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THE [       ] WIFE

the wife is a disguise/a crane/a fox/a fish/a seal
whose skin is left on a rocky inlet/
who plucks out each of her opulent feathers/
who sweeps the floor with her tail/
who cooks her own limb for the soup

& the sack of rice/the cupboard/her womb
fills and refills & the man owns her & she
owes him sustenance/sex/money/
immortality/offspring/death

& she disappears into the waves/wind/hills
leaving the man a box of gold/her eyes/a child/
her fat magical heart

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The Night We Met

we made out
on the teal loveseat
in my garage,

passed smoke between us
like teenagers, pressed
between the sloppy rows

of boxes left by my ex-
love. You didn’t mind,
knew bodies wound

together for a time, then
parted, like the best of dances,
the worst of sutures.

You elbowed the wine glass
into shatter and fluster—
for the spirits, I laughed,

and forgot the ghost hanging
in the high air of that house.
The beautiful dark

of even your eyebrows
eclipsed the tumbling night.
I couldn’t have known

who you would become:
mapmaker whose mouth
leads me to the study

of flowers. When you speak
I hold your language,
its roil and hollow,

in my own mouth like a bulb.
My hands burn and bloom
in the kitchen, garden, bed—

your body a breathless path
I learn by touch.

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Side A

We who pretended to lie down at parties
with lovers on vinyl couches or wished

we didn’t but wouldn’t admit it, licked
salt from necks (bass leaping with our breath

(or was it expanding/escaping
inside us? (the black light’s purple stripes

transforming eyes/teeth into green glowing
beings, separate, alive, our faces

into negatives))) cried at dawn. If we
did it (we did it) because the Coke bottle

chose us when it spun. A boy jammed his tongue
into my mouth, which was my first kiss. We didn’t

ask questions. Or we fielded Ouija board
                guesses, Yes/No/Good-bye. I walked into that closet
willingly let them lock it. O our wasted

adolescence, assessing vertical stripes
on swimsuits as a function of decreased

belly fat, obsessed with how thighs pooled
when we sat, how absent thigh gap leads to ruin.

We dieted on Cheez Balls (one every 55
minutes, dissolved on the tongue to a well

of melted butter). Or we teased our hair
to make our faces slimmer. Ruin, from

the Latin ruere—“to fall”—as in headlong
or with a crash. We were always falling/

laughing/collapsing/unable to stand
our bodies pulsing with famine.

Side B
For the Lost Beloved

We chopped beets for the borscht
& all afternoon
sweet steam filled
the black & white kitchen.
Wine glasses full,
filling, up from the couch
down again, rotating
spots in socked
feet, radiators hissing.
Th e walk home I can’t
remember if I drove or
with sneaker prints in snow
drifts walked alone,

              but the torn-down marquee

flicked out, just like
the time a man
followed us (we crossed
the road & looked back
but he’d turned
into a dime, flattened
behind a lamp post).
We played Parcheesi
till dawn, yearning
for summer, for swimming
Lake Michigan (which yes,
you kept me to it) the two
of us dressed for a picnic.

               We leapt in

where waves broke
over limestone blocks
where tidal flow
crashed us toward
rocks, our bodies
alive with risk
with demand, we must
press on, swim, no
lady aboard a rowboat
counting strokes
no arms to lift us
dripping, out. There was
nothing erotic about it

              except the body’s own pleasure

& destruction.
This is what always
happens. I’ll stand
in a museum & my hand
is a talon sketched
by Michelangelo—yes,
it’s the way I clutch
my pen, the years
crossing & it
doesn’t make a difference.
You are the same
one I held hands with
at the double feature

                second-run—you must

understand—& when
we kiss we’re kissing
all the lovers we’ve
ever had, all
the future lovers.
You must remember
how water swallowed
our skin, how each
stroke flung droplets
hungry for the sun.
Like a scroll of instructions
delivered by manservants
bearing pomegranates

               (they’re detailed in the letter, the one
               with the talon sketch),
               palm-leaf fans in marbled halls depict flies/sweat,
               steadfast in what we no longer want.

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Editor’s Note from Love as Invasive Species:

The book these poems appear in was originally imagined as, and is printed as, a têtebêche or “double book.” The poems in Side A and Side B mirror and respond to each other. Some companion poems share exact titles, while others share shadow titles, which appear in grayscale on the poem page.

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Love Song with Contradictions

Side A

What were you listening to, Great-gramma
down at the lake, that Saturday nite
when you felt you couldn’t breathe? Not those lo-
riders waxed and raring, but the way souped-up
carburetors suck oxygen to drag
along the strip, your gulping breaths, gurgling,
ineffective. The ambulance fetched you.
In the hospital, they lopped off your thick braids
(to think you never grayed!) “for convenience” or
“to ease sweating.” Gramma brought them home,
kept them in a candle box next to her bed.
Each night she’d slide back the lid and touch them.
The surprise of it—oh! sorting the clutter,
              after the house sold, ma found them under the sink
next to the Brillo pads. It was unexpected—
not the way as a girl, when I first touched
myself, thought I’ll die from this, more like
a child wandering aisles of jarred foods who
looks up and can’t spot her mother, howls a siren
of rage. Love is not a boat moored on a lake
that bobs on waves, more like a house, it’s foundation
drilled into bedrock, that in an earthquake
still shakes. Can you explain this inheritance? Gramma
knotted to her bed so she won’t “sustain
a fracture.” O to be found but never claimed!—
picking bright pink cherries not for glitz but
for sweetness. Pay attention, ma said. Keep up.

