If we were entirely made by thread, I’d be the red yarn.
There is something about rods and cones
that doesn’t seem to like danger. They work like facets on diamonds,
sample lipstick at the grocery, white letters on stop signs;
like the word “caramel” when I say it.
God, I just want to be important. I just want to be someone real.
The early autumn leaves have me thinking deep crimson hue is only okay
when it’s fifty miles early and I should’ve expected it. People don’t like that color:
it’s like being hit in the face with a shit-ton of bricks, and nobody wants
to be met with something real.
What’s the fun in being real when you have to prove it? Let’s see,
I have a dog. When I was four I stepped on a nail and had it taken out with tweezers;
when I was seventeen I glued cigarettes into scrapbooks. When I was old enough
to call bullshit on Andy Warhol, I made a choker out of tabs off Campbell’s chicken noodle soup and a severed G string from my guitar. Sometimes,
I sit in bed and wonder how to shed eyelashes
and the effects of antidepressants on women taking birth control.
World history probably warned me about this:
being a bitch is like manhandling a group project,
everyone drowns you in praise ‘til you fuck up. I’m waiting for you to smoke it off.
I’m waiting for you to stare at the sea ‘til you’re positive there’s something there.
Under all these deeply damaged layers of artificial material and cheaply-crafted plastic,
there’s something there, and I can’t believe it’d take a bachelor’s degree to see it.

there are subtle sweaters my mind knits you.

they are purple when you walk
red when you take your shoes off

when i find printed socks i weave them in,
and drip sweet old sesame oil between the hairs and the knit.

there are subtle sweaters my teeth build you,
after i brush them too,
when i don’t speak and it’s mostly in february

what is it about the letters f ‘ruary’
that squeezes in love
through the cushions?

Already in August the bees
had gone to ground, 
burrowing for rain. 
Already we knew
many things of winter,
the frozen doorsteps,
the slush on Third Street.

The mower’s blade,
unsharpened since my father’s death,
startled two who rose and stung—
the light of pain, the annoying
thought that I was wrong—
being there, a blaze
of flesh, a man.

We have our flannel
and our heated rooms, 
hot water and the hour of sleep
before we leap 
into the day, things to fracture
and collect, things to heed.
The bees are still, memorial,

the winds of Illinois 
only they can hear. 
Already they knew
in August the squalls of snow
off Lake Erie, the dents
men make 
as they perfect the land.

It’s night one of Aquarius season
& the road is bleached with moon
& spit. I’m looking at my bangs
crusted like a helmet to my face.
I’m looking to kill the president
of the USA—if not the tower, the
hallway, if not his ghost, his hands.
A boy told me once he thought all
girltears were black cause he only
saw his sister cry with mascara on,
that same eye leaking & leaking.
I told him god is a 12 year old girl
leaking all her hidden bitter tears
on a kitchen table.

When I was 12 a nice white lady
mistook me for her adopted
daughter every day after school.
She thought I looked just like her
from the back but I know what
I look like: a lotus flower with a
sideways cunt, lying facedown on
my bedroom floor remembering
how bright animal eyes shine when
they are reflected in car eyes. My
mom doesn’t believe in abortions
so she mailed me to Shanghai with
a suitcase filled with breastmilk
as soon as I was born. There are no
stars in the womb but the stars in
Amerika glimmer like cruel babies
in the rain.

Last night I dreamt of a wet block
of tofu falling down an escalator,
step by step, into a shallow eternity.
I know it meant nothing but it went
on all night long. At the end of this
escalator I witnessed god sitting
at a kitchen table. She wants to know
if Amerika is as holy as the textbooks
say & I tell her: Amerika is
a swimming pool filled with spit,
a pile of puke on the nativity scene,
a limp dick on Snapchat,
an artificial plant dying under
a depression lamp & I
have been instructed to build
a synthetic ontology in all
the holy spaces left behind.