floor boards muscles into cobwebs, growing pains sounding like an attic groaning under the weight of old photo albums. as a kid i knew that there was a car burning above water before this life, i woke here to find fire scorched my hair clean off until i shined like glass—my eyes, two acetylene headlamps. in my family we have a story for this: my brother holding me in his hairless arms. says
dad it will be a monster we should bury it.
ULTRASOUND
it’s not that we’re all born
genderless, though we are.
rather, once we were all small
women inside our mothers.
something about science
& sex organs & hormones
& god. no wonder she wept
red negligee when she walked in
on me at ten in her worst dress
spinning before her dead
father’s mirror, my eyes made up
into science fictions. felt me
again inside her, my pig thirst
threading her blood & body
mass into another veil i’d wear
& not care for. seeing mother
cry i found myself
into manlier fabrics. when i am
a boy again she tells me
it’s not that she hated me fey
rather, that day she swore
she saw the mirror sob. fetal lady,
little daughter, tiny apology.
NEW GOD OF AN ANTIQUE WAR
i only want the world
to end when i’m done
with it
a boy stares into the lake & falls
in love
it’s not how you think,
with his own reflection
but rather
the lake
o to be so fluid you can hold
another’s shape
& stay the same thing
this story is a horse
beaten into a new name
a french king builds a palace
of mirrors & bankrupts his countrymen
you can’t drink glass
without becoming
something else
sure, everyone has heartache
but mine lives
in my body
it moves as i move
it stares back at me
BUENA VISTA PARK 2AM
these men carry
famine in them
eyes
knives
the lamps throw their light
against branches
the branches rake their shadows
across a man’s naked back
his back flat as a table
the table set for me
i did not come here hungry
& yet
i eat.
PENTIMENTO
the mass-produced
painting of a field
in winter hanging
above the bed
in this west oakland
motel room starts moving
on its own inside
the faux gold frame.
it begins as always
with whiteness swallowing
the rest of the painting
in its dumb bloodslit
hunger. then as always
a pulse of the backlit
blue veins rising up
like abrasions on a pale
boy’s back. followed
by the inevitable red
riven out the snow bank
taking the shape
of a scythe or sieve
or finally a boy or the shape
of a boy growing antlers
or the shape of antlers
wherever his hands
are meant to be now.
but they’re impossible
to see in all the movement.
impossible to move
his hands & you have
to wonder how a boy
or the shape of a boy
wound up here
in this unstable field.
if
