how many miles have you walked in your life to get to the place where you are right now? how many miles have you run? or crawled?

how many birds have you seen drawing circles in the blue grey sky? how many hawks, hunched on telephone poles, hunting songbirds?

how many meals have you cooked? how many people have you fed? how many conversations at your kitchen table, how many heart to hearts on your porch, how many broken hearts at night, alone, in your bedroom?

mildew, cold on an unused shelf, the smell of disuse prevalent in your house. a dampness in the sheets that suggests absence rather than physicality. glacial, you follow me apace.

in the sky there are a thousand stories of all the ways i could hunt and harm you: i could send a monster, i could use a sword, i could let the thousand barbs of your ego drag you across the searing sun. i could let you die, squalid, entranced by your own reflection, on this silent afternoon in midwinter.

but where then would i go? in what bed would i purl my tiny rages, string my soft hates out along the brittle branch of someone else's mouth? when the egg cracked they thought i was a condor but in this age, i am pure, i am rotted, and my claws are longer than the carrion i seek.

silence: it is not a lack. your voice, the clear sky: a million ways to know that we are for each other. the conspiracy of the stars and the crickets now defined by the smell of wet, warm asphalt.

i am ancient without you, renewed by you and the kind way you say, can i kiss you? i am lack, an ache, a gulf opened up in the earth but with you: a sprite, free and clear, in the depths of the quarry.

i am a traffic light with no lit bulbs, a map with no lines drawn, puzzle pieces with no image, white paint on a white wall. i am water without a cup, a mask with no face, staff lines without notes, a window without a ledge. i am a highway without berms or medians, just a wide swath of concrete cutting across your landscape, curving and sloping without warning. i am eyes without color, hands without fingers, a mouth without teeth, saying ________

you do not have to be ambitious. you do not have to let your professional labor be the encompassing labor of your life.

the faint lilt of the voice of a lover, singing her way through the trees at night, refusing to come in from the wind. her untucked shirt, her long hair, her tangled limbs as she dances under mercury, under mars. the pines lean down to her, offering branches bowed heavy with lush needles and fragrant sap. when she comes in, her skin is sticky, her eyes wild, her mouth soft.

tender as children we are to each other
having both just been rebirthed
the muscles are sore, the blood is low
but we carry each other's names gently.
in the gap between my hips is space
for both of us to grow.
in this garden we can both bear fruit
and neither lose ourselves for it.

toward what is possible:
the glow of each day, and rising
to meet it as it comes.
where i am never alone, and crossed
by both grace and fortune,
where my great grandmother opens doors
and the heart of me flies free
over a slate blue lake.
in the clay dreams of the future
there is time to build and time to rest
and you will hold my hand in each,
and you will hold my hand until
we are called to other mornings.

what if we were not strangers?
what if i could count on my hands
your heartbeats, strung out moment to moment,
and always heard. what if we
were not lovers? i would still cherish your voice
and the breaths of your lungs, and bless
your aptitude for loving others.
what if we were birds, with visible talons
instead? what if we were pipes in
the same organ, what interval would we sing?
you are the ascendance of my kestrel cry,
the major third and delight of my windburned heart.
what if we were not strangers but two
pigeons on a city street? what better place
has there ever been for two odd ducks to meet?

blown wild in the weeds of your encouragement,
raucous hope and i would find a common kin.
or at least, a belonging: a restful hope,
where others could only pause.
neatly you resheath your claws, i am
ever grateful for the glamour of rebuke but
you refused, and so i wounded myself.
etched in my skin is years of decisions:
did you mean that? did i?
grace is chief in your arsenal but
i am too tired to witness it.
rest awhile with me, you've said, but
little rest can be allowed.

i have been a mountain cat for so long,
and decisive: quick claws and an easy heart.
i evade so easily that i have even forgotten
the sound of my own voice.

the hills are always deep enough.
we dredge our sins entirely: vacant cliffs
but full with sound and sky.
i am a predator inside my own skin.

shake loose my preening mouth and look
at my red red tongue: the blood
that pulses, thick, the root
of me keeping sharp company, slavered dreams.

