in the night, everything is an animal.

the earth moves fearless, catches my animal heart.
i see the bones of this powerful play,
and they remind me:
what is love if not an open hand?

on a rainy morning

there are, with the heavy inevitably of solar flares,
people who assign you (you!) something like a value, alienated and
false and sad, in the way that packaging the sea piecemeal is false and sad.

it is important, as important as your quiet self, to reclaim your reflection, to remember that no one—
no, not even that one—will ever know you, and while yes, this
implies a loneliness both mundane and breathtaking, it 

also—darling, look—it also holds your freedom out to you 
in quivering hands, blue. they do not know better, or know you better.
the follies and faults and blunders of artificial language without

referents, deaf-mute, are not you and do not speak to you of you, you 
burning billions of years forward, naked in your mirror
are responsible not for being good, or saving even one convert,

but only for allowing your soft body to echo a rainy morning,
only for hearing the godsong in your legs and the animal of your breath as you
inhale, exhale,
love what you love.

hagamos esto: el lirio encendido,

la playa de cenizas donde nos quemamos las manos
se oscurece, y nunca se me ha parecido
tan suave la noche como ahora, al tirar flores en ciertos pantanos

que me habitan, los lagos sin fondo que me habitan, profundidades azules
que sí, lo concedo, en algún momento me asustaron por su aliento de dios frío
mas, ¿quién sería yo sin abrirme el pecho con este extraño dulzor de sacerdote,
yo, el mismísimo pan tiernamente repartido?

si hubiera de anestesiarse para salvarse, bien sabes que
la muerte puede parecer incluso acogedora.
soy todo un rito de luto, quemo las flores con que me quedé
por la ceguera. hasta la mancha de la fe la llama la devora.

a series of questions

if we weren’t and i never,
and love wasn’t and hasn’t,
if there are no trembling hands under the table,
if we are cliché and i, of all people,
got this so very, very wrong,
if there is no bird in my chest and no part of me
ever recognized any part of you,
if this wound is a wound that is meaningless,
that gives no empathy and no perspective,
that allows no clarity and no relief,
if my blood is not in your body and your body
is not mine and the silence in the storm
and my head on your chest were not,
and will not be,
if our eyes across an aisle meant nothing and i,
the sole attendant of this shiva,
have only shame and the grief of my survivor’s guilt,
if bravery has no worth and your skin no smell
and i am only one option of many,
and you are only one option of many,
we are only one color of so many,
if you are not for me and i am not for you,
if taking flight had no purpose and
if our words were seashells with only echo,
fragile and hollow and innumerable,
if there is no way back from this path,
if it disappears in the dark and my feet are agnostic,
how do i find the girl under the lights at night,
how do i save her from your fire and your weight,
how do i whisper in her ear and point her home?

there was a painting

that i saw once at the art institute of chicago. it’s a girl who is barefoot with a scythe in her hand, and she’s stopped in the act of doing something. she’s listening. in the background, the sun glows on the horizon and floods the whole painting like firewater.

the painting is called “the song of the lark.” it was painted by jules adolphe breton in 1884, although i didn’t know it at the time.

art, to me, is a concentration of the human experience to such an intense degree that it strips away situational time and circumstance and connects us to what it means to live in the world. i have also been ripped out of some specific task by the startling and almost scary appearance of a beautiful thing, like birdsong, or the way the rain beads down a window, or a river of car headlights. that moment, and the painting of a girl experiencing the same moment, murmurs to me about the irreproducibility of my life. the breathtaking speed of it, how each moment echoes but never comes again.

art situates us in a chaotic world. it forges beauty out of the chaos, or at least strips chaos into something that speaks to us about ourselves. it binds us through nakedness. it find it punishing and purifying, something that anchors and unmoors.

for me, understanding and using the mechanics of writing has always been about performing this magic. it’s my way of speaking into the void. it’s my way of rooting myself into the earth and letting the bird out of my chest.

to a lover, long since dead

It’s been a long time since I’ve sat to think only on you,
So you’ll have to be patient with me. Sometimes I guess
You’d never forgive me for how little I think about you now,
But what you wouldn’t know is how hard I try to avoid
The things that breathe you, and between you and me,
They’re everywhere.
Isn’t it devastating how time passes, like one smooth road
That blurs into darkness and forever just beyond the trees?
You haven’t touched me in a very long time, and yet sometimes
At night I feel you scooping bowls of flesh out of my chest,
One after another until there’s such a weak remnant.
I’d know you anywhere.
Dead, the morning you told me my blood was the oil in the lantern
That lit the way home for your tortured feet, only
There was no blood, and no lantern, and no light, and no home.
I have spent clenched-fist centuries not lingering over
Your body, the scars on your chest and fingers, your twice-cured magic.
Do you remember—
We painted each other and sang hymns that were gravesongs
Before we knew that we had started at the end.
We bled Braille into each other’s hands, made love
To the unspeakable things we had placed within one another,
You felt how I clung to your hand when I touched the sea.
And yet,
I’ve worked so hard to forget you, my love,
You and the long-dead nights in the rain when the city
Shined like a bullet piercing through the dark universe.
How to withstand the annihilating knowledge that
You are very much alive, a world away and thinking of me?

