Sons blushed and became soft peaches in the hot backseats of cars, never even wanted the front seat. Or, I was the son, but it’s nice

to be plural and grand and count the dandelions in right field as friends, which I picked in the ancient way of boys who’s fathers tried to metaphorically

light fires under their asses, there I go again, I was the boy, who was mediocre at boy at best, first boy, if it makes a difference being a minute closer

to your father’s father, and I don’t remember if I plucked maybe a little out of spite because my dad told me metaphorically to quit picking dandelions, or if when

he mentioned them they sounded like pixy stix in the outfield during a tee ball game, which due to the smallness of five-year-olds mostly happens very close to home plate,

and dandelions pluck so satisfyingly like plonking open a can of coke (let us use plonk’s secondary definition of playing on a musical instrument – the coke tab –

laboriously or unskillfully) and their frilly heads spin when you shush them in your hands like you’re warming them. If you build it then some of the angels will come

to plop down in the outfield, finger the dirt and rest their heads on tender blades while the pop flies pock the earth around them.

When you’re out in the sticks – the woods are a fortress – sunlight stabs down at you in bright daggers – I bet no one told you how a canopy is like armor.

I had a place in the woods where rules couldn’t touch me – 
little warrior boy with sticks beating up all the full grown men that ever left mama broken.

On the ground with a jar of bugs – benevolent demigod me who only knew enough to tear out earthy pieces of the woods and shove them in.

Love is often a tearing away – open heart surgery featuring pieces of us that don’t fit – and a partner who can play dead really well.

I played house – made a time machine too – went back in time – made mistakes – I must have – how else did playing house get so hard all of a sudden – why else would everything be my fault?

I preached in two different churches at the age of eight. I forgot the God is love part – was too busy memorizing bible verses – writing fire and brimstone sermons.

Whenever I was on my way to an ass whooping – I always wished I was someone else – someone strong enough to put the switch down.

Did you know hide and seek isn’t fun at all – if one person suddenly decides they don’t wanna play anymore?

When you grow up and the woods can’t hide you – you learn to disappear on the inside – you try and make yourself a fortress.

Best I could muster was a jar of ripped up roots and leaves – with a bug that knew how small he was – who was much loved – until the day he wanted out.

I feel as if I should tell you
That I have never yet, seen –
A Beaver in the Wild/
but have, for sure seen plenty things:
-Too many a shrub and quail, 
-Elk drunk at the Waterfall, 
-Horses arrogant in the sun
-So many a video of Fruit Bats gnawing on…Fruits.
-So many dams Made by clawed hands, or less clawed hands.

I still strong-arm the river 
at the diaphragm in wanting – and choke/
Think I grow more confident in 
The frame I wake in –
Every rock turns and shifts to coerce the spirit Outside the Vessel & up the 
The shore pregnant, affirmed.
Hope I am loud enough to Beckon help
As the water’s edge keeps climbing.

I’m sorry – it is rude to Think me a river.
I fear the space I take knowing my Gender both me and coursing,
but want not to Scare whatever gets Swallowed by my shadow. 
I’ve been swallowed,
and have seen all not bashfully shroud by my lashes –
Sometimes I burst in a partners mouth And a dam breaks –
Floods all my being With heavy hand. 
I do not hear it coming/
go warm as doubt drowning, &
hear my name called to me over crashing timber, This Time.

It is enough to keep running by morning.
Enough when my friends call me a Mother in earnest. 
It is a truth with heavy hands,
Lapping at the levee without relent,
But Most Times 
I cradle my stomach in rushing water and do not feel a Fertile Shore.
I weep and search the mirror for a place to rescue my wanting/
Wonder so often if all who love Me must breathe water,
Or just as unlikely make a home
in my body By their mouths
Or clawed hands,
Or whatever will a wild thing has 
To take shelter in impossible places.

I had not yet seen one for me
in my wandering – this being that
treads stream and earth confident
//without fear until just here in my room –
Through the eyes of another.
Bless this Babe of the Wood with
soft touch that makes all of my landscape Proud And Untethered.

I’ve held this force of nature – 
& every minute knowing the deficit of
The sense to believe those close/in love –
Without always seeing &
It is enough of a miracle
To hear your name from a loved one’s
Mouth, to trust//breath and well,
I suppose I could have led with just that.

1. Trigger happy target 
2. Archangel of the burnt and bruised 
3. Newport ash on a papi store floor
4. Pants way passed where his mama taught 
5. It’s my car sir
6. Ocean front scalp 
7. Jesus in hiding 
8. Unintentional vaudeville show 
9. Fireflies in his palms 
10. A friend’s blood 
11. Tomorrow’s bedside prayer 
12. Tonight’s prime time special 
13. It’s just my phone sir 
14. I just want to go home 
15. I didn’t ask 
16. A gunpowder freestyle 
17. A stained glass dice game 
18. A white man’s orgasm 
19. My hands at 16 
20. His voice before the shots 
21. Stop sign eulogy 
22. Mom alone in the chapel 
23. No angel 
24. All blood

Sometimes I wish I could stop you from talking 
when I hear the silly things you say
Alison, I know this world is killing you
Oh Alison, my aim is true
– Elvis Costello, “Alison”

