From up here in the leaves’ no-kidding goldishness
you’d guess everyone was already in lovely w/ each
others’ cheekbones. Infinity scarves
& vanilla coffee, mint tea, warm whatever.
Cozy becoming the coming-at-the-seams, a couplet
of verbs mid-bodily inexperience.
That man doing cartwheels is not wearing a shirt
& in any other life I’d want to be the double dare
fanfaring a future so totally astonished
by his nipples. This is what I mean

when I say things like catastrophe.
Okay, fine. Just one more winter.
Nothing can compare anymore to us anymore.
You big good oak limb. I’m in such cute like w/ you today.

In one diary of my have-beens, my mother
named me Elizabeth after one of her
mothers. You god particle. You matrilineage.
I’ve never lived anywhere more
or less this haunted. She named my sister
Elizabeth. You boy
genius. You midsummer pinky promise ring.

There’s this person I know I’m not in love w/ but wears
a dress patterned like a postcard from the state my grandma
died in. Imagine waking up
a whole frame away from your bedsheets. Imagine
waking up & being anything as yellow
as a dress. You treeline. You root song. What’s an amount
of time equal
to you? You kindling ring finger. You unchewable bark
but the headache’s gone. Pardon me, dandelions,
have you seen my ghost, six foot nothing,

has an interstate for a mother but also a mother? Adjust
your spurs, honeybunch. This time I’m writing all of us
in pink ink. Let’s huckle-buckle off into the leafiest
of all possible genderings. You know how the rain
starts right after you get home & the country song
your friend slow-danced w/ her big love to, the one
your mom would play real quiet on her moonbeam
highway streak back to Pensacola, is somehow

already at the chorus & you forget there are words like joy?
Or when someone whispers Imagine you never met them
back at the bum, grinning stars? You remember.
It’s like that.
Or, is that. The difference between salt & salt. A someday
of matching sweaters.
Told you it’s cute. O sweaters. O little knit
bundles of vegetable-spit. It’s always sunsetting.

You golden hour. You soap-soft seasonal.
Once my mom found me
sitting in a circle of candles, touching each rosebud
& sat w/ me until we were wax musuems
of our secrets. Look—
the sky’s a toenail & the moon’s a chesthair. All the shirtless
boys have tired themself out, spread-eagled
& slapping the sun off their shoulder blades. My body is a line
heading for my body. You crushed-grass
sex smell. You dirt-inverted comma. Someone w/ bleached
hair is biking home to restud their denim.
I rediscovered kissing foreheads & it is so yes again.

Hurry up & sunspot, daylilies!
The cops aren’t going to awe themselves
to death & we have
a dictionary to laugh across.

The light’s seltzer, bubbles.
I said My lord. I thought
My god. O moonstruck. O gladracket. Barring
gravity, our knees could be forevering each other.

Barring leather, love is a world I’m praying
all my mothers’ joy back toward.

Elizabeth was my name. I’m writing this on all the trees like a wish.
I’m kissing every hem in sight.

We’re all hysterical & going nowhere together.

C’mon rapture. Let’s go bedazzling.

Nothing gets futured without its own spitshine
& I’m already not not not not not not miraculous.

poetry-magazineAlarm

poetry-magazineDream Ending in a Host of Angels Zipping Me into My Grandmother’s Dress

poetry-magazineFrom “Reconstructions”

poetry-magazineGravity

poetry-magazineSpeculative Realism

poetry-magazineTomorrow, No, Tomorrower

Alarm

Dream Ending in a Host of Angels Zipping Me into My Grandmother’s Dress

From “Reconstructions”

Gravity

Speculative Realism

Tomorrow, No, Tomorrower