I hadn’t felt the sunshine since the funeral. The sound of my feet crunching in the river of pebbles and hardened dirt mud is distinctly me, one set of feet. Doctor Byrd walks with haste, always rushing to help, consult. I heard his footsteps often, crunching up the path to our front door, steady like a dripping faucet, a metronome on a piano ledge, weighed down by his briefcase in which he kept clear bottles and stainless needles. Henry would wait on the porch, watch Doctor Byrd’s swift ascent up the path and lead him ( inside. )

Armed with dirty gloves and rakes, they told us
not to be gentle, to pull like hell on the vines that
strangle the trees. Dioscorea bulbifera,
air potatoes, not to be confused with the kind
in the skillet on Thanksgiving, the ones the Irish
planted and lamented. The difference here is that
we cannot get them to stop growing.

They overgrow the starry sandhill milkweeds,
take soil from the marbleberries. Air potatoes
can’t catch on fire. Instead they entice birds to spread their seeds,
infiltrate the rainwater and ride the current to a healthy space,
latch onto a native plant and start over—
braid their thin green vines around branches,
suck up nutrients and drop ugly yams.

Since the bulbs are pebble brown and unwanted,
we are allowed to mercilessly kill them.
We hook the rake’s claws in a tangle of wiry twine.
Heart-shaped leaves and squat tubers rain
around us. We pull, pry the weed loose
from its death grip around the tree trunk.

We hack at the mass, jerk
handfuls of herbaceous growth and toss
it into waiting garbage bags.

The school board call this community service and to
our eighth grade ears this sounds like slave labor.
The girls want flowers for their hair
but the partridgeberries are too small to tuck
behind the ear, the pennyroyals remind us of thistles.

Someone picks up a stray air potato,
lobs it into the water of the bay. It makes the most satisfying gulp,
a tiny atom bomb to burrow under the muddy floor.
They scold us, understand our sentiments but
that kind of behavior will not keep away the air potatoes.

Aunt Marsha didn’t like the beach.
Lathered in sunscreen and long sleeves,
she pinched the corners of a towel,
put her back to the wind and let it float to the ground.
Weighing down the corners with an extra book,
my sister’s purple shell bucket, a Gatorade cooler and
her shoes, she set Carly in the middle, brought
her toys to keep her hands busy and dry. Aunt Marsha
hated the granules of sand that wove their way in between toes
and coated skin like bug spray. Carly was a baby,
would pull at the ruffles and jewels stuck on her bathing suit,
occasionally give our aunt a look behind her star-shaped sunglasses.

I was allowed to wander the beach at my pleasure, stick my feet
in shallow pools of seaweed, dig ditches
around crab holes and collect the shards of metallic shells.
A seagull grazed my ear with his feathered wing and I
bolted back to the blanket, shuffling the sand around me.
In my excitement I kicked a fistful of sand at Carly’s face.
Aunt Marsha yelled at me and set me on the blanket while
I watched her take Carly into the water to wash her off,
holding her underarms delicately and cooing as she soothed.
She kissed her forehead. On shore I packed a dinosaur mold
with loose sand, turned it over on the blanket.

For years we watched him build his masterpiece.
The cubic feet expanded as our eyes grew tired,
staring at the garish palace. He said God
wanted it that way,
God had taken a renewed interest in us.
But Noah nailed strips of gopher wood,
sent his family out to collect animals,
threw himself on the ground in prayer.
He continued, regardless of us.

In the last days,
as we could come to know them,
the rains came as Noah had warned.
They came oddly gentle.
First a soft sputtering of drizzle
not unlike the scattering of birdseed,
the falling crumbs of bread from the loaf.
Looking to our barren fields,
We were oddly thankful of Noah
for sending us this rain.
But when my roof caved from the pressure
and I could not stay dry
long enough to remove my sandals,
I went to Noah to find him gone.

He sealed the door, long ago had
He driven in the last nail.
The scene was quiet
despite a sundry caw or cry.
I waited outside the door
as the water began to lap at my ankles.
Flower petals and bits of leaves
floated around my feetlike a belt of forgotten creations.
Noah had told us God
didn’t want any of those things anymore.
The water was clear, like an invisible blanket,
lying over the ground. Objects were just
floating around in the flood,
waiting to go somewhere, do something.
I picked an Almond Blossom from the
perpetual current, touched its waterlogged leaves.
I did want these flowers, despite.

