My Uncle Ray and his friend Lenny
are reunited for the first time in decades,
and the trip down memory lane has been
fully floored. With my whole dad’s side
of the family circled around, they’re recounting
the time my Great Uncle Walter took them hunting.
It goes something like this:

They’re all up in the forests of Moose County, Maine. While they’re separated,
Walter trips over backwards, breaking both wrists trying to catch his own girth.
Once the other two find him, they help him into the car, and on their way home
Walter says he needs to use the bathroom.
The two simultaneously realize that with two broken wrists, the elder relative
would need some … assistance. So their solution was to fly at breakneck speeds
to the nearest hospital and let them take care of it. 100 miles an hour the whole
way, evading every cop in the process, risking their lives just to avoid wiping
their uncle’s rear-end.

We’ve all heard this one before, second-, third-
hand, passed down as family lore, but today,
we’re laughing harder than ever, filling this room
with the kinds of sounds it probably isn’t used to hearing.
And I’m looking around, thinking, how strange
it must be to run a funeral home. This space
is like a factory-made living room. The worn middles
of the chairs look too intentional. The colors
a little too coordinated. These people crafted this
foreign place to look like anyone’s home at any time,
and now, they listen to the sounds of strangers’
grief on repeat every day.

We are at my Great Uncle Walter’s wake.
My family is showing him how much we care
in our only way– a family of openness,
in arms and in mouths, a family never silent,
even when no one is talking,
a family getting together after the wake
for bonfire heat and cold beer fizz, a family
that is always somehow expanding,
and when we lose one, we just work
extra hard to fill their space with more warmth–
the morticians must be
shocked by this family’s boldness.

Or maybe I’m giving us too much credit.
Maybe laughter has stained the carpets
of this home far more than tears.
Maybe it’s a common defense mechanism,
to try our best to make joy out of pain.
Either way, when I die, I want everyone
to tell my most embarrassing stories,
laughing like a full stomach.
I was never taught
any other kind of love.

a dumbbell perched
on a yard stick
blue spinning plate
your brain is the last
balloon at the birthday
crushed & waiting
a tiny elephant
ushered through space
your brain defies
all sorts of gravity
like a tin trailer roof
your brain considers
imminent collapse
in any second
your brain longs
for a new Harley
but thinks better
of driving at night
in sleep your brain
balances its checkbook
dreaming deeply
of total preparedness
your brain thinks
certainly next year
will be the good year
your brain has been
singularly waiting on
no regrets your brain
insists despite growing
tired with age your brain
is probably thinking
it’s time to find god
a power your brain
doesn’t believe in
like flying objects
and family therapists
instead your brain
prefers to slow sink
an anvil submerged
in brain-shaped denial
until your brain can
no longer take it
blown head gasket
bottle to bottom
your brain as mirror
your brain a cut rope

my parents scream

embrace the demons who crave

inside, i am alert and petrified

i am awake and happy

i will fight through the valleys of cheap lows

through open and dying work

i will show up for God’s different calling

and embrace the listener an honest friend

son / daughter beautiful and positive

a real friend hurts good

teases absence when they sing along

I am laughing and crying

all my friends are extreme

a cheap fight for just because

it’s different this time

I am better high

I am awake and happy

I am so fucking on it hurts

okay, okay, so he’s doing a poem about a girl and it’s a pretty good poem and he names her “chandelier” / says something about refracted light and his eyes follow me out of the room (again) and I want to name this follow “friend” after the person holding the eyes / want to name his name after a summer of doing poems about girls named “people” / how his pen sways the world-chandelier and I am caught in / the light / in the side hallway of our poetry-venue is a quiet dim and he refracts out of the room and grabs me like something breakable / breaks me like something light / shards his teeth and I bleed / but my skin doesn’t shatter so I bloom / into a person and twenty minutes ago he did a poem about a girl and I know I am not the girl because I am not a girl but he still calls me by this softer name because it is easier to get hard that way / to undress me in his head because he assumes I look like how I should / to forgive his hands for calling him faggot when they wanted the rest of me—boy disguised as a dress, girl and her leg-hair, her arm-hair, her hair-hair, and I think he’s scared he liked it / so someone walks by and sees two pairs of chandelier limbs tangled dishonest, and I guess they assume this friendship renamed, guess I don’t get to name what I want after myself anymore / guess, I guess, I guess, I—get into my car. my building-body suspends my ceiling heart / as if this was my first time being hung—if only I was a real chandelier, or a real girl—something too beautiful to ruin without touch. I drive away from the venue without looking at myself in any mirrors. the hickey in the center of my neck is the size of a child’s fist. at first, my partner doesn’t believe me. surely I hung myself in front of his eyes like a raw metaphor / let him do whatever his fag-panic hands needed to still wake up a person / how human to name a mirror after a friendship and attempt to find yourself in it / how brave to break me open in search of the summer-girl / the one with the breasts and small hands. only a coward would’ve / held me.

