The Day I Became a Bird

The day my beak grew
I wanted you to notice it. You didn’t
even have to touch it. Maybe you were scared.
Maybe you were hoping
I would get surgery. I imagined you volunteering
to pay. It’s on me, you would say. Take care of yourself,
while looking at my hair instead of my face.
Maybe you’d have been waiting for me
in the nougat-colored aftercare room
with the bouquet of geraniums. Perennials,
you’d say, we’re in for the long run.

The days my wings developed,
holding court behind my shoulders,
I wanted you to ask me about them. Could you fly,
you could’ve said, like a kite or a bee? And I would’ve said,
like a superhero. We could have talked all day
about the things we would do differently
with superpowers.

The day my feathers grew
I wouldn’t have even minded
if you shaved them. I would’ve
forgiven you. We would’ve been lost
in the flux of plume and down and laughed
until it felt like every sound coming out
of us had a fracture.

The day I stopped being human
we could have done it together. I waited for you
in the hospital. I collected a pile of sticks,
just in case.

Names

It’s true
I often write poems
just to use certain words. It’s true
I dream of babies just for their names.
I have twenty-six journals
cradling sleeping names.
My L book revealing:
Luther, Lux, Lucille, Lou.
The twenty-seventh book
is an index. Silly names:
Snoopy, Coda, Turtle, Iris.
Theme names:
Helvetica, Garamond.
My old nicknames:
Sleepyhead, Stinky. I smile
despite the deprecation –
they’ve already wedged a sweet association
in the cavities of my brain.
Rich, supple, elastic. Lucille, I want to yell
into space. Claudio. Mathilde. I wrote a book
just so two characters with first-class names
could fall in love. I am one of those people
who repeats your name and looks you in the eye.
I do it at least ten times
an hour. A name in another’s mouth,
like a mute boy’s kiss, makes a person feel
like a person. I love to hear, Christine, Christine.
A name is a gesture that goes to sleep
and wears a cotton hat. When I meet
another Christine, I relax slightly. My name,
unlike myself, wears a form
of permanence.

There is no such thing
as a terrible name. There is no such thing
as a ruined name, always an unborn baby
waits to redeem it. There is no such thing
as a secret name. I want to enter
forests, beaches, cities, christen every rock
and plant and piece of candy,
name them all after names waiting
to redeem themselves like Jezebel
or signs for the deaf

like a sleepy boy with a cotton hat
sitting down with his entire shirt
unbuttoned and his hand to his bottom lip
touching it as though something
inside of it could pop.

Borderline Poetry

Ascent Aspirations

We Spend So Much of Our Time Going In and Out of Bathrooms

I search every ladies’ room in New York City. The toilets look like
upside-down teardrops on a dirty face. At night in the bars

the restrooms are smoky-discreet, waiting rooms for the homeless. I stopped
putting up the signs —Have You Seen Gretel? — having found them defaced

with word-slurry, marks drawn on her photocopied mouth that make her look
like she’s drowning. The immaculate bathrooms are most offensive:

chrome, sensitive like teeth, a reminder of what is not there. I used to carry
a flashlight, shined it in the eye of each sink and towel dispenser. Two questions,

who are you looking for and who do you think you’re fooling? an attendant asked me.
She told me the bathroom is no joking matter, that nobody hides here.

I thought I saw my sister in a gas station stop by the West Side Highway in the corner stall,
knees on the ground like a mix of tile and legs was some gritty topography.

Her hands, two kernels clutching the rim. Her body looked like an abandoned house.
I knew it wasn’t her, but gave her a slice of bread that she ripped into pieces.

Burner Magazine

Nightmare #37

For Tereza and Tomas

I live for the bed. I live for the private, the closed doors;
your pajamas I beg to wash in my mouth
and never return. The rules of the bed are
no more secrets, no more clothes, and then no more rules
which means at any moment
the bed may become a water taxi
and take us to a place where there are strangers,
accessories, shirts laced with fear. Outside the bed
there are jokes. Jokes are human
and clothe fears. Jokes are a way to survive
in public. One morning I awake:
the pillows are waterlogged and I am a joke. You are wearing
a suit and a tie. You hand me a cane, no longer
a dandy. I am a cripple. A snail holds its bed
on its back. A hermit holds her lover’s pajamas
in her mouth. A water taxi charges the same fare
to the public: every body is the same. No parts
private. I cannot recognize your human parts
in a sea of shoes and pants and knock-knock,
who is there, fireman’s suspenders. Christine who?
I unswallow your pajamas and wave them around
like a blue and white flag. They are the same color
as your iris and white. Which you open
and close to try to get us to the place we were
before we both fell asleep and the cab opened its
blankets to hold every privacy we’ve ever shared.