I tap the lid against my open palm,
like thumping the barrel, nudge
the last shot that clings to the wet metal.
I’ve never had one before, she tells me.
Carsen tucks her hair behind her ears.

I thumb the paper lid of the pack to unveil three
crisp rows of cigarettes,
ready to deploy in the battleground of my body.
Packed tight, their tobacco caps look like a machine gun sash,
draped across a beauty queen’s chest.

I count Carsen’s initials,
touch one roll for A, one for B,
remove and flip and repack the cigarette for C.
Smokers always have to find new ways
to think that luck is on their side, I explain,
running through the alphabet like a field manual.

I pluck one roll,
my weapon of choice,
place it between my lips like
flicking off the safety. She picks
her own, mirrors my tactics,
salivates around the invasion.
Without a lighter you are
a solider in a nightgown.
I light my own, breathe in
a sigh, the whizz of a missile
above our heads and she gives me
this pathetic look. She is gun shy
and has the tommy ready in her hands.
So I reach over and she crosses
her eyes to watch the flame light the cigarette
like staring down a landmine,
watching a colleague dismantle a bomb.

Her mouth looks like Nagasaki from
the pilot’s seat. But it gets lit and the first cloud
of smoke is a mushroom from her lips.

Wavering like a lazy flag in dead heat,
my body might’ve collapsed had it not been
for the four walls that kept me upright,
grasping at the slick tiles with the palms of my hands,
like maybe I could make them stick like a spider’s
spindly limbs. Uncapping the tub of jiggling goo,
my fingers bite at the edge of the plastic,
a tiny cut opens the skin of my hand.
The jelly inside flabbles back and forth.
I press two fingers in like I was tasting
cake batter, having already licked the spoon.
The slab resisted until the point of my nails,
a clean break.

When I cupped the chunk in my hand,
scooped it over to a washcloth,
I remembered a time when I once
stood inside the shower, bar of Dial
soap in my hand, scratching with my tiny
nails through the lye, hoping to find something
hidden inside. Like maybe there was some
center that shrunk as the soap grew thinner,
frailer, began to crack and die under the water pressure.
But that was back when I thought there could be
a center to everything.

I found her floating on a blue cloud,
curled like a ribbon’s end, limbs packed tight against her body.
Tiny chicks pecked around her feet, their eggshells, shards of white
against the sickly blue of her blanket, pulled taut
over her shoulders like a jacket, waiting for rain to come.
When I found her she had already taken the pill.

Her jaw was shaking like arthritic hands splitting a pill;
her eyes squinted like a sailor in the morning cloud.
I knew she didn’t want me to come
and find her there, her expired body
in her bed. She was repeating what they taught
her in Sunday school: she had to earn robes of white

that could be hers in heaven’s land, crowns of white,
wings for a token, gates laced with pearls like strings of pills.
In heaven there are no more lessons to be learned or taught,
the teacher told her, heaven feels like sleeping on a cloud.
But she knew that the breath of a cloud could never hold her body,
could never entice her enough to come.

But I made her come,
and her vision went colored dots and then white,
white white. I gripped her body
like a leopard cured at the swallow of a pill.
I made her come and while I was clouding
inside her she was biting her lips taut.

As a little girl her mother taught
her well, leave well enough alone and come
home for dinner always. Then her vision began to cloud
and she could not tell the difference between grey, black and white,
and every truth a bitter pill
that she swallowed, coursed through her body.

She offered me her pearly body
and if I was taught one thing I was taught
to never give up something good, to bite the bullet like a pill
and swallow, no matter how much you just wanted to come
home and lie in bed and want. And want. Her white
fingernails dug into my pillow; her face kept changing like a cloud.

We came to an understanding that a body wasn’t a body unless it was taut.
So we swallowed pills and painted our faces eggshell white.
Heaven isn’t a cloud. You can come if you want.

When we reached the trial they told us to be very still when the lawyer asked for our testimony. We did as we were told, dressed in our nicest robes, a grey satin with silver enclosures pressed at the bumps of our motionless throats. We didn’t fidget, just laced our hands together with the one next to us, a chain of bric-a-brac black&white striped fingers. Our palms were damp, our secret as we checked the blank spaces atop the walls, absently looking for clocks. Here they have more control over time, they get to choose when they want things to happen. They wanted to know what we had done to ourselves (their creation, their masterpiece) so we tried to tell them that we meant well but something about the way they paced and shuffled their belongings in their laps made us think they weren’t listening. At the end they asked us what one thing we’d like to save and we said “the earth. We’d like to save the earth.”

