You cut a cabbage, not
carve an arm. Remember
the cat lets you cradle him
when you’re calm.

Remember the sound of
birds outside – grow wings.
Feel the spring come like
promises to the wind, feel
the wind, how its freedom
caresses your face.

Focus, the oil is shimmering.

You’ve jumped in puddles
bigger than this so listen,
you’re making breakfast.

The thin edge of the knife
covered in bits of vegetable.

The conversation starts as
a mouse in your brain and
sneaks in the folds like a dragon.

The summit of a nerve you
cannot fix; you hold the onion
as if an unborn baby, but don’t mourn,
you’re going to be the happiest woman in the world.

You were young and less
than you tried to be, hid from anything
you couldn’t put a safety on. Got pepper
spray from a friend who said you’d get stabbed
with your own gun.

Is this why you drag your toes over the lake like a woman
hung on the thickest rope? Do you know yourself? Are you
a wound too deep to ever fill with life and do you remember
how to grow? Do you believe, or does that can in your head
still rattle rusted rocks?

Do you believe in killing nothing anymore?

Do you believe in killing nothing? In making
breakfast? in kissing the dark clouds of your
veins, or do you die unto the willows in
the thick of spring?

Why are you silent?

What’s done is done.
It would be futile to fight
what is.

Years from now a priest
will have you confess a
gender and a name in the
dark, that your sin can be
absolved in the silence,
and you can learn what it
is to Be.

For now, your family talks
in the next room, so keep
an eye on the potatoes and
remember to walk calm, to
glide, to cough up that body
inside of you. This will be a
beautiful birth.

This will be a beautiful birth.

His heart is a carny barker.
His skin, a bullhorn
gathering the men for miles.

I am a circus of a woman.
I light up. I smile. I let them
slide their mouths over
my bottleneck and the length
of my lashes while he bellows.

I love this man who kisses me
greasy, wears stripes
like a popcorn box, the men
in line with tokens for teeth.

I am every gaffed game. Every
one of them is waiting to play. My hope,
the reddest balloon. I’ve handed
the man I love a rope of my best
veins. I let him open me.

He wrangles my legs into a rope
ladder. I twist and flip
while he reaches to ring my bell.
I am a shiny thing, I am
a ring toss, a game of chance.

I am not done until the carny puts his cane away.

I am not done until the lights have burnt out and the dark
bleeds itself
towards
tomorrow

After I left my fiancé, I was a broken phone, no quarters. Bought a one-way ticket to Montana, a leap of faith, the airport, a collection of cowboys and children. When we found each other, Mike was a beard I pushed my face into before heading to Huson. The persimmon sun still had a little bit of coffee in it. So, this is our street, he pointed out the window, there’s a lama; they got some horses over there. And deer, we got plenty uh deer. One bounced from the roadside into the brush with its tail high and white. And there’s our home. An old yellow schoolhouse set back from the road. But, I need to show you something. We kept on up the hill and as we neared the top, the tree limbs let go of their partners across the street. The sky made room for a gold field full of long grass that breathed in ripples with the wind. Distant mountains rumbled a solid silence, stood with their shoulders strong, blue, so I stepped over a barbwire fence into the field, with my hands asking for something, and because the heads of grass wept their seeds across my knees, I touched them like a box of matches, like I was an oil lamp in all this tinder, like my noisy blood had brought me to burn in the heart of a farmer’s back yard, so I snapped a string of hay around my wedding finger, chewed at the stem, while long necks of grass bobbed their heavy heads at the skin of an orange sky. Alone, in the middle of a golden ocean, I saw the miles of memories, tried to stub out every one as the sun lit the sharp waves of land that crashed throughout. And as the dark opened its slow eye, I knew in all of this deathless dusk, my heart would be the brightest thing I’d ever find.

Like when a bottle of dish soap,
spouts small bubbles. We

found each other this way- insignificant,
full of magic- and your smile is

a hammock, your arms, a warm cup of tea,
a stethoscope on my chest that floats

a length of skin, a single
silver plate lost

on a stream
red with poppies.

Our love was a church.
God, with us every Sunday.

We searched for it
the rest of the week.

Our mouths, a bowl
of holy water, swallowing

whatever words sliced rigid,
spat them out clean on the other end,

sought out paradise in a pile of books.
Maybe the man upstairs

was just a suitcase, and we were
silent behind a pane of glass.

I want to murder you and eat your brain,
so you won’t write anymore, and
I can have your words in my mouth.

I can’t decide if I would sauté it
in a cast iron skillet and finish it off in the oven,
or slurp up the wiggles like a bowl of soft noodles. 

But I do want you dead by my hand.
I can’t keep chipping at this wall
with these jack hammer fingers,

digging flesh from the hole in my face,
just to find another muse
to muse about.

Thinking that if I pass through this
thin sheet of skull, I won’t find you
in bed at two in the afternoon

wishing for someone to rescue you
when you know god damn well how to walk,
and the flesh of this door is cut wide open.