The children still believe that Frodo sailed off to New Haven
And that Sam married his love Rosie Cotton
And had a daughter of great beauty and virtue
Became mayor and lived with a general forgetfulness
Of his friend, enjoying the beautiful world miles away

In reality
Frodo killed himself with arsenic
Sam found the body a day later in the bathtub after the ants had started eating the lips.

When they found Adam, you were miles away
Nobody bothered to call you because
After all
This was one of those secret affairs
The kind you don’t tell your mother about
And there were more important people to tend to first

And soon enough there were more important tasks to tend to
There were cockroaches to be cleared from the kitchen
There were children to serve up hot meals to
There were dresses to be stitched and essays to write
There was a lot of sex nobody would be having
And a variety of colored condoms for everyone else
There was still the taste of poetry that will never pass your lips again

You are my tether;
You, the solitary line of entwined rope
Holding me fast to the back porch

Every other city circles me like an animal
Every possibility eyes me like prey
And I sit here tied down

And you say, “I’ll die when you leave”

And all the states turn to red, as far as I can see

I only wanted a child.
I named them already, after light and melodies
drifting to me on the radio. A want so mild
Would be as easy as Sunday morning.

But God’s a spiteful bitch who went up between my legs
He put a hand grenade there, pin-out
And rested it there like a big fat egg
Hidden beneath my girly skirt

Fifteen years it ticked then boom! acrylic dreams
And futures we’d so meticulously plotted
Fall around my feet in smithereens
Floating on a pool of lady-blood

Crash!
Two years later
I finish the job in flesh

oh god my child is stillborn
I cradle him still little slug bones
all wrapped in skin and towels
they snap he snaps I—
should
but I eat his ashes instead

baby’s blue lips baby pink
towels and
woman all over the bathroom floor
it stinks so hot you can smell it
from all the way down to the creek
holding baby

--underwater
I swallow him
like my body and how it
swallowed you
up into me eight months back
it’s a prayer
it’s an orgasm

and even with him inside me
I am still one little body in the river.

You’re the beautiful end to a sad beginning
You were born dead, hung on your mother’s rope
With a heart the size of a fist
And soft soft bones

You had such a hard time learning to inhale,
There just wasn’t enough oxygen in your throat
To chain your cells together and keep you whole
Dissolving a little more everyday, using the nights
To piece yourself back together in a smear of sweat and sperm.

That’s why, when we go out, you dance
Like a firework on the ice, mouth wide open, sucking
The air right down into you and burning with such a lack
Of restraint, because with me the world becomes your bedroom
And our secrets decorate our bodies like army badges,
You and me.

Still we’ve spent every day crawling back to soaking bedsheets
Too wet to burn, too wet to breathe, too wet to do anything
But lay spongy under the covers,

And then your birthday passes.

So, sweetest, there’s no one watching anymore
But me and the electric light
Your god is sleeping, and you’re free.

You’re gorgeous like this
Feet in the air
Upside down.

I made your face from eyeliner, mascara, ballpoint pens and lipstick
If anyone wouldn’t mind being cast in cosmetics, it’d be you
And I had to thank you for showing me my mouth the hole to stick my fingers in
When I’m lying on the floor without the faintest what to do

let’s
stay late
forget to pray
love to hate
be sad be gay
and never gain weight
get laid

let’s
have fun
die young
play guns
hold back and
do things wrong
fall down

we’ll
stay awake
until we’re late
forsake
at any rate
if we’re fake
it’s a shame

let’s
press pedal
go meddle
count petals
heavy metal
and when it’s said I’ll
be better

The kids all tumble out of the car
To the electric light show
To see your superhero idol on fire
What luck, what beautiful chance,
That miracles ride in on pounding bass
Only three hours away from their home
He’s six-foot at least, they promise
And at least twice as gay as you
Just half as gay as me
And for a dollar you can even taste him

It’s short and wild
You go and put on your best party face
And a grin wide enough to swallow God
Matching big eyes to take in the fresh air
Behind the shield
Behind the break

It’s numb and warm
Your brain-blood pours into your blush
Makes your cheeks burn with your fever
Your youth fills up all your inflated veins
Through your body
Through your head

It’s quick and wow
You stand still and the lights blur on past
The paint lines race up between your legs
The asphalt looses the grip on your wheels
Into the forest
Into the earth

It’s fast and loud
You touchdown at seventy miles an hour
Spilling through a swirl of notes and glass
And you land with every sound in the world
At your feet
At your face

It’s hard and done
The seatbelt hangs against the empty seat
Clicking quiet and steady as a birthday clock
Lights glint off it, jetting off somewhere in tonight
lost in space

I am still obsessed with sex;
The fat pearls of rainwater rolling across the car window
Conjure the idea of poison sperms racing to hell.
And I am still here while your memory slides up my legs
And ashamedly slips out my nose and mouth.
I am a vessel for sin, baptized in virgin oil and lonely creams.

