without indeterminacy

I am heavy bored with criticism.
Your new lover has a light and congenial gravity.
I remember your wrists. and sing.

Minus antecedents: The final interrogation of no

Alright. Tell me one more time about the racecar.
About how your bike is better even if it’s not more safe –
because it doesn’t go that fast – but somehow you’ve shown up
so far. No, no. The last thing I need is a diagram.
Maybe we should go back to yesterday. There was a yellow house
and two stick figures in the yard. What do you mean they were superheroes?

As in: Wonder Twins activate.
In the form of a light post and the disembodied bumper of your car.
Very funny. What did the house do. It yellowed.
Its memory was the least safe
dream of us all. We wanted to be architects then so we made plans
to blow it down. Neither of us was invited to the show.

Wait a minute. Are you trying to sell me intermission?
I came here for lollipops and acrobats and even snow.
Now there are no words but there’s a diagram
and you’re telling me “Don’t worry. It’s a race
not a joke.” Do you remember your safe
word? No. What’s a safe word? It’s like house -

it’s out of context, it means no. You’ll be fine. Just remember: yellow house
(out of context) = no. But I was here a year ago and they were playing the same damn show.
It’s not that I think I’m unsafe it’s just that some people are falling (do you think I’m unsafe?)
and some people are flying and I can’t tell which ones are supposed to be the superheroes.
It’s ok, babe. I bought you a racecar.
And I want you to call it your brain. I drew a picture

of us on the back of my tongue and the diagram
drew the fixture right away. But what about the house
and the yard. The truth is there was never any yellow. There was only a car
and a car. Don’t get me wrong, they were nice cars. They always knew the way to the show.
I just can’t wrap my mind around precipitation.
We keep coming back to elephants and myspace and “safe”

words. I don’t know the difference between relationship. Between a net
made of fiberglass and an open window. The sentence and its diagram.
The ground that we move to make walls. Wonder twins,
activate. Where are you. In the form of a yellow house
and a bucket made of snow. Do me a favor, ok babe. Will you not show me
what you showed them at the show. One of us has a heart like a racecar…

It’s just that you’re an XX-man. and now I’m looking for a girl.
You wouldn’t believe the patterns I’ve seen on this racecar. I’d draw you a diagram
but I’m just not sure where it would go. Yellow house, relax. It’s ok. It’s just dress rehearsal.
I need you to save all that shit for the show.

latitude: perceived obsolescence: unplanned

(we lay there for months drawing back
tiny muscle. and grafting an exegesis of skin.)






My voice, which is the most terrible gift from me.
Indiscriminately. You refuse to touch me with sound.

I want you to tell me a story about unknowing me.
Even the mirrors have become bars we lean against.
Even the body has become a gift we regret.

Either way, I showed up today with my cast on.
With what I wouldn’t give to hear you say Technicolor.
With a guitar and an E string that sticks to itself.
With elephants and a memory of what was found.






It is hard to imagine there are fingers
that do not belong to me. That speak a language to
your body I do not know.

Come closer love, and do not diminish me.
These, which are the politics of our nevering
and you, who are a fistful of duet.
Pressed generously in the girders of my back.






It is not so much that we are
unbroken. Standing like a cyclone
on the periphery of that door.

The cataracts of leaving distinguish me.
And yet. I believe in this retrieval. You,
who are an elliptical. a sweeping. a banishment.

Come closer. Rest my hand on that fragile.



























Yesterday.

A silence we begin for.

And yesterday.

The crossing nothing comes.

territories of folding

This cannot be another year about ___________ (unknowing). I was my mother’s daughter and then a series of days came. They were not unlike a rock garden on the dinner table. I brushed the ground and made a lifejacket of fence posts. We committed suicide and she called me her sum.


































Pushed in a closet and bleeding.






If this is 1989:

your sister did that to your nose.




















sometimes I believe I am a hallway. (I take back the whole part about transitioning.) and this is what I keep trying to tell you about desperation. (if I could I would suffer more in that liminal.) my wish which is a faulty maintaining. the tender of a slightly turned knee. (I am the least brave person that I know.)






































It’s spelled s-h-e but the s is silent.

Isn’t that the way it is anyway. No two plurals in the world.























And what of CPR in the first place.


Play dead, little sister, be a good girl.
I’ll be the boy and I’ll save you.


This is air in your lungs and you are now
breathing. It is important to me that you
remember the difference. This is
resuscitation. Not blood or a kiss.

Dear rooftop:

Even though.

What we were promised was cornstarch. Featuring I am all no and other miracles. Minutes were made out of east coast. Suddenly Seymore and there's a fish in your hand.




An elephant has a memory like a cyclone. And either way I come back to you.



Little is left unchanged.

The Trapping Sessions: (Free)

(Eventually: 33 haiku about my transition.)

~

Somehow if I speak
the same: (do I speak the same)
negative capa-
bility is just
a word. (Word.) I live in that
compression. Language –
do something unusual
to languish me. Language me,
language, steal my voice.

~

Let’s just say I’m the
fish. Yes. I’m the fish begging
tricks for less air.
Compositional
improv is not metaphor.
My voice changed and I
thought I was k(no)wing-
ly. Speak memory, speak. ____.
Memory: break voice.

~

Smile (defer) smile, smile,
shimmy. Wink – wait. That’s not my
line. My line slipped.

~

A table covered
with t-shirts is a living
room. And who wouldn’t
feel safe in that ray-
o-gram. Where we are only
what the light cannot
prove. (I live in that
compression.) And who wouldn’t
language in whose voice.

