WHEN YOU ARE TWELVE
You wield the hose while your father cleans birds—cold, clear water trickles feathers off grey meat. His thumb huge below the breastbone. You grope inside the sack of doves attending each others’ funerals, give each one a little squeeze. The light pigeons out flecks of violet in their small, flopped heads. When he finishes, you make a pile of guts and bone the dogs can’t keep away from. Mornings before school you hear their coos in a thick mist over the driveway, a pall for your black jelly bracelets as you trudge tile square to square. Pizza with milk. Brownies big as your hand. Don’t turn your head when a boy screams “Hottie!” at you to make his friends laugh. Don’t even twitch. Think of Thursdays when your father drives you thirty minutes to soccer, makes sales calls in his truck and watches you scrimmage, dribble through cones, take penalty kicks, watches so closely he can break down each graze of the ball against your instep. To make him laugh, you take off your shin guards and put your nose deep in their cotton grooves, inhale and tell him they smell like victory. The truck is never quiet. The two of you are wings gliding cool air, purple beads in an orange sky. At school, you are the dove at the bottom of the bag, bodies crushing you against cinderblock walls. You count lines in the floor from Language to History, too dead and muffled to tense at the grasp of fingers. Boys spike thumbs beneath your ribs, turn you inside out.
YOU MEET A BOY
You meet a boy named for a river. You meet a boy who ignores you at soccer practice and messages you online after school. You meet boys who squeeze their own nipples, telling each other milk will come out. You meet boys you want to touch you, that you want to stare at for hours. You memorize their names, but speak to none. You meet a boy who touches you in a hall of mirrors, your reflections jagged and unfathomable. You meet a boy who touches you with his foot in a public pool. You meet a boy with blue eyes who can barely look at you when you touch him. You meet a boy with glasses, a boy with acne, a boy with scars on his arms, a boy you know is stupid. You are always on the verge of crying. At soccer, boys kick you, slap you, bruise you. Do it again, you pray. You tell lies about them to your friends, to yourself. You meet a boy named for a gun. He sits next to you at the back of the bus. You sit up so straight, his thigh against yours a razor burn. You study its heavy meat. You listen to music, connected by earbuds, wire dangling thin between your heads. He says nothing. He is seventeen and you are fourteen. You barely breathe in the seat. You make yourself empty, your face a darkened screen.
FOR MY NIECE, WATCHING
THE FOX & THE HOUND
You ask me when the fox will be on the wall,
the one furred corner to corner in raccoons,
because you haven’t learned the trick
of the deer, how it lifts its eyes, sudden
against grey, how it tips the chandelier
of its antlers and eyes the road, the three leaps
that melt it to a specter of pine, like the does
I saw evenings when my father held me, the wet
orange sparks floating above kudzu
in the dark, their necks invisible as hours,
and I really think it’s better that gunshot
never cracked in your ears, that your fist hasn’t
wrapped the dome of a dove’s head, opened
its gullet to see the swallowed millet—
there’s no need for gravel in your gizzard,
and I’d give you all the dogs for pets, pink slobber,
teeth sheathed in bubblegum lips, the howl
of the grizzled hound as he tracks the red scent
through the snow makes no sense to you,
though you shiver when my Corgi sidles up, push
insistent hands against his nose. I ask if he is fox
or hound, hoping to stump with the pointed ears,
but you are stuck, you ask when my dog will hang
on the wall, emptied like a plastic grocery sack,
no longer his snout between us on the couch—
Make him go away you direct, because Moana has gifted
you crowns of shell, the ocean’s gales against
your tiny, squared shoulders, so I’m just trying
to stay out of your way, a wayward collard
in your organic kale salad, stinking of gunpowder
and taxidermy, eery as the coyote frozen
in a lunge at the dentist that pulled four
molars to make room for incisors
that dropped from my jaw, fangs to rip
the meat from the dove’s breast, grilled
and covered in bacon, to chew my own ankle
from the bear traps sly in winter’s dry foliage.
May you never lift the jowls of a beast
your father slew, never finger the brown
at its gum line, brush its brindle ears,
always see the storybook wolf plush
as your stuffed menagerie, because today
you’ve crept with me into the darkened shack,
your purple sneakers scuffed against
the clapboard as you warmed your shoulders
in pelts peeled from rabbits, knowing what
it might be to cut instead of stitch, how a thing
might bleed and stagger, how a tail might twitch
then still, and how someday you’ll need your teeth:
a smile like feathers, a snarl that snaps like steel.
MY FOOTBALL TEAM IS WINNING
And a man is so fucking happy for me. I am head-
to-toe in gold, painted stripes, liquor dribbling
over my eyelids. I slosh back
So build me a stadium. Another man wants
to know what it’s like at the game, I say
it’s like an angel brown with tobacco
spit and bourbon. I used
to think some men were built
better. I used to think shoulder pads were muscle
through to the core.
I goddamn love that cumshot feeling
the clock ticking down, the spike
in the end zone, the personal / foul. I’m covered
in the juice of it. I want a man to text me,
Fuck you, Dorsey.
I’ll shoot a sonnet back, That really means a lot.
REJECTED PERSONA:
PATRON OF THE ARTS
At the poetry open-mic, I watch a woman
flirt while I drink water in my fox fur coat
and think Jesus is it almost February
already? To psyche myself up, I did black
winged eyeliner, wine dark lips. Still
this beige, this nude nothingness buzz.
I try to metaphor desire, but it’s just
a thin veil for “I want—”: Desire is
a pair of leather pants. Desire is a throat
full of come. Desire is the endless scroll
of videos, the stretch marks un-stretching
from my stomach. A man presses his face
into the woman’s abdomen below her breasts.
He thumbs her ear next to the jukebox.
When he gets a drink, she swears she’s not
feeling him. Lately, I am having a hard time
feeling anything. I am one of my son’s plastic
balls rolling down its track, the hollow clatter
that repeats, repeats, repeats. My need
used to pulse and ripple the surface of me—
a bulging, hungry, thrum waiting to combust.
Now, the me that wants is down a deep well,
Silence of the Lambs-style. I follow them home
and she clutches his arm and I want to stop
and spin her around and say, You can’t do this
to me, I am in my fox fur coat. The sidewalk
is cracked and the streets are dark and the week
is only beginning to unfold its ugly efforts.
The cold raws my cheeks with its quiet, little beat:
just me, just me, just me.
PUMPING SONNET
I have written many poems this week
with my tits poking through secret holes,
pump chugging vaguely like a sex toy,
its rhythmic robot square dance pulsing
on the desk next to white mugs, tin cans,
glass urn, all containers for liquids, as I am
obliged to nourish myself while outside
it is all wisteria and crabapple, grass wafting
in sun like some exhausting metaphor.
I have a million thoughts a day and none
of them want to be poems. You get used to it:
humming motor, baby blue but not a baby,
until you hardly hear it chanting at you,
saying fool space fool space fool space fool.