Codes

1.
An eye for your mouth, one for each corner.
A milky eye of mother of pearl, an eye for

style. An eye outfitted with ocular armor.
An eye for an arm. You cost

an arm and an arm. You cost me
both arms.

Fashioned from cloth, I come up
like dough. Yeast is a phoenix,

rebirthing and rebirthing and rebirthing
in warm, dark places. Place in a bowl

and let rise near the stove.
I built this nest of cinnamon and myrrh;

I waited five hundred years
to turn my body into bread.

And I count the noises crickets make
and I count your aspirations on my fingers.

And I count one, two, three, four, five, six
seven, eight, nine, ten, and I calculate,

and I convert kilometers to miles.
I learned to memorize which star is where

and in relation to what. I drew
Punnett squares and learned what chromosomes do.


2.
We grew a brood of fruit flies
in the bottles by the sink. We never

meant to. We went into battle, never
doubting we had a clear advantage.

We had the capacity for strategy.
We had a prefrontal cortex.

We had bait. We had traps. We had vinegar,
and honey, and rum. We were overrun.

Our enemies wore headphones in their bunkers.
They listened to our whispers and they listened

to our codes. Our words were prisoners
of war. Our words were spies.

I bound and gagged each syllable, and I
dressed your throat with my tourniquet mouth.

And I counted to thirty, and heard nothing
and I counted to sixty, and heard nothing

and I counted to one hundred. I gave you numbers
for morphine. I slid them under your skin

so you could sleep. I dabbed at your lips
with a rum-soaked cloth. I watched the oscillations

of your closed eyes.
Dreaming, you counted dead flies.

Tire

Tire

1. To lose interest in; encourage apathy;
to be bored by; to discontinue the expenditure
of energy toward. For example:
I am tired of picking up this mess.

Also tiresome, adj: monotonous,
dull; repeatedly and increasingly
annoying; causing weariness.

2. To wear down or deplete;
to drain; to use up all given resources,
usually through overuse:
I am too tired to give a shit.

3. To cease to be dynamic;
to draw the fun from a room;
to become a strain on others:
I am tired of you.

4. The circular covering that fits
around a wheel, providing
greater shock absorption and safety.
A necessity of transportation.

Snap

The smell of an egg frying
saturates our house. The white blinds
in the kitchen are open,
the windows raised, rare for night time.
Outside, hundreds of wet frogs can't keep still.

Right after breakfast it's time to open
presents. Glint from the icicles blinds
us worse than the sun sometimes.
My grandmother was frying
sausage upstairs with teeth like stainless steel.

To an alcoholic, time
is irrelevant. You're frying
bologna for dinner. You took down the blinds.
You told me your grandfather had a still
and made moonshine. I left the back door open.

I'm sure that if I stay still
long enough, I can project my quiet, one second at a time
to the other side of the house. My closet is open
and the orange shards of streetlight slip through my blinds.
A crash from the kitchen: a cast iron frying pan.

An egg is frying. The blinds are open.
This is the time for inaction. Be still.

elfie

You said you had to get out of the house.
I put you in the passenger seat and
bummed you as many smokes as you needed.
When we reached the interstate, you warned me,
“Don’t let this freak you out.” Face to the wind,
you screamed out all the air in your lungs, and
the cigarette smoke, and I was quiet.
Unfamiliar sounds came out of your mouth
like laughing, twisted; like the way you cry
and are brought to your knees by a punch line.
It made me nauseous. I pulled over so you
could take a piss.

One night that summer, you
sat on the trunk of my car and pressed the
lit end of your cigar into the skin
just above your left knee. The air was damp
and smelled like maduro smoke and singed hair.

You were different before the hurricane.
The water rose in the gutters and you
stayed anyway.

On the fourth of July
you took up the cans one last time and wrote
NO GODS, NO BORDERS, NO FLAGS, NO MASTERS
on a piece of plywood in the driveway.
We rigged watermelons with explosives
and chased each other down the cul-de-sac.
The pear tree in the front yard left pigeon-
feather-white blossoms all over the place.