I was named for a catcall strung out into three verses and a chorus Ballad
drowning in mystery fansites say she’s a pretty stranger his eye caught
at the grocery store maybe an ex-fling scraping out a fetus
with half his DNA Elvis Costello says my aim is true
he might mean it literally No one wastes time on what Alison might say
but I am Alison so to Elvis Costello to anyone
who has ever claimed to love me

Take my name out of your mouth. 
Your eyes lied when they looked at me
and told you muse Damsel I’m the troll under the bridge
Asked for peace Got this trap, trap trap Every echo
hissing my name in a hated cadence saying: we sing because we love
Who wouldn’t want a passion sharp enough to carve the melody of you
into the air? I was a child the first time I was dragged from my body
and into verse the first time someone thought their love meant
they could take my name bend it into a circle to crown them prince or 
failing that martyr against the heresy of my refusal

I ran into the arms of a boy who never sang did what Elvis couldn’t: 
gift me a contagious silence whistling a hole through my head
to land in my own mouth I survived him only to stumble through more poets
stitching me into metaphor muting me to make way
for the romance they knew they deserved If I were love, I’d say: 
take my name out of your mouth Set it ablaze I would rather be ash
than what you’ve made of me

Alison means “of noble birth” A princess of course needs not just a hero
but a narrator Her voice only good for singing to the forest creatures
The moral only ever Sit Wait Someone will love you
enough to speak for you to dirty your name
What a happy ending.

A few years ago a machine peaked into my head 
and found a section dead.

Most likely from a lack of oxygen in utero, 
but really, that’s speculation – what’s done is done
and there’s no undoing it. Like when I was eighteen and
someone pilfered the contents of my lingerie drawer.

They took it all: the see-through, the satin, 
the blood-spotted cotton panties and all the socks and bras.

It creeped me out, but I cared less about how it all went missing
and worried more just about their being gone.

For Owen Steinmann (2016-2017)

Sugars trickle from maples’ taut trunks, sapping
summer energy, the crystallized light of wanting 
to stay alive. But what melody the drops make a man
from a pulpit always says as they leap out the spout, 
percuss the bucket’s galvanized bottom. Yes, such sweet
vasculature and saccharine, this living always 
toward death. He calls for recalling thinner times, 
the feel of liveliness not yet stuck in the spiles
and given up. Forgetting doesn’t rid
our bones of any ache. Look—I’m trying
to hold open every leaking word all winter long
but this bark cracks, defenseless against air
and overfull. For each legible ring,
more lost. For each lived ache, a flume
of language unspun by air among us.

I finally want to talk about it
has taken me a decade more 
than most and all my wisdom

teeth have fallen victim by now 
there is a draft buried beneath 
this you will never know of

a pleasure of released dioxide and 
simile I don’t write because 
the block asks I do this out of

an empathy for myself, a backlog 
of tears and this body knows that 
the deal is ending soon it just thinks

it can wait out having to pay 
the delivery fee and this is just 
like me to go on and on nodding

to the tune of ephemera in my head 
without letting go I can count on one 
hand how many fingers I have lifted

to speak to my grandmother or 
times I even perused a bible yet I 
could tell you more about how

many times I opened my mouth 
for favor this week alone.

…july.
wilted cereal in a bowl / we
drown in brown boiling milk. 
the haze of sparklers and fire- 
works add to the deafening heat 
that drips into

august.
caged in by smog,
air smells of cigarettes and melted tar. 
surely this place is meant to 
ignite.

september,
when he arrives,
he thinks this is a flat plain, 
where desert dirt covers everything like snow
and sweat is meant for breathing. 
but then-

october,
and the devil’s breath laps up lotion, 
claws skin with its vicious teeth. 
yowling roofs beat whoosh and 
bend of threatened windows. 
tree leaves sound like ocean.
stripped-dry littered bare limbs.
the hard ones snap, ripe for a switch.
usedtabe gangs of tumbleweeds ran the streets;
now, solitary wadded balls of rootless limbs roll by.

november 
is a postcard miracle,
surrounded snow capped crisp sky 
where our eyes hang glide like eagles.
we perch low in the valley shadow 
straining to see 
the walk of fame.
sunset and hollywood.
palm springs.
peer into the pier of the pacific.
every mountain peak is
paramount. he says,
if it weren’t for the devil’s breath, 
i’d never know
where we are, and
just how beautiful

The eyes have it: weight, such that they can’t even roll.
This is one of those moments when I should probably listen
to my body but you know how it goes when someone talks 
too much for your taste (coffee, sir?). There’s lots of work to 
do today. There’s money to be had and even more easily lost 
like a sensible child to the pursuit of higher learning after 
high school. Time is really something, isn’t it? Death is 
entirely something different, but I don’t believe in dying
in the sense that I haven’t done it yet, so I’m unsure if I can. 
I’m rather incompetent when it comes to handling important 
matters and a de facto doctorate in the trivial; I’m always 
the trial and I’m always the error. If ever I’ve felt content, 
maybe even happy, it was a glitch. And then it was gone.