i am not a victim, and never was.
i peel my claws down the bark
of five fresh elms. they bow too
to my weight and insistence.

where the heart of me is still a child
running a stick across the fence slats for the rhythm of it--
hearmehearmehearmehearme--
this body was bred for insistence.

with hands flecked in paint colors and ink
we meet in the newsprint, uncovering relics,
stories wrapped in stories.
the dust is in my pores, my nose.
i welcome my self home.

the creek where all my dreams waded idly in the murk:
slow, with many penchants for variation.
the bridge where we dropped bright yellow leaves,
letting chance dictate our outcomes.
why did we stop screaming into the train whistles?
i still remember how to pick leeches off.

we will play those games again, you
and i and cassiopeia, the lukewarm sky
she retires in.
an opening where we can go together:
where, under no obligation, you point me forward.

i have burned the red candle without looking
and saged the interiors of my heart
above my driveway, orion points me
but this is not a hunt
and we are neither predators nor prey.

i write your memories across past lovers' letters
and till the ashes into my back garden.

the length of your eyelashes and your expressions of preference
and the mark of your acceptance on my skin--
signs, all. i am not afraid.

we meet in other layers of the universe, you and i.
another us lays bare the works of our hearts and hands
and we are both grateful.

for the quiet voice that asks
     what is hurting you right now

i know that whatever is coming out of my eyes or mouth
is honest enough for this moment

after you

things you let me put down:
my expectations of the world
my expectations of myself
my expectations of how i will be received
all of the guilt that remains in my body

you are a blessing
i will not be blind or deaf to who you are
i praise your presence,
and seek nothing

i have never been able to start writing in a new notebook at the beginning because i am not the narrator of my own speech
the first time i tried to write a book, i shrank the margins of the word document down to a couple inches by a couple inches so that my words wouldn't seem too weighty
in a world that tells me constantly to take up less space, the act of putting words on paper feels deliberately antisocial, against the rules of being social
insistently rebellious, the way i was when i was twelve
juvenile, pretentious, without knowledge or context
these are the ways that i think about the act of writing of my self

Companion planting

Some text here revised from the Farmer’s Almanac

As older sisters often do struggle to get enough

for themselves plants that require a lot the giving

sister pulls the air sprawling and minimizing

open areas where tangle the vines, wind the stalks

a living mulch that shades the soil the prickly

squash to keep away combatants, vermin,

pests make a mound of soil at least four feet

wide where weeds typically take hold six kernels an inch

deep ash to increase fertility as older sisters often do

grown poorly in the company of

sunflowers, potatoes make an excellent companion

they hold the sisters close together when the danger

of frost has passed even the spaces

around each stalk walk the perimeter of the mound offer

the vines needed support weeds typically

take hold although closely related they don’t

like each other prepare the soil by adding scraps of

fish through the tangle of the vines they wind

sprawling, you don’t want to step on them grow

poorly in the company of large leaves and giving sisters.

Seed catalog

The year she decides to learn to be

quiet she sticks her hands in the dirt she keep her

cool in the heat, remaining productive

and tasty longer she grows the herbs the vegetables in

pots in pots with lids and handles in kitchen pots she

stole from her mother flavorful, stringless, quick to

grow and prepare to leave, kitchen pots that

gathered dust and now they gather self-supporting plain,

flat, deeply cut dreams that are dark and

resistant to heat-induced bolting, she

buries her voice in the soil, turns the loam with

fish guts and banana peels and odd ends of

rotted things and their extremely sweet flesh red especially

for heavy or poor conditions which is

how she grew up and how she knows that someday

she will cover herself with flowers.

