Read an Excerpt
Water I Won’t Touch
It’s hard to explain my persistent sadness when I keep so many
blueberries frozen in the freezer.
Nirvana, in the past, has been plenty
of fruit, and all the moments spent outside of myself. But currently, I am trying to pull
the planets from retrograde, and remember all the ways my drinking can kill me.
I still want a lake-sized sip. This is such a citrus habit of mine, such acid rusting
away my tooth enamel. I never learned to drive because I knew one day
I would learn to drink. I have always been almost selfless like this. Sure,
there are some things I regret:
I once left my mother’s Minolta
on the hood of a car, and I regret all the memories lost in turn.
Because I am an alcoholic,
my memories are seven amens
and a few holy spirits from hogtied. I name all my favorite
bars after churches. Pigeons are swans if you squint. You know,
the cherry blossoms bloomed again this year, despite all the damage
to my liver. And autumn is coming,
even though I’ve said things
I do not mean.
Sand & Silt
In the beginning, there was a boy who touched me as he shouldn’t have.
His hands around my ankles—claustrophobic—
a plot of cattails on the water’s black silt.
We all have a story like this,
innocent in its setting, nefarious
how it stays spurred into our bones as we grow.
I think I knew I was a boy when the boy touched me.
I know this boy is now a violent man
with a large collection of semi-
automatic rifles. Some things
are so absolute. The point at which rain becomes snow. The way
fruit eventually spoils even under unblemished skin.
If I make a metaphor of my body,
it’s a desert. One part longing,
one part need, the rest withstanding. Of course
I would prefer to be thirsty
for nothing. I’d rather do so much than be touched in this angry dark.
Violent men want me to be a violent man.
Or they want me dead.
What a privilege to have an option.
My Partner Wants Me to Write Them a Poem about Sheryl Crow
but all I want to do is marry them on a beach that refuses to take itself too seriously.
So much of our lives have been serious.
Over time, I’ve learned that love is most astonishing when it persists after learning where we come from.
When I bring my partner to my childhood home it is all bullets and needles and trash bags held at arm’s length. It is my estranged father’s damp bed of cardboard and cigar boxes filled with gauze and tarnished spoons. It is hard to clean a home, but it is harder to clean the memory of it. When I was young, my father would light lavender candles and shoot up. Now, my partner and I light a fire that will burn all traces of the family that lived here.
Black plastic smoke curdles up, and loose bullets discharge in the flames. My partner holds my hand as gunfire rings through the birch trees. Though this is almost beautiful, it is not. And while I’m being honest:
My partner and I spend most of our time on Earth feeding one another citrus fruits and enough strength to go on. Every morning
I pack them half a grapefruit and some sugar.
And they tell me it’s just sweet enough.
On the Benefits of Learning by Example
I’m always writing about heavy things: headstones,
fathers, a feather painted with blood. Below the equator
bats are boiling in the night sky. I know this is the product of global heat, humans, but all I remember is my father
taking bat after bat from the night sky with a BB gun.
The first thing I ever learned is that it’s not hard
to kill. He held them together,
dead in his hands and rolling like tiny red plums.
When I fall in love with my partner it’s as fast as a downed bird, smooth and in a tailspin.
Our bodies are not meant to live together, in such queer blood red
harmony. But some sins are sweeter than others.
Sodom and Grace are all wrapped up
in the backwoods and yes, I will always be loving my partner just like this—soft
and dusted in Pennsylvania dirt. As far as I walk from my roots, they grow to reach—
and that teaches me everything
I need to know about being good.
One Geography of Belonging:
After Ocean Vuong
What becomes of the girl no longer a girl? Dearest Mother,
The stretch marks from my once-breasts have migrated
to their new tectonic flats.
But you can always find hints
of what used to be. Trust me,
it is more beautiful
this way, to look closely at my body and name it things like:
Pangea & history & so, so warm.
Look at me now and see how blood
faithfully takes the shape of its body, never asking.
never asking too many questions.
Dearest Mother, how many rivers did I run across your belly?
Do you love that they will never dry up?
Mother, I’ll make all this water worth it.
Echo
When they look inside your chest, the sonogram calls
your heart an orchid, each petal pulpy and abnormally
palpitating. You and I
both imagined it would
behave this way, flowering too big where it shouldn’t.
We have both pressed our ears to conch shells
and clocked your heart as it gallops
into another season,
another faulty
bloom. Perhaps it is an early symptom of aging, to worry
like this, with every sense,
in every room of our bodies.
Perhaps it is wrong of me to be so critical
of your heart—to want it to speak more like mine."
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