Burner Magazine

What Makes The Blind Man Sad and Isn’t Supposed to Make The Blind Man Sad

I.
The song made the blind man think of his biggest weakness: spelling. After he heard the lyrics, he wrote all sorts of challenging words down on napkins. He swerved down chemotherapy, and malicious. Her wrote down sleep with me, song but misspelled it smurf with me, lung. Couldn’t help glitches in thought.

The blind man missed the song before he even heard it. The day he finally heard it, he ate an entire container of Raisinets.

II.
The biggest weakness is being neutral in times of passion. Everybody knows this except for the blind man. The blind man’s emotional blind spot bit him during the snarled part of the song. The part he thought was harmony. He was not born with his endured fingers. He hiccupped with them, and pressed to prevent them.

The blind man could have spoke, or sang. He even could have listened. This type of listening is sometimes confused as kissing.

Anastomoo

First Journey Alone

Leaving home, his head noisy
like a barn full of animals
Hansel, Hansel, he hears himself summoned.

Only a few more months and it will go away, his mother told him.

In the aftermath of the tragedy, he picked up new regressive habits:
-sucking his thumb
-pulling his hair
-blinking thrice often
-dreaming of wild geese pulling his arms in different directions

He ate three times his body, then nothing at all.

It will go away his mother said It will go away; he wore her leotards so often
cloth pressing skin closer, kissing his lethargic muscles

Opened and closed same door to same music: half in Morse.
He tempered his breathing
with the sound of the wind.
No wind.

Found himself attracted to: older women, suffering, pine trees growing
from his teeth, waking up with his own name
feeling burnt onto the side of his torso.

No mother. It will go away
There once was a sister, a (checkers) partner.

He always felt
1. sleepy
2. like a sore throat
3. like a disintegrating book.

Set off to find the other half
of a body. No child in body.

Somebody painted his portrait, eating.
Somebody painted his portrait, sleeping on the side of the road.

A portrait. No artist.

When he called her by name, it sounded like
he was choking. A two-indigo plum flush grew
from the cheeks.

No throat.
No body, family. Hansel ,

no

!

Second Adolescence in Vienna, Paris, Bruges, Amsterdam

Only fluent in water: stopped throat, a clog in the sink,
a plumbing system measured in sobs. A tongue whose muscle memory

forgot how to be a tongue. The moon is made of milk – no, butter. It does not
comfort me here, a scalp turned away, a canoe swimming toward the buoyant stars.

I do not recognize its face from my celestial latitude. A bird tears itself in half
at the zenith on my map. The animal is the worst kind of tourist. I had questions

in a language I could speak but not understand. All Europeans speak nostalgia.
Sometimes I picked up on a similar dialect that confused me. Longing.

Whisper July 2011

The Spare Part Unused Mercantile

Chimes: I recognize the handshake’s click
between palm and dial-up modem. Mourn
the aisles: pay phones, beepers, and celebrities

(Shatner and James van der Beek) who now cameo in movies
as themselves.
I’m here to buy ribs, tires, change.

Find old diseases: smallpox, polio
having been replaced by superbugs and ebola –
quaking and reeling.

I find my old toothbrush in aisle four, touch plastic (replaced
by electric) muscle. It coughs, swallows a Ricola. Still pretty,
it tells me. Don’t ever lose your necessity.

The objects fall in real-needs love/
meaningless sex with other objects.
They have trouble sleeping: You are not wanted.

Hear you are not needed
in the places where people spend money. Which is
everywhere.

I find dodo birds and dinosaurs in Aisle 7.
I still can’t find my purple sweater, or

the flaked-off memories
of touched-body
shaped like fluted boats. What was once

a vague sheet is now
a quilt, seams waning inward
like spoons.

My body feels
too animal
and not enough machine.

After the Umbilical Cord

Only when I am in love can I eat and not think about it.

I.

Eat like the food in your hands will freckle, melt
Or disappear in the time it takes to swallow.
Eat like it’s a game of solitaire,
And there is the possibility of losing.
Eat because you can’t talk.
A torn mouth folds up into itself.
A lukewarm mouth seasons cuts of resistance with salt.
The gears of your mouth have power. You can do
So many things. Talk, say Bless you. Please others.

When someone dies, don’t eat. Forget about it! Or eat
For him and his family. Eat for the entire world. Be afraid
There is not enough nourishment to press
Into your mouth.

II.

An open mouth says “what have you done?”
A closed mouth says “…”
An open mouth says “I can’t stomach you.”
A closed mouth eats the quotation marks.