“When did it begin,” the therapist asked,
“this desire to be bound?”

A long pause while
she decided whether to tell,
or to make something up.

“When I was nine.
I was playing hide-and-seek.
I hid behind my neighbor’s freezer.

My friend couldn’t find me.
It got dark. My parents couldn’t find me.
They called and called.”

“And how did that make you feel?” asked the therapist.

“I was happy,” she said.
“I was curled up into a small space.
I could barely move.
It was private.”

“Did someone find you?”
he asked.

“No. After a long time, I came out.
My father cried when he saw me.
After that I hid in small spaces
every chance I got.

Under my bed.
Under my school building.
In my dog’s house.
In the center of clothing racks
at the mall.”

“But,” he said
uncomfortably,
“In a sexual situation…
when you’re tied up and
your partner can do
whatever he wants with you…
Isn’t that the opposite of privacy?”

She smiled, got up,
and walked out of his office.

He could smell her perfume
for a moment.

In the elevator she thought,
To expose everything and remain hidden
is the essence of privacy.

Spoiler alert: you will
stop thinking about him. He will
no longer plague your brain. He’ll
stop writing you letters. He won’t
even be a speck on your map
because, girl, you’re going
somewhere better.

Spoiler alert: love will
find you when you stop looking
for it. And when it comes,
it will be like discovering
outer space when the highest
you’ve ever been is a ferris wheel.
Believe it or not, your astronaut
will have finally found their star.

Spoiler alert: the obsession
you carry will end. Your pining will
cease and you will find recovery
in the most unlikely places.
I’ll spell it out more
simply – you’ll learn
that drugs were not
your friend.

Spoiler alert: your funeral will
be a party. In your life, you piled up
so many friends there will be
a mile long line to your casket.
Instead of black veils, they’ll wear
party hats – not to celebrate
that you’re gone, but to pay tribute
to how hard you went
when you were alive.

Spoiler alert: there will
come a time where you look back
on today and say,
hot damn, I survived.

You’ve probably read Fight Club,
so you know the first rule, and the second.
I get a pass because I’m a woman
and not a member.
But every woman has a degree
of violence in their make-up.

Some days, I imagine knocking
the air from my boss’ lungs until
her chest is a vacuum.
I resist the urge to break my father’s ribs.
I want to hit my lover as hard as I can.
My fingers curl into balls of brass,
and I want to go ape-shit on a stranger’s nose.
But this is not because of something I read.
I’m a kettle keeping steam and I don’t have
a whistle hole to keep the pressure low.
This is my life, and it’s ending one minute at a time.

If you’ve read Fight Club, you know the story
was never about Fight Club.
Fight Club just sort-of happened.
It taught us men weren’t meant to be caged,
or coddled, or comfortable. Men were made
to work, and sweat, and swear, and fight.
There is no in-between.
Fathers are gods and most men never had either.
Women are invisible or Marla Singer.

Sometimes, you have to make things explode.
Sometimes, you are the thing that explodes.

