The girl who couldn’t levitate got a cold. She cursed
the microwave for giving it to her, because the T.V.
told her that microwaves were bad and she cursed
the toothbrush for not having a wood tip and horse
hair. She stayed in bed and watched Netflix videos
and pretended like the titles were things that boys
were going to say to her: The Crying Game, The
Crow, Everybody’s Fine, Monsters, Malena, Mon-
sters. And even though her name wasn’t Malena,
she liked the way it sounded when the man on the
T.V. whispered it to her and once she realized her
imagination was wider and older than memory, she
was able to turn into nothing by thinking nothing and
by thinking nothing was able to not for so long that
she convinced herself she was levitating, and that’s
the story of how the girl who couldn’t levitate, levitated.

You fall apart
at twenty-two, twenty
five until nine, we watch
new clouds do exactly
what the old clouds did—
still we are arrested
by the sky’s vicissitude.
Things we never do: learn
to control the way we feel.
There was that summer
when I was fourteen
and my neighbors
mother had an affair—
I should have seen it
in the way she sang
that song just so.
Do you regret failing
to undo the damage
of others, or is that just
an easy way to hate yourself.
When I was twenty
seven, another summer
to be expected, kept
falling in and out
of love with my choices
my hair, cigarettes, home
made bread, oil pulled
from walnuts, the jars
with foreign labels
only the adults drag
home—everything
sparkled once or twice.
I think you know what
that means without me
having to explain it
but let me try: you cry
in a supermarket halfway
through a Jewel song
with milk gleaming so
white in a red basket;
watch your grandfather die
many times in fitful sleep
and wake up with a need
to record his stories—once
he flew that plane through
the Grand Canyon and who
will remember but you soon.
If you know anything about
misattribution of arousal
you might understand
that we are not machines
and I’m not certain we
ever really loved each other.
But running on hunches
I start to accept that
all of my allergies were
programmed by myself.
If you believe this fact:
Toxoplasmosis diminishes
a rats fear of cats to increase
the likelihood of transmission,
perhaps you start forgiving
yourself for those feelings
not yours to control. I believe
I am loved, I believe I am in love
as though you whispered
that truth against my sleeping
face, nightly. If you know
something about failure
you understand why it hurts
to be fucked sometimes,
when one heart is flatlining.
I am often so unsure, I think
if you were to play to me
my own heartbeat and sped it up
at the very moment I imagined
I should feel desire, I would
believe you, even if I did not.

Parted, burning chorus lumps and all uncertain
waves—the center breaks, no dawn with just a little
bedding, down-collapse, the feathered pass-at-will I’m
one. A black the sky can hold, can hammer,
light surround what light is is a glitch that moves and
all the figures—pilings. Finely spread and finely
faltered. I am blood confused, consumed, am with, the
water burning bright adorns. I switch, and all that
drops of splitting I am pulled to tinder-strike like
unremark’ble ambulations creased and razing
hours the day I mean along. It takes some tendons.
Takes some noise that pressured mends the weak in I am
hearing noise and rounding out my clenchfull gut my
lean in alter, clattered frame. The creature doesn’t 
have a number doesn’t need one. Goes the trouble
wreck the creature flits in unexpected terror-
form the creature dense in action boils down in
fruity redux, fuse of butter, solid pitch of 
hardened swarm and love. No hook, no curved and cutting
instrument the roux that breaks us—side from side we 
count the saved to count the lost, we hanged or reddened
creatures lost, allotted finer films of broken 
signals—tygers, lemon pipes, and every thing-ed
leap is culled, is in. With what is built this body?
Meaning, don’t forget to be unbuttoned. Softly—
Broke—some level pulls the whole the chatter
watches, held alone. A choice in not between a
body. Milky coin to toss above the oceans
poles go on—go on for days so shadows’ shadows
form of light and creatures eyes are open, eyes are
up to nothing more. A tumble mouth of stones in
creatures, vast horizon sweat in creatures I am
here with rices—skin it does the feather shaking
shakes the kind of weather tonnage—music rises…
slow, correction: music rides its hardened back so
long across the sand my leans they mispronounce.

