works of a NY queer

I am

sorry to

pull open a new wound so I

can crawl in, call it

home, call it

new life, call it spring

Your only daughter and third son,

I have our history written in my hazel iris, how gold gives to green in the light, 

I will pepper your grave with roses 

each winter and spring.

I will bring birdseed

to scatter so maybe

a red cardinal shows in

fall, and

you will be watching him with me.

dialect of pain, cauterize:

a searing of the inside 

impish body, moody God 

flesh-imprisoned

made to kill,

your nails as vestigial as your fucking voice

wait, don’t wait

wait, don’t wait

inject cantor intoxicant candid 

hypoxic 

I am white and clean, a purple baby on hospital sheets

deliver me

discount-bin sacred abscond, 

warm and soft is obscenity

read these bones like braille, 

I boil alive behind

scarlet fever

this body can scream for me

cut a Morse code, hurry

pull away, release

skin curling

I’m already carving

a piece of meat eaten raw

dip your molten hands through my soft marbled skull, dig talons through my

putty bones 

knead my joints like dough I

need to feel wrecked, destroyed

need to be a jelly-candy chewed to a paste, 

need to know hate and hear it

through the mouths of a thousand languages I need

violence, swallow

violence,

red velvet in my veined limbs,

smother this mouth with

velvet and orchids, 

my lips turned cyanic and my

throat churned volcanic spew soot and

flame the space between each organ I am

not my body I am not my brain I am

careening in the midst of a wakefulness I didn’t ask to have a

consciousness sugared and soured and

I want to not

feel each ingredient so clearly, name each note with candor, 

I only

know one recipe and it’s all I’ve eaten in days.

why do you spend each night reading, re-reading the same stories

told over a thousand faces

worry not, curled

embryonic in your bed, emerging

to light your matchstick fingers in the burning stories of

your dead relatives: 

           what they believed you to be, what their last memories

           of you 

                        were, are,

all the pride you took in your

Dykehood,

Daughter, 

Granddaughter, gifting

that connection back,

pressing your mother’s wish for her last child

back into her body.

And I wonder if

momentary comfort in the familiar means

it’s enough, I’ve only lived

like a child

before.

Hands crusted in crushed lilacs, goldenrods piercing each wrist, 

 winter captured and catching fire, our sacrificial lamb. 

 Blame all your ills on winter, 

pour your poison like fine oil and massage it into his wool

then complain he can’t make you warm with his moans and trembles. 

Blame all your ills on winter. 

Shepherd him, the pure hornless child 

hooves bearing the weight of you, 

eyes milky blue, turned upwards

Before: a visit of

a single syllable, lost through loose fog-footed steps.

Now,

I say “here” instead of “you”

Like a horizontal ghost, flat pressed ear-to-earth,

fluttering past, wings beating a rhythm I can’t place,

I was

pacing a creek-bed of footsteps, stone-less,

blanketed by a

Rube Goldberg chaos 

the kind

nature’s never needed to know, the

gymnastics of a human gone mental in the practice of a

mentality only leaving her with

dead flies on the windowsill, ladybugs sun-bleached,

always pulling the curtain while

scrubbing the stains of his softness as though

femininity were a dye that could lift.

So,

I invited in the stranger.

I made him a calling card.

I touched what made

my fingertips bleed. Scar over. I

ate the organ meat. I grew stronger off my own lungs and liver,

a dinner for once not force-fed

but savored.

I invited in the stranger.

We had tea inside a well

so deep it’d made Jung weep, probably.

I made peace with the stranger, the piece and

I can only walk circles around the truth to

carve grooves through repetition, a walk endless,

a creek-bed of footsteps, 

stone-less.