In My Lungs
We lit cigars and circled the iron gate.
There was only enough space to fit a fist
between the metal bars and the marble wall.
Those Mormons think a gate can keep away the world
that we drag around on our soles and in our sleeves.
That summer America watched police brigades
march through gates of men on their knees.
Armored masses pointed guns at believers,
broke through their hands to dig around
boxes of secrets, look for modern crimes.

You and I smoked in their parking lot, speculating
the rituals they keep, the prayers they utter when they are
alone. Your house isn’t a place to live, you said,
it’s a place to keep your things.
But we held on to this night, free to drive
your dad’s golf cart through the Temple parking lot.
You were ready to spin around the world
for six weeks while I read stories
of gondolas and straw hats to Sunday school
children who had never heard Italian.

The golden Gabriel pointed west,
gardens inside the bars rustled under raindrops.
Our smoke drifted through the gate,
touched the snowy marble and curled
upward to join the real clouds.

We said this rain is the same rain
Joseph felt pounding in his heart
the night he scribbled words in a foreign tongue;
the same rain that slides off
the golf cart roof, hits our toes,
knives through our smoke, temporal clouds.
You said I take my breaths big and long,
expelling cubic feet while you puff short gasps
spitting out the smoke just as fast as you take it in.
I test the precipitation,
offer my cigar to the extinguishing sky
and it lets me burn a little longer, another rueful drag.

We held hands and twisted beaded strings
between our empty fingers. We wanted
more than a sandy scrapbook filled
with pictures of you and me touching foreheads, hoisting
comical paper umbrellas over our curly ponytails.
That wouldn’t be enough, we thought, to say everything about us,
to put our relationship up against the doorjamb and mark little
lines whispering when and where. We could draw
timelines on our bodies, we said, instead of your bedroom door.

Being poets we thought that brevity could be better
than any intricate tribal design. As if saving ink would
save us. You drew a demented “xo” with your left hand on your wrist,
vines tangled around the borders,
sprouting little leaves. I wanted
it somewhere else, somewhere no one could see.
That night I might have held your wrist a little too long,
traced the film over your veins a little too roughly
to see if you really wanted it, if you’d really do it.

And after we turned the engine over
I couldn’t help
but notice the way I felt more bones in your wrist
than ever before.

A Place to Dry

“I want to hang
our clothes like Aunt Cassie
on the string.” Clothespins clipped
around damp one
hundred percent pure family-
photo worthy daily best
garments from caskets of dirty once-
worn outfits. Caked in
daily grime, nightly
swashling around the bathtub when
bedtime has been called.

Heated, press of steel
grates to fried
cotton. Wrinkles spill
through Thai weave
organic as we know it. Plastic and rubber
handle, coupled with steam
smokes kinks from the shirt
draped taut and palmed down
onto the hinged plank
that the iron paces.

You’ve carried the scheduled explosion in the clock on your wrist,
the weight of the world resting heavy in the pit of your chest.
Tarred lungs, overlapping time codes, inevitable deaths
And I’ve always been so good with your secrets

The last moment of the world is a steady tick,
a resolute wave thunders back and the ocean goes dry.
My lungs are salt, the air oddly thick,
the first breath was a gasp, the last is a sigh.

There is simply no
way to keep me off the grass.
Watch my shoes for me.

he prophesizes and preaches across
the chipped white picket fence
that separates our bungalows
and he draws multitudes to my hopscotch-
ladden sidewalk, but performing
miracles in downtown shanties
doesn't make the best parable

wispy hair whispering around the temples (of his ears)
kneeling, bending down at eyebrows,
shielding but just showcasing
sweat lines as he mows the lawn
or gets the mail in rumpled nightclothes
and all in that bed-tussled hair
as if he were always caught worshipping
(walking a woman to her car)
or making sacrifices on the floorboards of his porch
(burning a single steak on his Hibachi)
or bowing to pray for guidance
(smoking on his steps, children jumping rope by his gate)
or baptizing, holy after a pilgrimage
(sweeping his sidewalk bare in autumn)
or simply crucifying
(locking the screen door alone)

Enchantment is not about feeling love
in your heart or in your hair.
It's the moment when you realize
that your efforts are only sandbags to the floodwaters,
that suffering is inevitable and you, fossor,
have dug their graves already.
Your enamel skin and crater eyes,
your greenback sprees have given rise
to the dip-dyed dive of continual
tail-biting suffering. Always a sunset, never
morning light. Always undercover newscasts
from an unmarked van in the dead of night.
You who hang silently in a lighthouse have only been
the beacon of light to shine upon the hidden waves,
to illuminate the blackened depths only
to point them out and never sail them yourself.
You who reach from the shore line
cast nets until your elbows rust,
gather in your fish to set free from the sea.