The Pachyrhinosauruses died by drowning in a flash flood
in Alberta 70 million years ago. At the animatronic dinosaur
amusement park where I work, we’ve got these
robot versions of them and literally all they’re programmed to do
is moan into the rocks at their feet when guests walk by, like,
at least the T-Rex gets to roar and wag its arms and shit?
The Pachyrhinosaurus is used to this kind of double standard.
Is used to every single guest walking by thinking it’s the Triceratops.
Reads the sign that says, “Death by Drowning! Flash Flood!”
and knows it is so close to being a T. S. Eliot reference,
but it is not, the way that I keep finding boys
who are so close to loving me, but do not.
The Pachyrhinosauruses have the most concerned expressions
on their faces, rocks at their feet and no water in sight anywhere,
waiting for their own destruction that will never come.
When my boss isn’t around I tell guests
that they were the dumbest dinosaurs, just waiting
for the water to carry them away. I tell guests, “they didn’t know
that they couldn’t swim.”
Last night, I told my first ex-boyfriend Ian that
all I wanted to do was fall off the face of the Earth
like they did. We pile into his car, seven years,
three failed relationships with other people,
and the stick shift between us, our knees so aware
of their distance from one another, and pulled
onto the long sideways glance that is Interstate 78.
We just figured that if there was ever a road that led
to where the edge of the Earth meets infinity,
that road also probably leads to Allentown, PA.
He sings loudly and switches lanes without signaling,
and I am positive that I have finally discovered
the way I’m going to die. He says, “write about us
dead on the fork between Allentown and New Jersey,”
and I imagine them digging up my thickheaded skull
saying,“They didn’t know that they couldn’t drive.”
I was considering telling him that I still loved him
as soon as we hit the straight-lipped line of the horizon,
but we never reached it,
and I never tell guests that the skulls we found
had huge predator’s bite marks on them, that
what they were doing was escaping,
and isn’t it such a better story that they had a choice
whether or not to get what they wanted?
That sometimes three months go by
And the boy you never told you loved
Is dating a beautiful girl you know you’d love, too?
Isn’t “dumb” just another way to say “not quick enough?”
Isn’t this an easier story for me to tell every guest?
the Pachyrhinosauruses moan loud
and sad into the rocks at their feet.
I sit cross-legged, forehead pressed
against the fence, and mutter,
“I just don’t think that I can swim, either.” I expect
an answer but receive a whine instead.
They have been dead for 70 million years
before anyone I have ever loved has been alive,
and I shake my head at my feet, moaning.

think of all the grain alcohol that lies dormant in bottles in the world right now

think of all the animals in cages secreting eggs and making faces for the camera

think of all the avalanches that have folded into themselves this time this year

i tell you that i am glad you got the job at a ‘milk bar’ with flavored milks

you tell me that you are nervous and you need to practice first

instead of listening i am watching a juggalo video subtitled ‘faygo up the pussy’

think of all the methane expelled by cows in bondage for a fajita platter

think of all the oil pipelines that have yet to be built in our lifetime

think of all the corn syrup in cylindrical trucks on the highways

i see you keep going online and offline in my ichat buddies list

i can chat with your gmail account and your aim account if i want to

think of all the impurities in our drinking water after the industrial revolution

imagine if the libertarians had their way, what would we turn down for

you said ‘when you feel like you want a drink, just make a cup of tea instead’

i’ve had seven cups since noon, my heart is racing, and i still want a drink

this is the innate feeling that the marketability of my face will peak at age twenty-four

God prayed for rooftops and got the alphabet. Houses were to come first. Then umlauts. Then love. Instead, it starts with After and follows with Before. If ancestry is a tracing back, forestry must be a going forward. On a test: If (you pin a photograph of Artaud to a tree), then (matrimony). God watches while you rearrange your desires from Aching to Zero. There are __________ species that haven’t been named. If we do not name them, there will never be a record of their eyes. If I found I could love a child, I’d call her Olive, I’d eat her before the world ends. My mother is a house. She came first. Then gunshots. Then love. God is when you cry at your body. God is what the president calls a lo mejor. If my name starts with M, I am sisters with Morose, Moonrise, Machine. I remember when giving birth to animals meant a future of luck and hauntings. Haunting: an object that acts out in terror. Memory: an emotion made of string. God calls you terrible names. You still show him your noose. Loss is what comes after xylophone. Xylophone is how we strike our longings into sounds, how our violence sings.