Today, you are made of electricity
Your typically parched words flood and rock

Outside, people are superimposed on the red bricks
They leave trails of discontented air in their footsteps
Their voices clatter and mangle and swing from
the lamplights up top down to our ears
Such intrusions upon our conversation
agitate, distract

And you, like a buzzsaw, filled with sparks,
have your beaten edges illuminated by the fluorescent
backlight in your wake, and continue

So you stopped stealing crow fat
You decided you were fat as a crow
And a thick lie or omission, plump
From guzzling down uncertainty,
Or lean and boney from your
Many fast flights from facts

But time, dear, slipped in under your
Doors and walls and molded herself
There; like a swarm of carnivorous
Insects, or noxious gas and fumes,
She enveloped your mirror and nightstand
And the sulfuric color you keep in boxes
To escape your mundane description

Your mother has become a rocket in
The kitchen, you tell me, and not in the
Good way; she spits and sparkles and
Sets alight every perishable object she sees
While your father knits wings for himself,
From scrap metal, noisily, in the basement,
He conveniently forgot you and your brother

I can see a thousand miles in your mouth
And the staleness that came not from your
Immigration to America, but from the
Decades at your feet, stinking and dusty

Where will you go?

You turn to me and ask “how far are we going?
Let’s see how fast this thing can go” then
You try to drown yourself behind my dash-
Board; if you are cocooned and coffined in the
Leather and plastic and steel, no one would
Ever find you; you know I’d be fine with
Just driving, with you as my stowaway
Through grinning mountains and fields of
Scarecrows, and very far past the border

You
Beat box

You
Click talk

You
Run walk

You
Laugh soft

I don’t think you realize
How easy you say it would be
If you could invite the lesbian suicides to your doorstep
If you could drag them by their hair
With their bare white toes clutching the drain
Force them to it’s-the-shower-on-my-face
It’s-the-noise-you’re-birthing-in-my-throat
With your
Kill the sex kill the words kill the girls
(While we rock ourselves in the cupboards and cabinets)
And don’t tell me anything I don’t want to know. I never did.
Your words are spilling red
Cracking in the ears of the lesbian suicides
(We are rocking ourselves as if sleep could pause your invective)
As if you could pull us all back to your mold
By the stain of your hand on our cheeks
My bed is my cabinet and all the music notes and magazine cutouts and
All the lesbian suicides sleep against my chest

You
You could pick your words from the sky
Or from the air around your head that they seem to drift in
They are so careless and blissful as little nudists
And you could decorate my face with them like tattoos and like beads
You could find just the right ones to curve with my cheeks when I smile
You could find the ones with the perfect shape to and width
You could fill my face with language like a jigsaw on a table
Strip me of my skin and make me a picture on your page
Every last inch of me

And I
I can only describe what you do

As you were guiding my hands to pleasure
As I was lying in my lonely dirty bed
I heard their sick sweet morality bellowing
So I let them shoot you in the head

The sweat-covered puppies crash-land
in a heap of bony elbows and fevered meat
and grins
and in humid breaths and languid phrases
lazy syllables oozing off swollen tongues
they joke
a thousand authoritarians couldn’t pull apart
the hot kin and hungry curious love of generation
1989
tumbling all the
way down
to
1992
laughing and rioting over the carcass of good taste.

this is how small the world is.
first you take off your shoes.

and you see how small they are.
then you look at your legs.
you see how short they are.
you see how slight your hands are.
And how big the world outside is
With many grand objects
And many large discoveries.
Things much larger than you.

this is where tears come from.
your flesh and your bones.

Maybe you want me to speak to you of the autumn I hoped
That by scratching hopefulness into the faces
Of teenaged boys strike by strike
I'd convince one to reach up my skirt and fix me
Would you rather I spoke to you about that summer I spent
Waging war on my sexuality in my bed
Under my blankets beat by beat
Of the music pulsing nonchalantly in the bored air
Or would you rather I tell you about that winter I learned
To rub everything out into those very pleasant pastels
Onto the canvas stroke by stroke
To just shut the hell up and paint

The teenagers are out again
Dressed in 4 a.m. rags and goth techno
Digging in the dark for the newest, brightest way to caffeinate
Looking for love in a can of hand grenades
And a box of wired affections