Side B
with two italicized lines from Bernadette Mayer

On the avenues, white exhaust tinges blue;
a pigeon nearly gets me, perched over the red church door.

For lunch I pack a ham & turkey sandwich;
I want to hose the city down with bleach.

Mostly images don’t form patterns;
or they do—it’s my mind

arranging them, giving an impression
of continuity, not unlike the man with a serpentine walk

I’ve avoided all my life looking down at my shoes.
When I say “the man” I don’t mean my father.

Of course, I’m told we walk alike;
from behind we have the same stooped cadence,

arches collapsed, soles worn on a slant.
Is that him I just passed?

I don’t like cooking dinner;
I get bored listening to my husband’s yakety yak.

“I have to send my meeting notes in the morning,” he says;
I stir-fry the tofu/get distracted

by the inner turmoil of paying rent
& what it means to be a good person.

              In another place or through window tint
              it appears to be raining on asphalt.

Storm pipes branch beneath swarming feet;
we weave around each other like flamingos

on takeoff or just before dancing, each of us
moving in unison, a dot on the GPS.

Little Dot, move left;
Little Dot, don’t move, just blink in vertical space

going up the office escalator, toting coffee in a paper cup;
Little Dot plugged with earbuds.

Riding backwards on trains we’re time-lapsed;
or we flicker like flamingos

mating in the infrared;
each orange splotch with a yellow heart pulsing

at once above/below;
It’s easier for love to have a million neighbors

seems a breezy thing to say, appropriate
not slutty, our mouths’ sucking frenzy;

yet like zebra fish we zag in blue swaths,
flashing eyes, lacing fins, in fact

yes, I’m avoiding the text
just in from my landlord asking WHERE IS THE RENT

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Editor’s Note from Love as Invasive Species:

The book these poems appear in was originally imagined as, and is printed as, a têtebêche or “double book.” The poems in Side A and Side B mirror and respond to each other. Some companion poems share exact titles, while others share shadow titles, which appear in grayscale on the poem page.

---

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Side A

We ate burgers bloody,
buns toasted in grease
& where teeth
split the meat, red
dribbled down our chins
onto the grass.
August & the ghost
moon shone w/out the sun
having set. Bees
pummeled my head
so I’d get up & run,
sit down again,
slather butter on corn,
get up, circle & duck,
hand slap thigh slap
foot. The buried cat
sprouted a raspberry
bush. Nothing with
thorns ma said,
but that bush was
an exception. My sister
sat calm when a bee
brushed her cheek.
Like a statue she said,
but the world
is a breathing place.
Tulips dropped petals,
& the inner eyes
of stalks stained fingertips.
That night we whispered,
my sister & I,
through grillwork,
labyrinth of heating ducts
that connected us.
Ma’s love cries
echoed through the house.
I baked a cake,
ransacked the cupboard
to cover it
in sugared hearts.
How sweet it was,
feasting like that
in the dark.

Pastoral

Side B

                   Such greenness—the lawn!

Bent-back blades & dewdrop sequins
stitched in sequence replicate

                              the fly’s eye tweed of my dress.

              Here I am, mama, amplified the way
you always wished.

Lawnmower ripcord starts up,
                              the kind that tugs gasoline-rich

                              the kind that swipes off toes,
like when cousin Linus

              sprinkled the grass with his flesh.

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Editor’s Note from Love as Invasive Species:

The book these poems appear in was originally imagined as, and is printed as, a têtebêche or “double book.” The poems in Side A and Side B mirror and respond to each other. Some companion poems share exact titles, while others share shadow titles, which appear in grayscale on the poem page.

---

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Side A

Ma wanted birthday lilies
so you stomped through snow
to the florist’s beige counter, tiled floor.
Tiger lilies. No dull

white for her, no pink tongue center
yanked fresh from a mountain path.
It was six years since Daddy
plucked the spark plugs and left.

Lilies you
nearly crushed
getting back,
bare legs bright red

like knuckles, simultaneously
snow-wet and bled. And stars in snowdrifts
glittered. Not stars but tiny crystals
moved as you moved down the block, a wave of stars

followed you home
and the stems
gone bent
and you not broken

Love as Invasive Species

Side B

The day the tarantula escaped, my uncle
joked, “The cage is empty.” He said it over cornflakes—
the rock fallen off, the mesh lid mysteriously askew.

He smiled and slurped and chewed.
We searched behind the couch cushions, among
piano hammers’ knotted strings, in the broom closet

with its scary duster. (How many days had he let it out
for a walk—crossing the afghan’s colored squares
draped across the backrest?) At night I dreamt it crept

across the headboard as I slept, scuttled clacks,
each foot a seed-hard talon, spilled tacks.
Gramma finally found it when shaking the sheets out:

black and lacy it sailed through the air,
then scampered under the bookshelf where it hid
then disappeared beneath baseboards.