They say empty yourself, and she says it is no longer possible.
Define ostracism. Unholy ostrich, burying
its head in sandy graves.
Yeah, I’m okay. (Consider the ostrich, which remakes
reality through denial. Which is to say: if she ignores the elephant
in the room, it eventually becomes a flea. Which is to say:
her smile hangs on a tightrope.) She toes it daily, fearing
that one misstep, one wavering smile or slacken hand, will reveal
her guilt. But happiness is not a path to walk. The line cannot hold;
things fall apart.
She says help and it comes out as great. Something got lost
in translation. Great—wasn’t meant to be found again.
Call her strange. Call her alien,
but it’s not her fault. She was made a leper by this world.
Blame it on the sunset of her composure.
Please, please understand. Such words are cheapened
by a shaking voice.
What is her guilt?
Her guilt is written on her face, frozen
and misconstrued as cold. Her guilt is stained
on thawing eyes, breaking lips. Her guilt
is not that she wages a war, but that the enemy is herself,
and the casualties are frightful.
They understand fear of dogs, of darkness, of death.
Hers is unforgivable.
They say speak up, and she says you won’t hear me anyway.

Jonathan did it. He teaches at a university in Washington now.
Or Oregon. I forget. But he said he gets fifty grand a year.
To teach creative writing. That’s like winning the lottery.
I make thirty grand and my lungs are turning into a collection
of twisted lies. I cough more than I think. I asked Jonathan
how he did it and he said he didn’t know. It was like God
napalmed him with luck. He got some award for a poem
about a goddamn lake and suddenly they pay him a thousand
dollars to read for fifty minutes in an auditorium filled
with students who don’t want to be there. I tell him to seriously
tell me how to do it and he said you have to make sure
there’s a lot of mist in the poem, that they can see the mist,
feel the mist, and then just go from there. He says that poets
love mist. They want so much mist in a poem that you can’t
see anything else other than mist and then from that mist
you have something really beautiful peek through and then
something really ugly peek through. But it can’t be too ugly,
he says, or you’re fucked. And he says don’t swear. He says
you want mist and beauty and a touch of ugly and every word
has to sound like it’s linked, like it’s a big game of Scrabble.
He says that the real important thing is that you don’t have to feel
anything writing it. Don’t get caught up in the poem. That’ll trick
you, he says. What you want to do is be a little mathematical
devil and just plot that shit like Stephen King, but with so much
thesaurus crap that people think you have a Ph.D. If you do that,
they’ll give you everything in the world. They’ll eat your feet.
They’ll kill your children. They’ll throw money at you
like it’s made out of cotton. They’ll light random Vietnam villages
on fire, if you ask for it. They’ll drive a bellhop insane,
if it’s your wish. He keeps going, a long list. I ask him
if he could set up a reading for me at his college. He says no,
that they only give money to people who don’t need it.
The more famous you are, the more money you make,
the more we pay you. If you need it, we can’t give you a cent.
It’s a rule. Then he’s gone in that way that humans do, just
disappears and goes back to his life and kid and perfection
and I think of mist. I keep thinking in my head, “Mist, mist,
mist, mist, mist, mist.” With all that sand kicked up in the air,
the mask strapped to my face like I’m in Shanghai, the sawdust
of air I live in, all day, I keep thinking about that goddamn mist.

even though this is exactly what you wanted:
to sleep in a strange bed tonight, a drunken screw;
your organs rearranged like furniture and someone
to churn your insides around as if making butter.

Is he a naughty child in your kitchen of lust,
two fingers in the honey pot, stirring? Maybe it’s the way
he moves inside you like he knows where he’s going, or
at least how, in the blind dark, you become braille

for the right pair of hands – a book spread wide
open at its center, a malleable spine. God knows how
he’ll survive the gush of you, spilling and spilling from
the basin of your hips like warm bathwater.

Any other night, you would turn away as you
came, your face crumpling into shapes of vulnerability
behind your hands, body quaking around him. But this
time, you hold his gaze. You sob his name

and then crack open, over easy like an egg, your
heart dripping yolk onto his bared chest. When the
tremble passes, you try to scoop the pulpy mess back
in-between your lungs, panicking, but it’s

too late. He sees your sorry heart, sitting there in
a pool of its own fragile blood cells, could probably pick
it out of a lineup now. He hears the pulse of it. A begging
so ferocious you could almost mistake it for bravery.