Crown me, the blessed queen of the soothsayers.

I,
who always felt the hesitance of my own hands on my face,
I,
who went to Carthage burning,
and never asked the Lord to pluckest me out.
I,
who vomits love at every tender thing, God’s gardener,
I,
who drew this warbled wall in my dreams from childhood,
I,
I,
I and how I knew you,
you,
who opens the same sea-window
for a long-suffering spirit that does not want out,
you,
who tastes like winter sun and ashes and my own shoulder,
you,
whose flesh is haunted, first and foremost, by the fear of your changed mind,
you,
who made this same martyred love to me in the cool of the day,
you, you,
you and I and our dandelion hearts and scorched feet,
I know it all,
Every profane, too-beautiful inch.
What about it, love, tell me,
what do you know when you look at me?

my girl,

i see you in the mirror and i know,
and you know,
someone should instigate a coup in your head.
don’t you crave,
so deeply and so darkly,
with the raw need of nighttime
the arrival of our relentless dictator of order?
a fascist who will burn, burn,
clear from your snowbell head
the thoughts that you cannot even speak?
what is it like to flutter,
my butterfly,
from one possible future to another,
plum-berry candy who says so little but
always,
always
thirsts?
the peace you have known,
twice-stolen, once shy,
taken by you and from you,
by you and by me.
i watch your tide-strewn search,
how you trip as you kiss the sea,
and really,
i don’t have the heart to tell you, my clearest song,
any of it,
but mostly how
i’ve abandoned you to try and find me.

Black-blood vomit between unsure teeth and

Eyes that glint like Californian backfires.

Tottering between versions of you and indecisive as a streetlight.

Which one goes with your Saturday-night best?

That’s how you control the spread—

It is so simple, this shame, as simple as forgetting your middle name

And you have never known mine.

I am the last problem—

a chemical unknown that you try to solve with algebra,

You bring your guts to the haberdashery and beg for something to keep out the cold.

Wounds and grief stalk most at night, or sometimes

In the surprising sun of a butter-leaf October.

I have thighs that have known more than your mouth and still I forgive you.

What is that song that we sing for the dead?

I’m afraid of your shadow, so far behind you and with no mouth at all.

To not feel most of the time is a hard-won victory,

Let us crown the champions. It is just easier to change your name than to remember it.

You induce the sea into birthing something half-made.

It is enough. You claim to know no better.

Rubber eyes and raw-fish hands, you don’t create because you lost the match.

These tiny nips take away your hair and mine,

They cut out the light from this endless room, 

but they give you something to eat.

Stop.

Look at it.

Isn’t it so interesting that,

in your need to live, live,

you only kill, kill, kill?

What is a phantom limb

But a nothing that promises everything.

I have never felt at home in this world and you know it in that
Way you know something about kinetics, which is why, I guess,
You treat me with natural logarithms and some sort of
Function from the fourth and farthest quadrant.
What is the pharmacist’s prescription for a body born homesick?

If I were to go into the bottom of my own roots I would vomit blood,
A whole Red Sea of things that burn, and you would be consumed first.
You have suffered many atrocities and I know that I am the worst,
How my own body vibrates too much when there is nothing more to say,
How I am made up of arsenic flowers and this gunmetal hunger.

Forty years in the desert and one thousand and one nights in this labyrinth and I circle endlessly around the same all-consuming thought,
One that leaves no room for your head on my chest.
There is something violent in me, something that swells in my breast
And does not love you or the rain or God or anyone.

Say it doesn’t matter, say that you will ease my aching feet
With some favorite Impressionist painting, you know I like Monet
And I know that you like fairytales—the sweeter the better, our nights
Plums that rot before you can pick them off their maternal tree.
Doesn’t everyone dream that Eve returns to the garden?

If I could articulate this ache to you I would show you, pointing
Out the stars that spin so fast they threaten to eat up the universe, exploding
As endless vast fatalities that rain fire, fire, fire.
After all, an eye is so little to sacrifice for knowledge,
And you have already taken both of mine.

There is nothing more terrifying than the sound of wings in the dark.