The walls breathe with it now,
acrid, not unlike the air outside the zoo’s tropical house,
toucans dripping guano black as the berries they ate.

I coax it with felled moths, pheromones
exuding from their bungled heads
after all night blinging the bulb’s sexless filament.

Or I stun lightning bugs with a mosquito-zapping racquet,
sweep twitching bodies near the crevice, where I expect
long fingers to sense their way out, scoop the offering

into its mouth. Or I want it gone,
to know it’s no longer fingering up the walls,
its carcass a dropped glove I’ll bury in the yard

beside a house quietly erupting,
cupboards sagging with china plates,
identity papers locked inside a fireproof safe,

the last will and testament edited, crossed out,
signed in a wavering, unrecognizable hand
(the tarantula’s carapace slipping off,

mushrooms growing
where its abdomen once was), the bookshelves
collapsing, centipedes and their nymphs

thriving amid musty spines,
the loved and unread occupying the same space
inside their dead wood frames.

The cage is empty—I bring home a mate
and watch it sleep under the heat lamp,
tap at the glass, hoping

I’ll find a way to live again
grateful, tame
among the rocks.

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Editor’s Note from Love as Invasive Species:

The book these poems appear in was originally imagined as, and is printed as, a têtebêche or “double book.” The poems in Side A and Side B mirror and respond to each other. Some companion poems share exact titles, while others share shadow titles, which appear in grayscale on the poem page.

---

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Prayer

Side A

Daughter, if I forget to teach you
to hunger, to sup as I did,
ice chips in the lawless
4 a.m. labor, awake
w/ foot-kick & elbow-scrape,
the body’s rhythmic
snoozing, then follow this
dull ache that insists
the body open. Here,
at the length-of-a-vein,
from navel’s hollow to
how-low-the-azalea-bloom,
your propulsion into
the expectant room.

O, to hold or be held,
to unspool like loose thread! –
the hospital gown spilling
behind you—how far
it must stretch! Unraveling
when you climb the steps,
press your fingers to check
the spider plant’s thirst,
until the garment gives
out & who knows when—
O, to block-print
in felt-tip on the bracelet
circling your wrist,
Hello, my name is ________.

Side B

Daughter, you filled a shoebox
with dead wasps, leaf blankets,

cut needles shot from pine,
painted the cardboard

black to keep the light
inside. It was a good day,

an ice cube tray
full and cracked and split,

the water shaped to hold
in our mouths. There was no

treasure. Cool liquid
slid down our throats

in the garden. I quizzed you
for your biology final—

all alveoli and exchange
of oxygen. Tomato plants

hummed, fledglings
squawked for their mama’s return,

and the sun blazed dewdrops
to extinction.

               World spinning through dark and dark
               itself spiraling (yes, spiraling!) through the void

               future world with both of us gone
               that from a distance shone like a star

Science, do not forsake us.
Pretend dying won’t be inglorious

and hard, that we’ll reflect light like gowns
sequined and glittering, various

and continual, shouting out over
time our urgent unimpeded burning.

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Editor’s Note from Love as Invasive Species:

The book these poems appear in was originally imagined as, and is printed as, a têtebêche or “double book.” The poems in Side A and Side B mirror and respond to each other. Some companion poems share exact titles, while others share shadow titles, which appear in grayscale on the poem page.

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Lies to Tell the Body

I became the opposite of orgasm,
               breathing with the cyst
nestled in my left ovary, where the pelvic
               bone juts up to meet
skin and socket. I tongued demands,
               a steel countertop parallel
to my spine, while doctors insisted I could
              conduct animal electricity.
A spark would jolt my limbs
              to swagger off
the table, proof of something alive
               inside my muscle.
Could I keep the yolk whole, a tiny
              fluid-filled sac that if  it bursts,
it bursts? It would have been a relief
               to lose a little more. You could stand to lose
more, he told me. Weighing pears, he estimated
               how much I would need, suggesting
serving sizes, his perfect portions.
               My uneaten bite,
my refusal to measure. I left one
               curled arugula leaf or crusts
from toast. The year of almost. The year
               of maybe. Men moved
their unsteady chins up and down.
               They told me, if  only,
my body a tragedy. If I burst,
               I burst, no more hurt than
the sharp pinch from a man bumbling
               across my feet. I watched
my tropical fish die from fin rot. The tetras
              went first. My blue
gourami the last, half floating, half swimming
               on the water’s scummy edge.
Two red drops and two yellow drops to stop
               the infection. It still
spread. I was never at home. I combed every aisle
               of the grocery store, my nails
digging in for miracles. I harvested
               tomatoes, chard, green beans.
I was not a morning person.
               I was not a night
person. I was a midday creature that slept
               opposite of any man.
I stayed awake longer. After that year, I grew
               all muscle and sinew:
my husband looked at me like a panther. He cut
               my haunches on his teeth,
pressing the mechanism inside my pelvic floor—
               reincarnate, reincarnate.

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