As I have developed a sensitivity to your windy night mouth we move in paper bags. I am butternut squash and in your accent don’t mind the act of finding people. Snow could briefly mix with your firewood in the same way you would spoon honey on toast. It’s just like the weather to give you everything.

*

With you I waste less apple cores. Maybe it is the fifty percent chance of tomorrow or it’s anger made of tiny flowers. Based on arctic soil there were perfect dead plants like dandelions. Little plants were everywhere pretty. It would have been a landscape if it wasn’t disappearing. We were around and while eating the flowers we were eating the mammoths.

It says Baby On Board in that car window, in black on a yellow diamond, a yellow diamond saying something like a white diamond says something like diamonds get a say. You gave me a diamond once in London while we were curled up on a bench in the shadow of Trafalgar’s massive bronze lions, but I couldn’t care about them because my feet hurt. I said that my feet hurt, and that mattered so we sat on a bench in the square and you must have made a wish while you fished in your backpack for the worn velvet box and words, and words slid out and you slid great grandma’s ring over my knuckle and we slid forward into something different. And that ring was like glasses, like getting glasses in 5th grade that I felt so much at first because of the pads pressing against my nose and the way everything was framed in but my God I could actually see, and when I looked up, the clouds had edges. And the trees had branches and the leaves weren’t actually homogenous green blobs but shades of light and dark green together, and some dead brown, and even something in between green and dead, something trying or maybe not trying to change. Later I stopped feeling the glasses but somehow I was still seeing everything; I still got to keep the leaves. I don’t feel the ring anymore—some days I don’t feel anything—but then I wash and dry my hands and the ring gets snagged on the bathroom towel and I remember that I have to pay attention to hand towels now. And so I flip my palms down and dry my hands more carefully.

waters so still
i saw the sky reflected

you’re planning on making out with me in a peacoat
i’m okay with this

you take my hand that i finally offer and squeeze it in intervals to prove that we’re still here

we’re in your car with book jackets lining the back seat
i am here and i am blushing in the dark
i am blushing in the goddamn dark.

we watch ted talks until sunrise
you catch me saving pictures to look at when longing

next year you’re gone, and i’m not and i want you with trimmed bangs
i want you angry at me
or hurt by me
or anything ‘at’ or ‘by’ me

i once told you that i didn’t want to be married,
but i wanted to propose to someone
you offered your hand and said yes, 
and now i’m widowed by the still waters.

What is the smallest size they make those white canes in?
Would it have been better to find out earlier?

Isn’t it ironic, the writer
with the broken eyes? Isn’t it ironic,
I can’t really do this life alone anymore, and this
will keep me alone?

Will this keep me alone? Love?

How do I make this sound charming? Not a big deal,
deal breaker? Will you help me find

the words, his car? Doesn’t everyone hate
blind dates?

When will this be over?
How bad will it get?
Blind? Seeing eye dog? Cane? Blind?

What if I have children? Them too?
What will the look like? Will you tell me
when you meet them?

My siblings? Am I the only one?
Does this mean I’m done now, nothing
else can be hiding in my blood, right?

This is it?

I wake up in the twin bed and my grandmother is in the next one
Sleeping uneasily, coming up for air
Sleeping like she doesn’t
Next to her husband of sixty years
Who is ninety-one and doesn’t sleep either
Not at night anyway
But will doze off at Christmas dinner
When there’s enough people in the room
And my grandmother begins to tell the story of how she won his heart with a song
It was war times
He was in hospital 
She was beautiful
And all the women around the table are crying when she sings it
And I wonder
Was it fiction
And perhaps she wonders too
Wakes him with a slap on the wrist
And wipes the lasagna sauce off his chin.

Next to me she is sleeping
Like an older sister
Uneasily, coming up for air
As if checking that breathing still works independently when unconscious
Her limbs too tired to hold her body 
They are sprawled out
And I can’t look at her so I decide to leave.
It feels important somehow that I protect her sleep
So when I leave I want to tell my grandad 
Who is awake, with the tv on 
‘Your wife sleeps, please let her.’

