Swans in their laurels

A toad lingers by the sunless pool, languishing and dying wrong, all
wrong. In the kitchen, my mother swaddles her china with cloth, bumpy
and skin-like, the yellow of running yolk. She speaks in a dialect.
At school, her daughter learns latin. Corpora means Bodies, fields
of deadness in her nativity. She neuters her words fruitlessly.
At night, she devolves, her fingers outstretched into a canopy of
skins. And still man chases, stripping laurels of her boughs, sloughing
bark. And still she flees, her feet embalmed in the earth, coursing–
Morning comes. She is corporeal, salt crusting skin. She yearns for home.
In the water, the swans hang on the shoreline, roaring at the kitchen.
My mother peers out the window. The wood shrinks away from his touch. Swans
lift and crane their orange beaks away from their daughters, white and stiff-necked.
Do they mourn when they spurn their young? Mothers find their daughters curled,
dead in their nests. The toad bites a swan and gnaws. It will crave swan meat endlessly.

A chicken dreams of me

Again, I think of those metallic candies that slick themselves. They are cheap,
divoted, speckled like fruit. My cheeks mount scar tissue so thick the bugs can’t

climb through. I think of my throat that stirs when it savors the old
stone that crawls upwards. The pharynx squeezes like a worm, an old rite.

A throat yielding. My hands cup themselves to offer each other solace. When
I watch the sun, my eyelashes grasp at the light and drag me downwards into earth

where the millions of suns eat the soil after they set. They burn quietly
still. A city of gold remains, traces of a winter that swallows. I once climbed a tree

to split it, to see yolk running through its bones. Instead, I snapped its fingers and
waited. But nothing happened. No one came to find me. I walked home, leaving

my fingers behind and my sleeves, wet and orange. At home, my legs prostrate themselves
and ask me why I want to fall away. My wanting walks me at odd times, permisses me

to hide as strangers do. At night, I want to dig at the ground as moths do
to light, lapping at the holes, flying as chickens do in their dreams.

There are stones growing

My father holds his casket close to him when
I ask to see him. They’re stamps, he tells me.
The stones are rubbed raw, glassy and bleeding
Like little fingertips clinking together. Last night

I picked at my chair and slit my palm open. The air
sucked the puckered skin, sipping red and plodding
like a balloon breathing. Some day my grandchild
will watch it bobbing and tell her child, that’s nai nai!

and her child will look at her like I do. She will hear me
in bronze tin chocolate capsules, find me in the must of
corners dawdling, cutting my pants to fit my arms. But now

there’s nothing clutched in my mouth, a barren plot. Once,
I planted chives in my backyard. They ripened, keeled over
like a father who fears for his son. There was nothing I could do.
I am sorry, I still want to say. I want to know us into being, to show
softness, to disgorge gracefully. There are stones growing. We
no longer etch our names into them. Where will we linger?
I can only write him simply.

Lick the child

that springs forth from the eyes of her
father. When she casts her feet on the leaves, they turn
away from her, crestfallen. The crumbles of road
forget the path. The gutter anoints her when she lathers
her fingers through dirt water. When her father hugs her,
she will push him away. The chemtrails
flee in the sky, arc towards the rim of the distance. If
the rain falls in her mouth, she might be able to draw them in.
Her neck arching towards the sky, teeth jut from the lips,
spangled red, a zippered tongue
peeking. A tongue bump like a fattened tick.
Sometimes I think I am afraid of being known.
Her lips are stained black, oily.
There are bulbs fruiting
on her skin,
apple-like.