to brush my teeth before i kiss Them,
scrub under my fingernails and pray to jesus, like, literally pray to jesus.
even in manhattan,
i catch myself rinsing crick water off my boots before stepping inside.
we didn't even fuck, just floated like water lilies,
cupped time in my hands like fireflies, like july's toads.
i don't eat seafood so i catch white bass just to hold them.
to kiss the skin where my hook snagged their pretty mouths,
just to gulp in air with them- ode to inhospitable arkansas!
how she smothers us, one and the same!
ode to the bloody gums and the broken wrists and the beetles in my sweet tea.
cicada shell behind my teeth where a tongue should sit,
i must be born from so many empty things.
lovely arkansas! tried to claim me, to catch me,
to hold me like white water but,
oh! she can't hold me like my Butch does!
i knew it when they said in every life they've been a dyke.
heads restless on barbed shoulders
i could have swam in their heartbeats,
could have swallowed their collarbone whole.
they didn't say in every life they'd have chosen me,
don't think it even occurred to them
as our laughter fogged the window, as a man reached around us to throw cash on the counter.
all flushed and freezing in the pink-hued lighting, shouting over kate bush on the jukebox,
breathless then,
pigeon-feather ribcage knocked askew within me
i guess that's what they mean when they call me a city girl-
me! of all people!
they leaned in close to tell it to me, like a pinky promise secret kept,
singing eureka and hallelujah into every syllable as they said it:
in every life they've been a dyke.
i wanted to laugh so i kissed them instead.
felt my trembling knees clack together beneath the barstool
and they kissed like jumping off the fishing dock.
ice cold, ice cold
'till you get your whole body in.
ice cold, ice cold
'till you're used to it.
Oldest daughter, holy child,
Only ever one third of a man! or one third of a god! or one third of a ghost!
Broken-off like a stutter. Tripping from the mouths of everyone she hates
Garbled and bloody and cracked like baby teeth in a cramped jaw.
Claustrophobic and lost in translation, paper sharpened on whetstones
Until it could pierce her side on impact, right between the ribs like a sprinter's stitch.
Martyred, Mother Mary, do you mourn your little girl?
Shrinking away from her still-shut eyes like they could catch, like flint and steel lullabies,
A contagious love you cough up, choke down,
Wrap your clothes a little tighter around you to conceal the lesions it leaves.
She clutches your hair like sweet iris stems,
Sings to you in an eyelash, sleeps like a white bird,
Haunts your dreams from the shoreline.
Mother Mary, does it scare you how much anger she holds in her tiny body?
How all the forgiveness you had in the water of your womb
Must have dried up when the river did?
Your blood turned to ice when she was born already named,
Already screaming, one-third her Father but born of all of you.
What do you do with a ripped fishing net of a girl,
Born underwater, who refuses to sink?
Who reaches a pudgy baby girl fist up to the storm and cracks like a rib cage,
Like a lineage, screaming like the squall will cease if it takes the whole ship down with it.
Watch her Father's name limp behind her like a stray dog,
Refusing to forget the times she fed it out of pity.
Arms too tired to stay wrapped around a world that snarls at her touch
When all she has ever done is love it, or try to teach it love,
Or cry for it, or resent it, or refuse to let go of it
Which may all be the same thing, but don't we all learn how to love
By watching our mothers?
for You to be You, as i know You to be-
gap-toothed girl with the dirty fingernails,
my brother's laughter, pinky finger of my father,
rain boots and fried fish and the gasoline smell of a lawnmower.
if You were to breathe here, in even this-
somewhere between my own memory and the way my mother retells it,
i think something slithered down my spine that summer. something splintered in my soft foot.
a God who can fit in my own hands, sharpened beer-glass edges and all.
the swamp i was born in buzzing like my undetected heartbeat,
lake water lapping at luck-kissed heels and the church where i watched my first horror movie,
ladybug shells littering windowsills cracked potholed by humidity.
if i were to believe myself- that rarity, that anomaly! if i were to know my mind to be sword edge-
as i see shadows dance between the blades of a ceiling fan,
so still in this twin-sized bed frame i watch white clover burst up between the webs of my fingers,
for You to be emmanuel, bless their hearts, hallelujah
then You would have to be
white trash Jesus. camo trucker hat Savior.
catcher of all these pillow-muffled prayers, these prepubescent poems.
a God who mucks the cow's stalls out for the neighbors, talkin' bout some come Hell or high water,
who chases rattlesnakes off the porch with a spade,
who squints one-eyed at the storm cloud, blinking buttermilk out of His lashes when those Heavens crack open.
hometown doctor's daughter, eyeglasses screws in the headgear
and catnip in the back garden,
spider webs blown out of teacups for a slumber party picnic, leaping barefoot through sharp creek banks.
i must have known Your name before the rest of it, Lord,
like bubblegum in a ditch, double dutch, diary pages.
this shoutgun-on-the-wall Jesus. hick sister Jesus.
folded farmer's almanac as a coaster and cousins crammed in a too-small truck bed.
if You were to be You, God, as i've loved You to be,
then Lord, i know i can hear your voice on any tin roof-
He who sat holy with me in the sorghum fields, trekked holy with me through the trailer park.
flat tire God, empty turtle shell.
snakeskins and corn husks and busted wicker chairs orphaned on roadsides,
all empty tomb and empty hands.
a God that prays back, in that southern drawl of my grandmother,
sounds an awful lot like, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry."
some days i am jonah and
some days i am the fish.
but today, i think i am
the rainstorm,
mind falling like a single drop
hitting the ocean with little more than a ripple.
i don't think God is angry with me,
but what other explaination
is there?
why else
do my fingertips split like diaspora, bleed like the nile
let my people go, God,
let us walk out of hospital rooms like egypt.
some days i am moses and
some my heart is hard as pharaoh
but today, i feel more like
a scared oldest daughter smearing blood on the doorframe,
hugging my knees to my chest
and praying Death will passover my house tonight without
taking anything
call me prophet sinking, God.
call me forgiveness found in holy hands
that feel more like the belly of a beast.
jonah waits for God to strike down nineveh,
and in another world,
someone's firstborn son is taken from his cradle.
my God can be inconsistent like that.