It’s like a comedy show
Because he hasn’t got his hearing aid in
And I say ‘I’m going’
And he says ‘Speak louder’
And I whisper ‘Don’t shout, grandma is asleep’
And he shouts ‘I can’t hear you’
So I gesture ‘I can’t’, covering my mouth
I gesture ‘turn the volume down’, waving at the telly
I gesture ‘sleep’ with my hands together pressed to the side of my face.
He shakes his head
And when I go to close the door to seal her sleep in
She sits up and says
‘Leave it open.’

And do they know their granddaughter runs the C tap for cold water
And is surprised when it’s calda?
Do they know she’d forgotten about fireflies?

Do they know she fucks a boy to the sound of passing trains
To the sound of crickets
To the blue light of a mosquito lamp that buzzes every time one burns on the metallic plate?
Do they know she cannot talk love in her second language but cannot talk dirty in her first?

Do they know that they went to the churchyard 
They held hands in the shade
That the Eucalyptus tree is covered in parasites
And the cypresses with the green acorns, that go by the name of ‘cuddles’, 
They are yellow
And the priest with the parrot on his shoulder doesn’t live there anymore?
Do they know the playground is rusty and the swings all broken and the slide not as tall as it used to be?
Do they know we mourn our childhood?

But yes they know, they know.

she o unfair she o stop your weeping that ugly face
with her hand she stretches forth to mine
a sickle
unloves my failure
this fright that kept me up at night 
stay away with me.

my hands blooded the sheep
with the best pelt
the sheep that would have been 
the best lover

i press my body over his wildness 
we wrestle
color overcomes us that foul cry might have gotten louder
out of hand but hadn’t

mock-orange horses 
pull a chariot aspiring to rule 
the heavens i pray

i may never die nor surrender 
nor modesty taint me

& always sudden the door
new eternity irises
before me my heart knows

i love you i have 
the disguise of love
though mother may never recognize me again
so i sew a black dress 
throw it over myself
throw it over the dawn throw it over the dawn throw it over the dawn.

Smash me a message in the pin points of all those glimmering far off lights. Got my binoculars, I’m looking.

Keeping busy. Taking apart a lamp so we can get light again. Taking the stairs two, three, four at a time. Talking to you on the phone across the world. You say it’s dusty there. You crunch a chip. I’m eating frozen blueberries with bare hands.

August is oblong August is a swamp. I’m showering with your soap. I smell like you morning noon night—lying diagonal, crushing your pillow so hard it’d be a dead person if it were alive. Leaving the TV off, if I’m gonna survive I’ll be tossing crusty dishes at the street. I find the Super and force him at knife point to fix our toilet. But I will fix the squeaky drawer, seconds before your jet skids in.

Missing person: Last dusk, talking to our neighbor Annabell on the sidewalk, she says her dog died three weeks ago. I shake her hand and she looks startled. Annabell says: Tell your wife I said hello. Yes tell your wife I dream in green and blue. Tell your wife I eat clouds out. Tell your wife it’s leprechauns or a mouse. Tell your wife get back jo jo get back. Tell her tell her—when she’s back, oh my, give this pinch of gold dust a shot. And when she’s back suck every tooth in her mouth. And when she’s back put her on your shoulders scale the skyline—climb beyond our vision.

Yes yes, I’m sorry about your dog. Yes, yes, you should get a new dog. Oh no, I never could, she says I’m faithful to the dead.

