Something for the Brothers (who are currently positioned in my line of sight)

I will lay your broken sorry heads on my bosom, where they may splash wherever they like. And your simultaneous glances will open wounds of my own, for you to lick clean and sew together. And your laughter in the hollows of my joints. And you hand on her back as if you knew her, or loved her. And instead of looking into you

This is how it feels to meet a poet. I took his hand in mine as if it belonged to me and glanced up at his face for a moment. And I am sure that his eyes remained on mine, but I stole a glance downwards and as my left slipped with a mind of its own over your right, so that I sandwiched you with my sweaty palms, I took in the sight of our hands entwined, because that's all I've ever really been able to look at, honestly. Suddenly there was space between our skin (so sudden I'm not sure I even noticed it as it happened). And I told you, there's something I want you to know about. And I told you, I'd like to write it down for you, so you can look at it, and do with it what you will. And I said, I don't know if I can do this, my hands are shaking. So with a deft, smooth movement, you relieved me of the weight of the small black notebook with its perfectly-sized pages and said, I will write it for you. So I told you all you needed, and with your own pen you wrote me down onto the squared page, which you tore out and took to keep.

Later, I sat out in the sunlight watching you and your brother move in circles and speak. I rubbed sunscreen onto my burnt shoulders and felt sticky. And the sunscreen smelled like summer. And for a hot second I was filled with poetry, but it dried up in the grass like spilled water. I remembered that I wanted to tell you that I'm teaching myself quantum mechanics, and that I wanted you to ask me why. I wanted to be able to tell you that it's so I can write truer things.

after you left.


je me suis endormie. je me suis levée. j'ai fumé une cigarette. je me suis endormie.
À 10h, je me suis levée à cause d'une bruit sur la porte.
C'était un homme. Il était fâché contre moi. Je ne comprend pas pourquoi. J'ai quitté l'appartement.

making the beast with two backs

I'm making predictions,
I'm foreseeing your fate and it's this:
We're talking in unison and identically dressed.

I learned a frightening fact and it's been buried under me for weeks:
Two people out of every hundred
Wait before I continue and think about this with the entirety of your brain
Everything in your skull needs to concentrate on what you are about to read.
Two people out of every hundred are hearing things
And the tiny bones in their ears don't vibrate.
And they are taken in by those who are jealous and ready to believe
And they live in constant fear
And they are convinced.

we are all constantly participating in a set of increasingly brilliant triumphs

a list of words strung together that i want to remember

It concerns our genetic material

He wanted a picture of my teeth

Things dry up

that which i saved for you! i want to be sunlight on broken boughs and honey glazed, jasmine roasted. i will pull and push and pull and be There with you. I will let you play with whatever you want. I want to read to you! In my own voice, booming and full. I never want to forget what you look like. Je vous aime, je t'aime- formal, informal, whatever you think.

i am in motion

i have a bubble in my chest
pop!, damnit!
(i don't mean a burp, i mean an explosion of emotional capacity; i can fix anything; i am going to be in love with everything for ever; i am going to go to moon; i am going to crunch on gravel! ON GRAVEL! i learned to ride a bike on the hill outside my grandparents' house, my cousin taught me. he was relentless, made me get up every time i fell and do it again, and when i finally fucking got it, it was beautiful! it was a gravel road, and debris was coming out of the scrapes i sustained for weeks, but it was so fucking worth it- the next week, there was a hailstorm and we rode in circles around the driveway until the stones got so big they were dangerous, golf balls plummeting. chester i love you.) we rode in circles.

I think this is actually a short story; but it came out this way first. I'll come back to it.

out in the green fields
pulled on poppy leaves, doing it wrong
he said: watch me jump.
we removed ourselves, and drank sweet tea from a sauce jar,
the lid still stained orange and smelling like
dinner.
he said: watch me jump.

i found his hand, later,
severed at the wrist, palm up & fingers
curled towards the blue sky, waiting for something to hold.
i wanted to put something in it
a bouquet
or a pebble (rounded by seasons of wave crashing,
and smooth and cool and burnt-red)
or a list of reasons and errands.
its architecture explained everything,
the creases on the knuckles spoke in latin and-
the ground newly plowed &
littered with seed;
in the distance, marking off the property line:
a fence, and behind that, the new irrigation ditch.
birdsong and summer like rocksalt, the sun just so
& burning my skin.
at the table, head in his hands, dripping onto the dinnerplate piled
high with breakfast,
his brother said: I never saw him
and I'm not an inattentive man
I shoulda heard him.
and his mother from the kitchen
up to her elbows in salty, too-wet pie dough:
Don't beat a dead horse.
I put the hand on the mantel & pictured it coming free
tossed
by the teeth of the plow
arcing up into the sky (& grasping for it)
and landing, finally, at the side of the road.

i like the idea of pouring salt on the ground.
last summer, i emptied the icecream churn out on the lawn
rocksalt everywhere.
my mother said, oh no.
the next morning there was a circle of dead grass
next to where the picnic table had been.
i wanted to do it again, but instead i let the water evaporate out of the can
and scooped the salt out,
put it back into the bag.
i wanted to crunch on it-
this isn't going anywhere, ill come back for it

what do you hate?
nobody, nobody; it is just beside me.
i'm angry with both of us.
what happened?
what did you feel, besides the responsibility
for all of it?
i thought these things

i don't believe in leaving things to chance
i believe that things are extremely complicated
oh! i want always to be imprinting these collections of letters
i want to imprint them on you
on your mucus membranes
eaily damaged but readily repaired
i want to write freely
free associations
cut up neatly on the desk
on the mirror
ingested.
perfected.
why are we not
inside each other
with no emotional meaning to that all i want to say is that your body fits with mine.
it fits!
perfectly!

