Before Memorial Day

Pinstripes and bitter shellfish,

early spring, with a kneeling night, and you

do not yet know. If only I could darn

socks, weave some cloth, be more tactile

with textiles, lap up the cobalt night and

find it refreshing. In one month

I will be sore, no longer bleeding, stitched-up 

to my final form, and you

do not yet know how the trees will

green, how there will be a pencil-yellow

bus, somewhere, packed with kids kneeling 

over grey pleather seats creased like old palms, 

weaving keychains out of plastic gimp, crying 

when their mothers pour hydrogen peroxide 

over scraped red skin, how a single squirrel 

lies dead on the green air road

outside the woods, soft belly to the sky,

pelt pale like soft cheese. I prepare

for so much pain. I pair

my breaths to my pulse. Try

to drown myself in warmed static, shelled 

music, but I find I am all clear-

eyed and cut greens.

It is All Half Lights

The androgynous mind sleeps, it is

halting/halted, faulting/faulted —

C fears she might never know if she likes O,

Ever-rageful, stamping out calm like a boot

over mellow ashes, while lamp light pools sick and yellow 

over someone else’s lawn, and C feels her throat:

purple, clotted. When C steps on the grass, nobody 

congratulates her. Not even O, for all her novelty, and 

sometimes, when C stands on tiptoe in that hall

of mirrors, she really can see her final figure,

the final girl where the reflections cease.

That final girl is O, of course. C fears her face

will never be her own, instead every feature

she has ever hated, ever feature she has ever

loved — it is too dark, in the sky, and the vein

is embedded in too much skin, and

the bird’s throat too thick.

Title from Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own”

Outside the Dollhouse

In the cooling air your face cracks open

like a ceramic dish; you are insane, hungry, harmful,

the knife through the water: full of want, eluded.

For months you have not seen it, time

like discarded flesh draped through your forearms.

You begin to remember the girl with the comb, who

read of green glass hotels and deserts that housed

a resurrected Arc, no sea, and you, still breaking, still 

treading water and wondering — who are we, to house

so much blood? When you bleed it is irregular, spotted, too 

thin. If you pared back enough of your body you know 

there’d be a marrow of meaning, somewhere, and a sparrow, 

whistling, wild with want. You know your bones would swipe 

the hair from your forehead with a mother’s touch.

You have no more costumes to wear. No more people

to fool. You are getting tired of fooling yourself.