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dwelling

again my brother calls in the middle of Property Brothers
to tell me he can build a better house. a blue house with a bluer door
& a hundred noiseless windows where i can live overlooking the sea.

a writing desk. sheets of sun stacked to the ceiling like paper. miniature
rooms hidden inside every doorknob, one with a library the size
of my thumb, fleabane vased in barnacles.

i could live there, i say. in the house built in the company of tv static
& other troubled men. feces on the walls & pillows soaked in piss,
jumpsuit removed & toothpaste spread over one man’s genitals.

yes, even there, my brother thought beauty. even there, resting
besides a hemingway novel on the bookshelf, will be an immaculate
little dwelling for his urn.

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Were God a Boy or a River Makes No Difference

Every boy is ancient & a river is as much a body
as it is a pair of hands. Who holds the blade that fails

against the rush? What within the boy dissolves every trace
of violence? The river speaks a name & a soft halo of sun

hovers over steel. The sun is gentle on the boy’s face.
Which is preferred? That each dawn be new light or the same

light remerged for centuries. Strange metaphor for a resilient
self. Even the wind appears reckless in its bloom-scattering

tantrums yet when a boy drowns, we never think to ask
if the river meant to do it. The river is but river stretching

on for miles & the boy returns home a small god walking
through fields. Until, there is no more light. Until, the stakes

of the ritual are so high the river can only mourn itself.
The brain placed back inside the stomach & a pair of new

hands folded over a corpse. How does the boy come to know
himself now? Whose name does he cry out over the wide,

rippling shoulders of the living? Mine, yours, his own,
the troubled sun’s—for whom does it even matter?

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The Professor Asks Me to Write a Joyful Poem

One without drugs or sadness
or mention of your death. One
in which you don’t beat your fists
bloody against a palm. I am
disobedient as is joy as is you,
as is the better version of the truth
that lives inside the defense. Is it more
profound to say walking towards
or walking away? Somehow, with me,
you’re always doing both: forgetting
the air mattress & your Greyhound
ticket, then forgetting to breathe.
Is forgetfulness a form of joy
or of disobedience? The day I forgot
the plunger at Ace Hardware
was the day you forgot
to put my car in park. You were fifteen,
so my fault, but as the car rolled
nearer the storefront, we laughed
through the panic because joy is you
is disobedience is me, is the weather
we last looked upon your face.
A shit storm, you’d have said,
as we ran out to the parking lot, pelted
by the sky’s sadness & with nothing
for a shield, while I was thinking
how nice it would have been
to spend a day with you in the rain.

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Content Warning: domestic violence or child abuse

EXHIBIT

Waking to a hand around my neck,
I wasn’t surprised. Violence seemed
a certain inevitability. Mundane

as a mother’s command, her hands

twisting and plaiting my hair.
Was I even in my body?
I try to examine that moment

from here, like a picture in a museum:

myself, barely past girl, so estranged
from my body. A little broken
in the mind, too, some plate inside shattered.

(It didn’t even seem like my choice to make.)

How I just laid there, and was lucky
as his hand released, slipped off, nothing
worse—a bird lifting off a window ledge.

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I WATCHED BOYS

I knew the lightless spot
was not a place to play—

where the starved cottonwood
bared its rooty teeth, tending

to a slush of spiders and leaves,
near the shadowed murky stream

where mosquitos bred
and bred, and the ruby-

fattened females dropped
their rafts of eggs

before falling
to the mossy stones.

In that dim, musty spot,
I hid, watched older boys

peel clothes from their bodies.
Free, at night, they glowed

like pale cream, and I knew
I shouldn’t look

at what hung below their bellies
in matted swamps of hair:

it was ugly.
I wasn’t surprised.

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PATTERNS

The church I was born and raised in has always observed a selective
history. As a girl, I am taught to view facts with suspicion. A fact is
always suspect, secondary to faith, negligible.



In 2014, the Mormon (LDS) church publicly disclosed for the first
time that Joseph Smith—the founder of the “only true and living
church”—married “between 30 and 40 wives” during his lifetime.
This admission from the organization’s all-male leadership came
after a century of denying the fact.

The total number of Joseph Smith’s wives rises or falls like algebraic
sums depending on what you consider a reliable source. For the
LDS church, valid voices and testimonies only come from those
who believe.

I, a nonbelieving woman, will forever be unreliable.