When I was fourteen they cut down the oak tree.
On Thursday morning I was riding shotgun,
science book open, rereading bolded words,
whispering definitions in my head.
We clipped the curb with the hubcap
to avoid the unexpected cherry picker
that was hoisting a hardhat who was
tinkering with the telephone pole.
I didn't notice that the oak tree was gone
until Sunday afternoon on a bike ride,
house keys tucked in my back pocket
and punk music blasting through my headphones.
When I was fourteen, making a wide turn
around Marcus Court onto Smith on my Schwinn,
I looked up and saw the sky.

a holy place

On Saturday nights, we'd stay up late in the sunroom,
passing around pieces of paper that bore
our favorite bible verse or memory from the week.
We'd all have sunburned shoulders and pink bags under our eyes.
Each of us in our matching nametags swinging from our necks like rosaries,
we'd sit too close on that thin carpeted floor.
The handmade banners would flutter in the circulating air
as we put away our crafts and fiddled with our nametags while we bowed our heads together,
TJ's quiet guitar guiding our hands to wrap the thinning yarn between our fingers.
We'd assemble in reverence and follow the person in front of us to the vesper ring
overlooking a still, manmade lake.
Filing onto the piecemeal benches, we'd pick up the song, hands on our moist knees.
Our lips would move in unison, letting the words around us seep into our summer skin.
We'd all sing that same level, voices conserved and lifted, like it was ever going to be enough
to soothe that deep itch just inside our skin.

pinching the seeds of watermelons from the icy pink sponge,
my fingers itch with natural sugar,
the stick of fresh cut triangles.
The fried streets are lined with
kevlar balloons tied to the back of cars,
summer air pushing them to the gravel.
My brother and I talk about utopia.
He is the kind of kid who gets people to laugh at his jokes
even if they are not funny.
He is seedless, so to speak.
He wants to be like me with my glue-bound journal
and often-replenished hair dye.
He wants to be anything else but twelve years old,
bike riding around the neighborhood.
Last month my camera broke so I couldn't capture
the way the rest of my tiny town celebrates
July Fourth. My brother walks on his tiptoes
to throw away the leftover watermelon,
the thick green skin. He sits back down beside me
and we talk about utopia
and how it doesn't exist.

a rightful place (she tells me that)

she is purifying her life.
that she can't bear
to see scraps of old
feelings still tacked to the wall.
so that is why
I have twenty
unstrung glass beads and one
wilted highway flower
on the bottom stair
to the Library of Congress.
because I have
always been the figure
waiting outside for the taxi
with its trunkmouth
full of luggageteeth
while the muffler spills
black smoke and the driver,
white smoke.

She says I do everything
for the wrong reasons, that I count
my rights instead of my wrongs
to convince myself
that I'm ok. She's moving to an apartment
with a bay window. she is planning
on putting cushions there
where the current tenant irons
his shirts every morning
on a beach towel. Apart
from an orange duffle
of shoes and scarves,
she plans on moving
things in through shopping bags.
because she is whole
-hearted with beginnings
like that.

She never left anything
on my floor afterwards. I'd go
sweeping under bedskirts
or behind the bathroom door
and find nothing but empty
corners, as if she was never
there. Her buttons always
stayed buttoned, her laces always
stayed tied. She
would proclaim
that there was a rightful
place for every thing
and that part of life
was about finding it
and staying there. On
the cement Library stair,
with a hollowed middle
from too many civilian
feet, I'm beginning
to think that she is right.

You maybe don’t know this
But you are my apple tree.
And outside my oblong rectangle window
You stretch from trunk to highest reaching felt-tip branch.
Auburn autumn and golden greens,
You are covered in falling leaves.
An apple tree, my apple tree
Don’t you fall too far from me.