It was the night of the Worm Moon,
low and full in the March sky, though
we couldn’t see it, not under
our wool blanket of clouds. You
were standing at the counter cutting
vegetables when I offered you two
paper cranes — folded triangles

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The way my mother tells it,
I ran away. She didn’t shove me
out the front door at sixteen.
Afterwards, she remembers my little sister
possessed by a poisonous anger
but has no recollection of dragging her
through the house by her hair.
The history of our family was oral,
repeated to herself
in the splotched bathroom mirror,
where everything came out backwards.
Backwards everything came out
of that mirror, where she repeated
our family history, with no recollection
of dragging my sister through the house
by her hair, of her own poisonous anger, or me
at sixteen, pleading at our front door.
She didn’t shove me.
I ran away.

Sword in the bonestone. Blade rhumb lining the tongue. I
was really sick but didn’t know it. One by one the
acupuncturist tlcks out the rostrum-like pins—forehead
cheeks chin—save for the splinter embedded in the
meridian of my soft spot, crown of the governing vessel.
Monster irresistible like the rhinoceros. Spiny spiky anteater.
Hedgehog cousin. Half-squamate, half-woman dwelling in a
cave no outside world’s iron age pierces. When I press the
antenna hidden in my skull the mind’s long lists of past due
& to do & will it so. When I press harder that axis of a planet
yet discovered: blood temples; glass blowing nerve hiss; salt
of tinnitus. Harder still—a jet shatters the sound barrier of
retrograde amnesia, a bolt of lightning fernseeds dream into
channels. Like a finger in the dam or a cork in the socket,
it’s the plucking out of the stoppering—not the arrow
spearing the heart—which kills you

When the sea breeze makes its way inland
through all of the cranes & concrete forms

of downtown, past the new floor-to-ceiling
windows, & in amongst the suburbs’ shadow

box fences, I watch the palm fronds behind
my computer monitor alternate between

a mild daze-like sway & orgasmic tremble.
Sometimes I fantasize about what a release

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Rub her tiny protruded belly in circles
and the sin will crawl out, fill a room

like prayer. Her first word is mine.
Do not let her use your heart

as a tool. You cannot take body
from her. You must keep her

alive, let her fatten up like a little disaster.
Under her coiled ribs beats a new tender

plan. If you bend deep enough

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What lives in the laboratory of the body
was cradled in someone’s hand
Look, they said and the thing
wet, translucent, glowing,
pulsed like the inside of a firefly
essential inner matter, vital, alive
in someone’s hand in a hallway

The [ ] you threw away
climbs out of the trash,
metaphor or not,
crawls across
the kitchen floor,
makes its way outside,
boards a bus,

finds a pawn shop,

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The room is your own, but it is still bare.
It has to be furnished; it has to be decorated; it has to be shared.
-Virginia Woolf

The day after we take possession of the house,
I find two bats mummified in the basement,
a mother and, perhaps, her child. They live

in our dustpan for a week before I decide
to carry them outside. Meanwhile,
we ferry furniture up stairways and through

narrow doors until I feel I have mastered
the maneuverings of each four-legged
wooden beast—dining table, sofa, armchair,

desk. There are cobwebs on every stair.
The spiders spin faster than me here
and I have been hurrying so long.

I sink anchors into the walls. My partner
buys a fly swatter, chases the insects
around the house. I buy knives

with rosewood handles and blades honed
in the country where my grandfather
was born. I have been building bookshelves

in our highest room, fitting dowels
into each pre-drilled hole. I assemble them
on their backs, laid down, then raise them

their weight tipping lighter, then level,
as they tower over me. On my front porch,
a great grey dame of a spider, quite rotund,

has spun her corner web. She sits at its center,
her hourglass abdomen turned
toward our door. I watch as moths, mosquitoes,

other wings catch in her careful architecture.
She never leaves them long, no struggle lest
their dying break her fragile home.

She kills them quick, then carries them away.
Just today, checking the mail, I saw that her web
was gone. I cannot know if it was the mailman

who swatted the strands aside, or a swallow,
or some other bird that passed through,
or if it was she herself who made another plan,

unstrung each filament and let them fall
leaving only an isosceles frame—three guy-lines
and somewhere, perhaps, in a corner out of sight

the remains of her meals, a tidy pile of wings.

splice the remaining fragments             smell of vodka, basement room filled with debris, sharp
pull of hands      zippers             teethed             apart with drunken care

what were we supposed to trust
but collapsed filaments?

we embraced teenage stupidity          left ourselves a sticky residue                             queer
shame

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I crashed through clouds of insects

on my riverside run and carried some

away from their copulation

and the rising warmth of a sodden bank.

Were they me, humans, I’d name the juggernaut

of my body a natural disaster

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