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THE QUESTION OF SHE

Did I meet Her or did I invent Her or did I copy Her or did I
inherit Her or did I earn Her or did I dream Her or did I
hallucinate Her or do I abandon Her or do I welcome Her or do I
punish Her or do I free Her or do I deserve Her or do I damn
Her or do I celebrate Her or do I blame Her or do I become Her?

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JEPHTHAH’S DAUGHTER

Your father tenders your life. You yearn simply for tenderness.
Nameless daughter. Known only as belonging to Him. He
who grips your loamy little-rooted life in his palm, wrenches it
then releases. In myth and scripture, a daughter’s slaughter:
never slaughter. Just strategy to achieve the desired objects of war.
You, a holy daughter made holier. The wood laid. The fire,
a knife. Your sacrum set on the altar. I imagine the moment
you understand no angel’s voice breaks the heavens. No
celestial arm holds your father’s blade back. Your life and death
trivial as a bowl of red berries, spilling on a wooden table—
scattering at his feet.

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Content Warning: domestic violence

EXHIBIT LIST OF SUPPORTING EVIDENCE

1. Exhibit A1 – Police record my body never made ’cause bodies like mine don’t call the police
2. Exhibit A2 – Palimpsest memories stored in my blood overwritten by the movant’s narcissism
3. Exhibit A3 – My bruised forearm in response to me congratulating a friend on Twitter
4. Exhibit A4 – My reddened neck in response to asking to phone my family members
5. Exhibit A5 – The hidden biochemical governance of the undeparted postpartum
6. Exhibit A6 – Police Report I dreamed up in response to a call I thought of but never made
7. Exhibit A7 – Unforeseen text message to my mama which contains an erased plea for help ’cause I knew better than to go down there with that boy I ain’t know that well anyways
8. Exhibit A8 – The audio recording I never recorded ’cause he said he wouldn’t do it again
9. Exhibit A9 – A recording of dirge saying he would kill me and take the baby if I thought of leaving
10. Exhibit A10 – The oneiromancy of my pregnancy
11. Exhibit A11 – Police record my body never made
12. Exhibit A12 – Police record my body never made
13. Exhibit A13 – Police record my body never made
14. Exhibit A14 – Police record my body never made
15. Exhibit A15 – Police record my body never made
16. Exhibit A16 – Police record my body never made
17. Exhibit A17 – Police record my body never made
18. Exhibit A18 – Police record my body never made
19. Exhibit A19 – Police record my body never made
20. Exhibit A20 – Police record my body never made

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I COME FROM

              after Tina Chang

I come from pants pockets, rolled socks, wired bra strap: the dusky places poor people hide their money. A crown royal bag full of quarters and pennies to put in collection plates on Sunday.

From double-dutch and deadbeats, an ashtray of cinders, an empty pill bottle. Every corner of juice saved in the carton as if we might need that slice of sugar on our tongues if a tornado hit.

As if, that gulp might give us strength, the way a hit gives my mother enough power to be a god, a mother, a warrior, a man, a piece of bread from her lips, if we ever go hungry. I come from that too, the indifference of food and drug, the

Crackling of a pipe or a joint, the smacking from lips and flesh. In the cheapest places, I learned people are the most expensive drug you could buy… I come from those cheap places: crack houses, corner stores, church. The ones that cry the loudest with tambourines beaten bloodied by sandpaper palms. I come from the crevasse between thumb and index finger, of the dryness collected there. I come from that succulent. From plastic plants, plastic furniture. From preserved pain, preserved love.

I come from the screech of a screen door, the chime of handcuffs, the flicks of fire. I remember the first time I sold my body. I was a pamphlet unfolded, only to be unfolded again. I come from that; worn pages of bibles no one reads.

The travailing of crows on wires. The aged chicken grease in cupboards. The sounds of a woman faking an orgasm. Or worse, faking her own death. In her own bed. The dim ceiling lights that turns us orange. Darkness. The oily water from my sisters’ bath. I come from that: Seconds.

Hand-me-downs. Thrifting through pantries, through boxes of toys at yard sales. I come from the reselling of things: slavery. My body is waiting for me, in a backroom somewhere at somebody cousin house,

maybe its interest has gone up. Maybe it grew wings. Got out. And maybe it hasn’t. Maybe it settled. And has become one of those slaves that falls in love with its master: bondage.

I come from that too.

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