i pushed into you
without knowing
how brittle your ribs were.
do girls ever tell you that you look like
a photograph they saw
once
a long time ago
last week.

anyway
i'm writing again
do you want to look away.
o!

in the dream,
you left a message on my machine:
you said my name
and paused before laughing
the laugh meant: you stupid fuck. you poor, stupid fuck.
so i knocked some of my own teeth out
and drew on my face with paint
and put on jewelry
and braided my hair with ribbons and feathers, and danced under the moon
an ancient ceremony i made up for this occasion.
and i tried not to think about running into you
your face and the way my hands trembled
did you know that they trembled?

my father called this morning
sister's going in for neurological tests
to investigate her bouts of shakiness.
i said, father!
and i paused before laughing.
the laugh meant: you stupid fuck. you poor, stupid fuck.
delerium tremens,
the technical term.

i wrote this, december 18 2008
it's about you, nicholas.

Let me tell you- how much I have come to love you over the course of our entire relationship- these past two weeks.
I love you in a lot of ways. I love you when I see you in passing. I love you when I send you pictures of things, and these pictures I send you are really just ways of saying: I love you. Because I need you to know it, and I need you to know that you are lovable in every way. Because I need to remember that I am capable of loving, it has been so long, even though I have been loved. Oh, you!

Here, with the sun in my eyes, I cannot remember a time when I did not love you. I remember a time when you were absent, your absence being the manifestation of my love for you, your absence being the underneath consciousness of my ability to love you despite your goneness. here, with the sun in my eyes, I recognise that I knew I was waiting for you to arrive, I recognise the feeling of your absence as my waiting to begin loving you, and through that, I realise that I am waiting for many more people to arrive so that I can begin loving them, I have been waiting to be conscious of peoples' presences rather than their absences, I am waiting, where are they? where were you?

i am slowly waking from a long and tedious sleep. a sleep from which i had convinced myself that it was impossible to wake.
and oh i have
missed the most
beautiful things
i have been so
totally empty
for so long and

and now i am filling up.
i can feel myself appreciating things.
and i am so so so
scared, I am terrified
and elated beyond
anything i have ever (striked out)
many things.
I feel as though I am going to do something drastic and brave.

twelve red ants climb the ladder in my stocking.
they punctuate my leg, pincers pincing.
i wish i had known the violences you have
what it means
a bicycle chain against my face or
whatever it is you saw.

i wrote a story about coyotes.
it starred the boy i thought i was going to marry.
he plays rugby now,
and he's bigger.
i wrote a story and in it
the coyotes found us kissing in the sandbox
and broke my collar bones out of jealousy.
do i remember the day the bear came to our back yard?
or did i make that up, too?

and what was her name,
the girl with the elevated palate
whose grey matter popped.
annika.
annika my first conversation was with you.
i named myself, can you remember?
propped up against the pillows,
eyes open, but did you see me?
you wore a red dress with a white lace collar,
i was three. i asked you,
how is it spelled?

My Autopsy

by Michael Dickman

There is a way
if we want
into everything

I’ll eat the chicken carbonara and you eat the veal, the olives, the small and glowing loaves of bread

I’ll eat the waiter, the waitress
floating through the candled dark in shiny black slacks
like water at night

The napkins, folded into paper boats, contain invisible Japanese
poems

You eat the forks,
all the knives, asleep and waiting
on the white tables

What do you love?

I love the way our teeth stay long after we’re gone, hanging on despite worms or fire

I love our stomachs
turning over
the earth

—–

There is a way
if we want
to stay, to leave

Both

My lungs are made out of smoke ash sunlight air
particles of skin

The invisible floating universe of kisses, rising up in a sequinned helix of dust and cinnamon

Breathe in

Breathe out

I smoke
unfiltered Shepheard’s Hotel cigarettes
from a green box, with a dog on the cover, I smoke them
here, and I’ll smoke them

There

—-

There is away
if we want .
out of drowning

I’m having,
a Gimlet, a Caruso, a
Fallen Angel

A Manhattan, a Rattlesnake, a Rusty Nail, a Stinger, an Angel Face, a Corpse Reviver

What are you having?

I’m buying
I’m buying for the house
I’m standing the round

Wake me
from the dash of lemon juice,
the half measure of orange juice, apricot brandy,
and the two fingers of gin .
that make up paradise

—-

There is away . :.
if we want
to untie ourselves .

The shining organs that bind us can help us through the new dark

There are lots of stories about intestines .

People have been forced to hold them, alive and shocked awake

The doctors removed M’s smaller one and replaced it, the new bright plastic curled around the older brother

Birds drag them out of the dead and abandoned

Some people climb them into Heaven

Others believe we live in one
God’s intestine!

A conveyor belt of stars and saints

We tie and we loosen

Minor
and forgettable
miracles :

four birds.

I am not myself.



Talking to those boys, I could only make them smile by swearing. So, I cursed; swore like a sailor. By the end of the hour I had them all in tears.
The umbrella I was carrying made a shadow the size of the sun; and underneath it, as I passed by windows and looked into them at, I looked like a smaller version of myself.
That's the kind of shit you can do here! (The tall one in the Raiders jacket caught my eye and I wanted to teach him things).
At the end, I sat them all down in the room and looked at all their faces and knew I hadn't said a word they'd remember. Well. My hangover began to reappear, and I waved my goodbyes. When I walked back out into the rain, having left the umbrella in the closet inside, I cracked my knuckles all at once. It made me remember that this body isn't mine.