Today I held an avocado in my hands and I called it my secret 
I split it in half and found there would always be
This empty piece
Moulded by what it attached itself to for so long
That it left a chasm in its center 
And found the bits of itself pushed outward towards the edges
But the piece could not be bitter
It was still cream against my lips
And congealed itself into the best of its ability

Its other half looked put together
Full of wood where its twin was not
But it did not make it anymore whole
Because the wood had been shared and compressed for so long
That in fact it was missing the piece that wrapped around it in the first place
And instead of sharing this core
Entangling themselves around it
One was left alone with the weight of what they created 
What they grew around 
The seed was left to one

And in the end this wood was forced to be ripped out from it
To become equally as empty as the other half 
And neither one of them seemed to be as whole as they were before

There are days when I float in the gulf of your hazel eyes and I come to terms with the empty chasm you have left inside of me
That I’ve become bereft of what we shared
And you stole the core

But then I realise
I have been left with what we shared
A weight so deep it has wedged itself in my gut
Cut harshly into my ribs
And I’m praying
Every day
For it to be ripped out from me
So I can understand what it feels like to be you.

(Pinyin Text)

Wǒ ā mā mǎile yīgè
zhǎnglǎo de jiàotáng.

Bèi shāo diàole. Kǒudài lǐ.
Xǔduō kǎi dì māo jìnzhù měiguó
wǒ mā shícháng bàoyuàn
wǒmen de māo bù wěndìng
máo zhǔxí máo zhǔxí máo zhǔxí.

Duì ā.
Shēng tǐ shì kǎi dì māo
tóu shì kǎi dì māo
zhǐjiǎ shì kǎi dì māo
dùzi lǐ shì kǎi dì māo.

Lǐmiàn waimian kǎi dì māo

tuō diào yīdiǎn
kěyǐ tuō diào de.

Wǒ méiyǒu jìngzhòng.
Kǎi dì māo yǒu yǎnjīng
hēihēi hēi.

Hóulóng tài qīng.
Yīng wèi yào jiā shàng kǎi dì māo.

Kǎi dì māo kǎi dì māo kǎi dì māo

nǐ bǎoliú shǒubì.
Nǐ bǎoliú zǐdàn.

Nǐ shì zhǐ néng gǔròu

(English Translation)

grandmother buy presbyterian church
she burn. it. in her pocket.

“many hello kitty stationed in america.”
mother always complain: chaos is cat.
chairman mao mao mao.

yeah.
body is hello kitty
head is hello kitty
fingernails hello kitty
belly deep hello kitty.

inside outside hello kitty.

taking off a little
of what we can take off.

I don’t need net weight.
hello kitty has eyes
blackblackblack.

mine throat too light.
Because: yet to add the hello kitty.

hello kittyhello kittyhello kitty

kitty beloved the arm.
kitty retain the bullets.

you are
can only make meat

photographs of people pouring pen ink or bubble soap into fountains framed and important in houses consumed by fire with firefighters chopping through each and every door with axes and gold crosses tucked sweating in their chest hair while the homeowners are on vacation somewhere somewhere where the weather is marginally better than it is here and sending postcards with dogs wearing sunglasses and collared shirts and elderly women wearing sunglasses on them to their relatives and coworkers and friends: they all say “im happy but im scared but im comfortable” and they kiss in hotel rooms that are neither expensive or cheap but they don’t hold hands on the boardwalk and they don’t feel warm when they are crammed close on public transportation and there is nothing in the bookstore that interests them except for stale raspberry scones and napkins