Things I want to be when I grow up:
Quieter
Respectful
Aware
Balanced
Easy
Open
Macro
Connected
Possible
Changing

Storytelling

They say that storytelling is how we organize now, it’s our authentic selves arguing through our experiences for our right to exist as we are: which may be true but it does not change the fact that of all the communities I am a member of, none of them can sit thru a telling of my whole story

I agitate for abortion rights but in that community nobody wants to hear about how my second abortion also scraped away bits of my soul 

I organize for queer justice but I wrote an earlier poem with the opening line, dear gay community, when will I be allowed to belong? And performed it in a space that I curate, and was told it was too negative, that it reflected badly on the community

I am a fierce truthteller but I am not stupid enough to think that my communities will come with me through every verse of the poem that I would write for you now 

I am a woman with fire in her bones but I know it’s easier to ignite anger than it is to create change. For once, I am not here to burn your house down

At a political gala wherein I am trying to establish that I can hang with the big dogs, a woman at my table entertains with anecdotes about the trials and tribulations of her and her husband attempting to purchase the perfect vacation home. There are members of my family who are proud of their double wide, who text us pictures of the new porch Scotty just put on it. If I put that photo on Pinterest it would be called a reclaimed wood bespoke project but to Scotty it is the materials he could scrounge up from his work sites. 

On the other side of my family is four car garages, wave runners, and ample gun collections. Tobacco money, they say. Tobacco money. In Maryland in the 1800s? I guess nobody is finna speak on who collected that tobacco. I asked my great aunt what she remembered of the plantation and she told me it was just a commercial farm, and then my mom sent me out of the house to go buy more ice. 

I live now at the lakes edge, most often envisioning myself as a big grey tern, keen sighted above the waves and scooping low for a rising perch. I crawl along the breakwater at dusk, the wind reddening my face with its whip and whirl. 

I had a partner who thought it was romantic that I told my secrets to the lake. And it sounds very haunted, right, very compelling. The lake and its repetitive answers, its rhythmic affirmations. I told the lake what I could not tell my partner. 

The lake remains with me. The fire in my bones is always in me. The stories I do not tell grumble around in my skin, grubbing up against my pores so hard I am afraid I will sweat them out. 

relics of your past lives:
a bowl, a fern, a painting, a woman's anger.

and i do look for inspiration among these stones
because who will tell me otherwise?
i fill my pockets with dirt, my mouth with clay.
but it's not my mouth i need to lose, it's
my ears, that i might never have to hear your voice
my hands, that i could forget the texture of you
my eyes, that i might never see you again
but none of this would make me heal or
any less in need of everything that you are, only
leave me gasping for more of you
each day. and it's not as though
i ever touched you, or kissed you, or
heard your voice, or saw you.
i never managed any of these
truly. i never knew you in the least.

solidarity too will leak.

you forgot to stay.
i never wanted to leave you there
(it only serves to tempt your aim)
someday the pot stirs, the plot thickens, the clock ticks
and the consistency of our anger thickens

i would give almost anything and certainly
not everything to have you
as i wanted you in the beginning,
to watch you in your moment of insistence, pushing.
but we are still young.

musk and twilight mask my lost enthusiasm.
a thousand folded promises given while
waiting for something else to sell.
i melt icily against you.
i have never wanted less, and ached more.

this kind of day, this kind of morning is leaving us slowly, slipping away.
you are a lovers' poem, to be sure.

On why I didn’t file a police report

Bathsheba in her pool dreaming of

her husband, of freedom, of rain, is seen

but never heard. She is “made pregnant,”

but never raped. How can you rape

an object? How can you rape a possession?

Jane Doe of Steubenville, Ohio, dreaming

of college, of freedom, of coal, is seen

around the world, but never heard.

CNN wants to know why two young, handsome

rapists have had to face such harsh treatment.

On the days when they draw

the noose a bit too close, let them tug

a little longer, let them cinch it in tight.

I heard the orgasm is better

for the men who like to watch.

what if instead of placenta we could go to the lake
and wallow there in the possible? the gap between my hips
is wide, but the depth to the sandy floor will grow
us larger lives. what if instead of the labor of one,
we go together and labor as two? tender as children
we are to each other, since both of us have been rebirthed.

come with me to the steps
we will climb them hand in hand
i am not afraid of falling
since there is nowhere left to fall
come with me to the lakeside
we can sing to the grey waves
you'll see me for the fish i am
we'll wallow in the troughs
come with me to the forest
where we'll listen to the trees
your voice an elm, and mine a fern
the dirt sustains us all
come with me to the wall
we can build it all again
i am not afraid of heights here
since there is nowhere left to fall