Comfort

You unhook your ribcage from the morning rays,

hoist them on a platter and walk them home.

Edge the mounted globe with your forefingers, 

mottled with sunlight more than blood

and struggle with the screen door as you call my name.

You tell me

Do the same for yourself one day. 

Show me that you can do it, grow up!

You say I am simply you but a version more rare.

We meet Dad in the kitchen by the chopping board.

He rocks the butcher’s knife like a toy boat,

but he is a lost sailor 

kissing each bladed corner into the dampened wood.

A day-dreaming sway. 

The father’s hand rocks to balance an unforgiving tide.

You take your ribs, your globe with an interrupted orbit 

and set it down in front of him as the family marvels.

The game is truly beautiful.

Dad clutches a bone,

wraps his wide, letterless fingerprints 

around its scarlet flesh,

consoles the marble how you do with my veins

when you see a little bit of you running.

He rams it with the sharpened edge thinner than, 

you joke, 

the film roll from your wedding night. 

The ribcage is now pieced

as if a man looked too hard for an opening.

Let them make a meal out of where a heart once grew.

He pries the last chunk off, but the butt of the knife slips

onto a stone-slab made to carry only thuds.

He wipes off the juice,

the same that always comes from things 

that can only wish for more orbits.

I take the smaller pieces, his anchors, land them into a bowl.

We grace it with seasoning, or what we can call now, a season.

I massage it because it is your bone.

I assign meat its aging spots. 

And now that we’ve dealt with an orbit by breaking it,

we have two options.

We can take it outside again.

Let it nap in the bark vest we borrowed from our tree.

Line the blocks in an array 

like we assign how each part of a skeleton rests.

Let the flames make ash under it, 

though the meat is not fazed from its rows

when it dies.

Smoke is now what chases a house and waits for it to burn. 

Let the smoke chase the house still held by your ligaments.

Let the smoke find a place to stay.

We smoke out an animal like silent hunters,

harness it onto our mantels and tapestries,

into our ears,

out of our mouths.

Or instead,

we choose not to burn.

Rub salt into muscles that don’t realize they’re cold.

Wait for it to dry.

As we wait, the bark still leans against the tree it used to hug, 

calling itself useless. 

From it its resin,

lost collagen turned ornaments.

When the meat is raw it’s a girl untouched 

and when it’s  

cured

it becomes yet another uncooked meal for a home.

Maybe we can take the tendons and wear them like jewelry, 

then eat what makes us jewel-like.

Leave ourselves alone to age.

Our skin infused by wrinkles, barricades.

Our expressions submerged into each socket 

that follows a bone put into place.

Wait for however longer a complexion can hold space,

shrivel up grown-up conversations 

about how we all talk like our parents,

roll out our tongues like cadavers

on the American tabletop.

I wait to be served another catastrophe 

like the blackening of bark with a desperate family name.

Pacific Moondust

9:12PM. 

Keith wipes down the last table. 

Barbara clocks out.

You click off the Open sign with the sticky light 

and have the bulbs blink themselves to sleep 

until they’re asked again to wake and 

everything feels as though it bathed in the day’s molasses steam.

The fake lilies still flaunt their manufactured wrinkles

and their plastic stigmas wink.

The moon sinks halfway into the sky.

The lily wants to play pretend

but it will always be a Mother,

happy,

standing in resin that settled ages ago 

in yet another vase 

born with the wave of them,

another that rose in an en masse Pacific crossing

but, really, alone to be filled with anything.

My podium will never be gone if it glues me here! 

The lily is trapped in an empire.

Dust magnet.

You grab a napkin.

How annoying.

You can never get rid of that.

I lock the main doors.

It seems to come with the process of wanting.

I don’t wish to be a trouble either so I make way to the back first.

Watch the street logos still sauntering. 

Wait for us to grow closer only how 

the minute hand and hour hand grow close.

Give me something beyond the unclingable clinging dust.

I’ll meet you outside, where we parked our vehicle in the background 

and we forget how long it had been left in the sun 

to melt into a design for a stage,

into a whitewash for an old, unrottable fence 

where the white dried soft like how we think people never do.

I press my fingernail into the shapeable skin and coax it with a dent.

I try to dig out the crescent moon that summits me for 

an unspendable decade called the fingers on the daughter’s hands.

I try to dig out the unfinished process 

and give, finally give, 

the once-sapling its girly stickers.

Was it ever right to wax the waned?

Do you think, like us, it remembers a time when it was liquid? 

Did it learn from us?

To take on the shape of a dead thing standing? 

I run my fingers to test if there is any paint left 

brave enough to still be shaped by a grave digger.

We have yet to jump the fence. 

We’ve been waiting, the fence sinking.

It’s in the ground and it’s gone and

the moon waxes the yard with another ocean

so we don’t have to wait to jump anymore.

If I cross the ocean with you this time,

would you still be scared 

that this raft was made to be a grave

until you said that 

it wasn’t something you could afford?

You ask if I want to watch you drive to back before, 

just for the hour.

Where A Dreamhouse Should Have Been

*

The man paces until he reaches a village, 

his glance following the golden aura of 

household oil wicks that gave the cottages 

their eyes, and as he arrives in front of the 

one with its features more aged than the 

rest, he peers into the window. The man sees 

a nervous, barely-teenage boy, wide awake 

and terrified when the rest of the world does

the same while sleeping. The boy is crying, 

but the man knows that there will be more 

lost. The man is the one left to convince 

manhood to be worth more than what dies. 

