April 29 (poem 29)

"things that have made me cry this week"

1. he sang Palisades for the last time;
Jon do you remember when I offered you
my dna and the field in which it grows?
that offer still stands,
but I cannot promise that your children
would be able to maintain perfect pitch
through whiskey the way you can.

2. drifting through the place I used to call home;
it smelled exactly the same as four years ago,
only the names on the doors had rearranged their letters
and the postsecret wall I made was absent.
Emily do you remember dead poets society nights
and how your room always smelled like thai tea
and warmth, how we rafted mattresses together
in the lake of your floor, swallowing goldfish
crackers, chocolate chips, and orange juice?
Remember smearing purple shit into my hair
and how we stained every bathtub and shower
in the building for three whole months?
Meryl do you remember the time I dialed 911
the night I stopped loving the girl whose life
I saved by calling, how you anchored me to the good
dock of your arms as I sank again and again into
all seven seas of your chest?
Gabe do you remember how we played dirty scrabble
and translated everything into braille for your roommate?
Katrina do you remember how you used to stamp
kisses on the envelope of my cheek? It was the first time
I felt like it didn’t matter that I was gay,
you treated me exactly the same, thank you.
Do you remember the day Tea scraped a razor across my scalp
and Liz said, incredulous, that I was still beautiful
and my girlfriend’s silence said the opposite?
She was my first kiss, first fuck, first girlfriend,
and we had nothing in common.

3. the signatures orbiting the photograph of me as a baby.
I am not sure why I think I will miss a community that
made me feel so lonely toward the end.
I noticed when you made mix cds for everyone except me,
how your inside jokes sprouted in the sunlight of the
gatherings I was never invited to,
how I didn’t quite make it into all those photographs you took,
how David was surprised when I told him
I felt like a distant satellite most of the time.

April 9 (poem 8)

"confessions in three parts"

1. doorknobs make me nervous
I can feel their afterimages on my palms
like ghosts.

2. when my stomach lionmouths
I imagine my thoracic cavity as an ice cave
it helps me breathe clear.

3. my panic attacks do not trigger the
most sensitive of sonographs;
I am good at masks.

April 2

"The Virginity Tree"
trigger warning: sexual assault

Prologue.
Andrea Gibson said to write the hardest poem.

One.
There are too many bruises in the word that does not belong between my legs.
It is four letters too many
which is to say it is four letters more than silence.
It is not a word that girls can give to other girls.

Two.
There is a tree that I can see from my room.
It’s heavy with shoes tied to its fingers as
reminders of what it means to be barefoot,
to be naked and touching for the first time.
It’s a tradition where I live:
you lose your shoes along with your virginity,
hang the pair in the tree.

Three.
Sometimes I imagine that I can erect fences around sections of my body,
miniature white picket spines designating parts of me as private property.
That is new; I used to imagine my body as a body.

Four.
There is a reason I remove my shoes every time I arrive somewhere new.
It’s the same reason I trust forests more than pickup lines.

Five.
My mother is a survivor,
a word she pronounces “victim”
and which she thinks pronounces her different,
even though the statistic is one in six.
One in six.

Six.
What is the meaning of the word legacy?

Seven.
I cannot bring myself to hang my sneakers –
the faded ones with rainbow laces and peeling heels –
in a tree so clamorous with happiness.
They would make terrible wind chimes.

Eight.
When the Womyn’s Center on my college campus strings the dirty laundry
of women’s shelter stories on a clothesline and calls it Take Back the Night art therapy
there is not a t-shirt there that fits me;
there is a man behind every curtain,
between every line.

Nine.
Her fingers knew the words crime,
No,
And Stop,
but she thinks her fingers can’t count.

Ten.
I called her “girlfriend” after that night,
called it a rite of passage
instead of wrong,
didn’t file a report because it took me three years
to even realize anything had been stolen
and not given freely.

Epilogue.
I still have not told my mother exactly how
precisely
I have filled her shoes.