I filled my pockets up with words but they deceived
me—they found a hole, they shimmied out, they
scampered through—left me wondering

why can’t I say what I feel for—? if we were closer
we would lavender, or even after we could knuckle
bones raw—but instead here we are cutting ribbons

from the sky, skinning time purple & bare,
cursing the gods of iridescence as they smoke
hookah into our lungs, burn incense into our spines.

Look You don’t have to be so blown open
about it Level stare we’re just cavities Sorry
and pliant limbs around the languid. Take one
slow lean and suddenly everything seems
applicable. Mouths with their warm red weight. How
last summer, a storm drove me porous River thinned
What to do with all this inner? The bloated oak
the cedar, the bees Curl of fern-shy murmur
peeled up the live side in me

a month after I met Bug, I asked:
“did I tell you I hated people too soon?
were you scared?” he laughed. “please,
it was time. I was relieved.” relieved
like oh good, she’s one of us. relieved
like he didn’t have to hide anymore. and
we don’t, of course, we don’t hate. we just
know. how to see invisible things, how to
not be aggressively abnormal, even when
we are, how to find others like us. we wait
in hiding, and reveal ourselves by careful
codewords. I don’t mind when people smile
for pictures and I don’t mind when they
talk more than they listen and I don’t mind
when they let other people shrink. but
Bug and I, we know: sometimes, you need
someone else to not mind with.

Ruin me in blue,
paint me in skins baked raw
and glass found broken.
I pray to my rock god
with my back bent over,
for arches and rivers
and taut throats cut
with slag. We are not lost,
not creature keepers bound
in curving leather,
stilts sunk deep in dry run mud.
No, we are not them.
We run like skies
swinging sharp and worlds
reflected in ponds—
the taste of heat
on lost tongues.
We live like torn skin
and the scent of blind men,
we rejoice like fire and
love like thumb-stuck barbs
and burial grounds.

I wonder what Jesus felt when Judas kissed and betrayed him
that last time, you said – before surging towards me,
lip to lip, two girls betraying our heavenly bodies.

We inhaled and exhaled, Eve and Eve. No serpents here,
we dove instead of fell. Through repentance or maybe love
(but what’s the difference), you got on your knees that night.

You still believe.

Leviticus 18:22. Genesis 19:1-11. Romans 1:18-32.
It is an abomination.

King James Bible, leather bound.

But how? I thought. We knelt too hard and felt too deeply,
hearts wound up like little grenades. Drowned within each other,
running out of air from one another; all the usual cliches.

It was on your tongue that I first found salvation.
You danced from transept to apse to nave, singing,
Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. Forgive, forgive, forgive.

Inhale, exhale, heartstrings ticking like faulty clockwork.
Your Sunday skirt dangled like a limp, shredded flag,
while I thought of the pink in your skinned, knocked knees.

The heavy woodwork of aisles, filtered light, the smell of
musk. There’s a steel flagpole holding your spine ramrod straight,
You have no room for warping inside.

I think it felt like this, I replied, A little tender but more
bitter than sweet. Maybe sad; inevitable defeat.
But most of all, it probably felt good. Relief, and release.

i have the sinking suspicion
that hell is no fiery inferno,
but every lie you’ve told your mother.
hell is the nausea of peeled beer bottle labels and
every time you wore sweatpants but answered “lace.”

This is an attempt to organize the purported divine, foundation
myth of a fugue state. Small boys dissecting birds at the joint—finding uses
for the acute, uses for the obtuse. Our Histories tell us augurs were the first
actuaries—knew how risk burned in the gut. Men who read
the appendix. One lunar year, circling Euclid, I lit
a taper and slipped singed lines
under my tongue. Felt the thin lick of idea eclipsed
by its own urge. Flawed axiom: grasp. Flawed
axiom: rigor. Sum it up knees locked
to a list and broken into step, echo little bittern

Shiver tip, paint me a portrait
for loss, for the color orange
the summer I was sixteen,
and for held hands
like your mother’s china.
Teach me remembrance,
and the hollows of your neck
when you were fourteen
and I thought yes was the greatest
one syllable I had ever heard.
Dedicate my seventeenth birthday
to your parted lips, to gravel
and perfume and to smoke
rolling off cars and clothes.
I told you I loved your elbows
and it was true; you forgot
my last name and left town.