Walking alone along 
a deserted pier in the early 
morning mist, I heard a frenzy 
of wings and screeching. 
Near the top of a lamppost 
a seagull hung, upside down
thirty feet in the air. One 
yellow foot was tangled

in a fragment of fishing line
left behind among the plastic bags
and bait and stale French fries. 
Desperate to pull away 
he crashed and slammed 
against the iron pole. 
Beneath him I stood frozen 
until his high-pitched wails

jump-started my fingers
to dial for help. A recorded 
message asked for my number.
I watched his movements slow
Help’s coming, I whispered, hold on. 
But his weary neck hung loose
defeated wings fell open. Silence 
thickened into the damp morning air.

The windows are rolled down,
but kept up just high enough so the wind 
doesn’t send my bangs flying.
This requires precision, but you’ve mastered it by now.
All those other midnight drives were practice runs 
for this- the one we will call the last, 
at least for a little while.

Our origin story is two halves of a sandwich: 
1. I sat at the lunch table in front of yours all through middle school.
While I peeled the crusts off my peanut butter sandwiches, 
I would listen in on your conversations, never say a word.

2. By senior year I am sick of peanut butter, but now we sit together.
Sometimes you make me laugh so hard that no sound comes out at all,
but this is the furthest I have ever been from silence.

While we drive past your old house, 
you point to the spot where your burning bush used to be.
You planted it with your parents, grew up with it.
We only realized we’d lived in the same neighborhood
after you had already moved away.
The bush went with you.

Now I imagine peeling away the new rows of hedges 
like the crusts on those sandwiches. 
Maybe underneath I would find ashes, 
as if it that bush had actually burned,

but nothing ever burns in this town 
except cigarettes, campfires,
or rubber on back roads
with the high beams on.

Our origin story is two halves of a highway: 
1. The way out.

2. The way back.

I know if you cut along the dotted lines, 
you could split us straight down the middle.
I try not to imagine pulling the halves apart.

sometimes i forget how big my thighs really are. my thighs could kill a man. 
they could snatch the lightning like a cigarette from between zeus’ fingers. 
they high five. they’re always high fiving, always stoked about something.

they meet each other like a prayer. they’re always praying for something.

this is why my strides are so long: i’ve got rosary beads where bikes would have chains
they’re dusty, always rattling like ghost of christian past —
i’m not afraid of saying “past” anymore, but i still like the way 
my scars ooze hymnals. i hear them when middle eastern air 
filters through the anise pods in my body.

and it’s muffled, but when i walk i feel my great grandmother’s prayers 
travel like sap through my tendons. the bullet that went through her head 
is nestled between two lives i don’t remember. 
each life: an arm that cradles it like her son’s arms cradled her at the end.

my thighs have rings on the inside: who i was before i even Was 
is trapped in my center of gravity.

my thighs are probably older than i am. 
i think they belonged to my great grandmother. 
i bet every body part i have belonged to a dead relative 
and the way they curve or jut closer to the space around me 
is to reach closer to the family i can still hug:
the people i still somewhat resemble
the biology that Civil War failed to claim
because the cosmic Will hanging in the soundwaves left us all with moles and hairs to inherit —
they connect like constellations, but more like something less precious:
something sleeping on the capacity to kill with the roots stored 
in the nucleus of you: that planet that centers all the rings.

it hangs like a doorknocker behind your bellybutton.

when you’re born, the portal between you and mother is broken but so much has traveled between you before your body sealed itself. so it hurts to stick your finger in your middle, 
to knock at your navel. something ancient is carving you from the inside out

you’re not supposed to know it’s there.

you’re not supposed to know why there’s a cellar in your stomach 
because that’s where the lizards live — those dehydrated past versions 
of all the Selves you’ve ever been. They wait to breathe when they sense 
other halves of themselves behind other bellybuttons you orbit.

this is why when i meet certain people, i feel a tug at my navel, 
and my breath wants to collapse into the cellar of myself. i can’t breathe 
and i watch stars turn into fleas, chewing my vision purple. 
this is why I like purple so much, why i collect it under my eyes. 
why i trust my stride even when i can’t see where I’m going.

when i can’t breathe, i keep walking. they call me Thunder Thighs.