The boy looks up, lines his gaze with the man 

on the other side of the window, who is like a 

mirror, but buried under a generation; A man 

around whom the night immediately blackens. 

A man who wraps himself with it and 

runs until he is out of a continent. 

*

The man is home alone in his apartment.

More wrinkles on his forehead like a scribbled 

map. The room is laced with perpetual dust 

and lined with furniture picked from dumpsters 

of shopping mall alleys, thrown into the lended 

Honda in such a manner that would only 

quasi-violate traffic safety guidelines, and rolled 

into the unit’s shared parking space with 

the Carpenters’ Yesterday Once More still 

at its guppy bridge. Neglected on the run-down 

floor of the foyer is a backpack that once 

carried ghosts on his shoulder. He sits at the 

dinner table. A tea kettle with paisley 

brushstrokes and three months worth of 

paychecks tucked into the beak. A radio turned 

on, broadcasting across the frontier from NYC 

with the World Trade Center in shambles and 

civilian terror engorging on the witchhunt against 

terrorism. The man sits and chews with Bush’s 

voice in the background. His Nokia chimes, to 

which he flicks open as he deposits the remaining 

soda crackers from his hand back into the 

cardboard sleeve. He yammers into the phone 

with his mouth half-empty for every sha la la la.

*

A young woman enters who, six months 

later, will be determined a wife, sign a page in 

a red Henley top and flared denim at a counter 

of an air-freshened room, be called married, pack 

back up the film, and clock back in. Share a box 

of Empress chicken with a Carpenter’s boy 

on the Golden Gate Bridge. Charm the court. 

Be restlessly the same but a sharer of a municipal 

drawl that is, after all, the monumental point. 

Carry first the infant, then a green card, and 

gravitate towards the gradual devoid in 

exhibitionist severity. But of course, that is never 

for a wannabe Yankee girl. And, like a narration, 

dinner is set. But the man’s face is twisted tight, 

tugging the collar of a remedial-level U.S. Polo Assn. 

shirt he won’t replace until, oh let’s say, the 

orchestrated final shine of the woah-oh-oh.

He clutches a Tsingtao bottle. He shouts, breaks 

its neck on the dinner table so the shards and booze 

both look like tears. The table pushes. Another bottle 

breaks. Another voice breaks. The fluorescent 

lights buzz melodically above the couple to make 

a tune from injury, decorating the blankness mercied 

by their screams. 

On the Other Side of the Yankee Girl Drawl

The camera is slow. 

The screen. 

A girl walks out of the shower. 

She steps carefully into the shallow, 

and wraps herself in an exhausted towel. 

Her hands probe at the damp cushion of fat 

belonging to her stomach. 

She moves the towel onto her thighs 

and soon her ankles, 

hastily like a failed meditation. 

Looks in the mirror and gives the fleshy outline 

of her torso 

a soft pinch, like teasing a toddler’s cheeks. 

On the girl’s chest is what she regards,

the opposite of a bruise, 

a ring of blemish 

with redness that surfaces from an internal heat. 

This is the type of hurt with an energy. 

We meet her cerebrally.

This is it.

Fibers of a woman in the making 

as I take my palms 

and dig as if there is a story to find,

into a greased scalp of hair that flakes though 

it doesn’t fail to mold

with sweaty oil making a waxed frame.

I push it and it stays,

holds at a frozen incline

like a breath without a second half.

I’m damn pissed.

You cut the encore! when there isn’t one to begin with.

I pinch an unsatiated gasp 

like tying an inhale too tight with string.

Hollow lungs and 

cool 

like snippets of mint

or a dusty tabloid 

lamenting a moment in time

but missing. 

I step in the shallow backwards.

There’s a reason why they call these flyaways.

I push my torso over the sink and crowd 

my face into the vanity mirror,

big-eyed and looking up 

at the stubby rays of a sun.

I was Icarus except I was told to be closer. 

I was Icarus who was born my women.

What are they reaching for, 妈妈?

To see the rest of you, I guess. To see the world.

It’s like they’re dancing.

I don’t think they’ve learned the rules.

I thought the laughter was supposed to be light

but nothing melted but the music.

The scene switches.

The girl is dressed in weighted clothes 

that feel of a bodybag not yet employed. 

Thumbs the frayed bristles of her toothbrush, 

thinking, and, as she brushes the grooves of her molars, 

blood runs. 

A nameless tension settles on her back and hips, 

pulsing like a sore dance.

Dinner at Ice Age

Why don’t you join us for the hunt?

A wholesale woman.

A bag of dried prunes.

I flip on my shades at the dawn of my massacre.

A sandal, mouth popped open.

I am too selfish to hunt anyone besides myself.

I could be that Rae Dunn bitch sleeping within white pickets

without a single bloody thing at the points.

Grinding my teeth.

A pitchfork for a roast.

A braked-wheel ripple across my temples.

A gospel.

Unhinge each of my tendons after Sunday.

Two coupons.

Pierce my heart chamber.

Free drink.

One coupon.

Lick my heartbeats off the rod because 

the rhythm

is the only thing left of me.