~

20 minute mustache

I always mistook my face for less sinister. I have only one secret and in 40 seconds that number will become less than three. When I wash dishes first, I fill up the largest bowl with warm water, soap, and silverware in the sink. Notice the rule of nonrecollection. It is paramount to the myth of the sink. On 5th Avenue my dog is under the kitchen table and Shana’s oranges are remembered to the wall, waiting to drip kindly on the floor. Only the fact of what I was thinking there can separate me. Less than a decade but what the sink said was years. Can someone please pass me the Technicolor? The dyad singulared and the space was an honesty. Having lived through the funnel both ways. Little intuition calls the scene.



Look at me, playtime. Listen up. It’s cold in here and I’ve got heavenly. My windmill arms are a wish. You can touch me. You cannot go any further than this. I cannot hold you do not trust me. You can go any further than this. We left the oven on much more in that kitchen. Your hair breaks in and I am lovingly. Go little grass, burn back. Go little ween, kiss kiss.

februate holy field bridge

spurious concomital and loverly
she’s a good boy no matter what he’s our
you cannot be everywhere besides de-
votion resume you are only the places
where I be both tired of the obvious
and invigorate arrive in us arrive in
us temper tiny honesty arrive
not unbuttoning I thought I was dying
point the dog seeking shade in the corner
for the sake of forsaking for forsook
a girder we fashioned from our teeth

Underneath February is a test strip.

And believe me. Believe me. I would.



Men is another moment of happily.
They say your body. My breasts
in my hands and. Your hands
cleaving. I said I would tether them.
Lay your hands down - I will
sever them like wood.

parallelograms for a. to z.

You said I will pull you out of my body in 237
ways. What you wanted was beautifully to
sever things. Here love: the same things. changed.

Finally: a taxonomy of afterthoughts. As though
you were the one who was
sleeping. Breathing in the marrow of would.

You, who are a valley of no, I hear the music leaking. (How she.
How she. How I.) You say low key and I do not believe you.

I forgive everything: the perseveration of skin.

My hands that are a chopping block and I
cannot touch him. I cannot touch him
without not touching me.

Because if you leave, and you are already leaving, there are three.
But you say less than three. And the couch, in your absence,
is crenellated. And who is going to watch us as we leave.

To add to the list of changing things: life preservers are no longer
about preservation. They have become less holy. PFD =
personal flotation device. Endlessly possible. Unlike wood.

Stacey May Fowles wants a lover who will hit her.
(I do not believe in submission.) I want you to erase me.
This is a kindness. A kindness you tell me. A kindness I do not deserve.

On the floor. By the bed. Hotel Congress. March 19, 2005.
Room #23. We are a long way from disintegrated. You said Now.
Look at me. And I did. And you bloomed.

(When my mother died, I will say.
Many years after my mother has died.
But I will not believe her. I’ll be like my grandmother who

despite my parade of girlfriends and her profession
that nobody should be mean to them, still
doesn’t believe in being queer.

I don’t believe in being dead,
I’ll tell my dead mother. And just like you
she’ll repeat herself. Happy New Year. Happy New Year. Happy New.)

I expect there will be a morning when you walk up to this very gate
while I am sitting here. I know this. I know you less each time I see you.
I know this like I know you are more lonely than glass.

To your languishing. To your bubbly.
To your recent. To your hologram. To your desperately.
To your seeking. To your dictaphone. To your you.

Neuromuscular facilitation is just another way of saying
Vancouver. Always is yet a matter of roller derby. Just
in love with you. you, more than sleep.

In the top drawer is a photograph of them touching.
It is not so much that it is a photograph
as it is a depiction of what. what, not could.

I want to tell you about my body. About testosterone
as unwitting art historian. About recovery. Me(n). What it feels like

underneath there. The part you cannot know. but should.

Either way. It’s a house. It’s a house
like everyone else has. I take things away.
I don’t take them for good.

How delirious must we sound when we are falling.
I miss you, you can’t even imagine. And how bad
at math. Less than three. Less than three. Less than three.

And what if. I completely remember
it wrong. What if I remember there were two
of us. And then what if. there was only one death.

I do not believe in the existence of holes
that lead to nowhere. Muscle memory remains an enigma. Still, you cannot
touch her. You cannot touch her without not touching me.

(And still) you are not not a part of me. The world is
uncharacteristically unresponsive.
I could thank you. You stay with me. like grass.

thaw

My hands are consistently.

so many pieces of wood.

anyway, what the hell is a panic attack?

So it happened that I had a panic attack last night. The first full blown one in several years.

Sitting at Bentley’s and the room gradually fills with bodies. The sounds of bodies and their individual coffee cups. The sounds of merriment. A seemingly invisible collision of worlds.

This happens all the time, of course. People come together in public places and do what people coming together do. I have been a person before. I remember it in the way you remember something that happened in your presence. Something you may have witnessed but ultimately, it didn’t happen to you.

We were sitting there, it was amazing. She had on a black shirt, I think. Or maybe it was blue. Either way I don’t remember being afraid of her. I was alive then, I didn’t worry about it. I knew we were people in a world full of people. It never occurred to me to have my eye on the door.

The ugliest part of a panic attack is complicity. The way the world becomes a table top lifted from one corner and the plates slide. People who were eating salmon now bite into chocolate cake as if that’s what they ordered. No one whispers to their neighbor when a plate or two makes it to the floor.

Today I feel as though I am broken.

I feel like a road that folks will continue to drive down. I wonder where this goes, they will say in their wandering. And, oh, what a beautiful view. The patches seem seamless. Really, they’re nothing more than pieces of non-reflective glass.