I was born in a coffee cup Seven times this week It is gross It is plasticine It is sunflowers and florescent yellow Like pissing froyo coupons And job applications for hands There is a girl who sleeps in my arms some nights And I dream we are sleeping in the produce isle At Whole Foods and the manager is upset When I trace my palms around her skin My hands are GPS markers Mapping the routes I take to try to be nowhere And measuring the number of minutes until I have to know what time it is again. I never meant to move into my email address Or cut myself for Facebook. I told her secret name To the guy at the supermarket bakery In exchange for a manufactured cake Made of acid sugar and kitchen sponge That is slowly fusing itself To the shelf in the refrigerator. The intentions are good. There are flowers here But the flowers here have nametags They didn't write themselves.

May, 2015 "Hey, wait." She pops a cherry candy in her mouth I count to ten She opens her lips and a ladybug is perched there like a cute tongue stud, Waits just long enough to stop making me nervous Before it flies away to someone's garden. July 2015 We walk everywhere. It's not grown up. There's always stuff in our pockets and in summer a little halo of snow follows her around And weighs her hair down. We sit on the grass by the drainage ditch outside the shopping plaza eating garlic knots, Never sure how weird it looks, Whether the folks leaving the DMV find us embarrassing or inspirational September 2015 We fuck like living in a house that's been abandoned since the 60s My appliances are never wired right and Your body is a rotary phone I don't know how to operate I whisper in your ear "Can you hear me now?" And we hold still until the squirrels' nest in the attick Quiets long enough for me to hear you answer We're not sure there even is a circuitbreaker anymore Most nights we just lay there in the dark Because the pillows are the only things we know how to repair November 2015 Next time some ivy league kid is rude to you at your restaurant job I'm strapping the tent to my backpack And carrying you to the Appalachians Where the sky opens up And we're gonna scream it out like fishercats Hurl pianos at the sleeping construction sites Skip the cattlespurs in our clockwork Out into the atmosphere Propelled out there on a jetstream of all the fucked up shit they put you through And everything they told you not to cry about And every time they told you to man up Howl at the moon so loud Every dog in North Carolina starts barking And every person starts barking All the way back to business majors at UNC and all the homeless folks on Franklin Street Together We're gonna scream every pushed aside truth And every crumpled up feeling Back into the atmosphere Filter a hundred years of carbon emissions through our trembling bodies Shot out into space like a giant robot anime finally Beam of pure goddamn human catharsis Into a new star May 2016 "Hey, wait." She pops a cherry candy in her mouth I count to ten She opens her lips and a ladybug is perched there like a cute tongue stud, Waits just long enough to stop making me nervous Before it flies away to someone's garden.

I make a bulletted list Of all the ways I am different From the bones in the bricks But each bullet Slips through my bare ribs Like this is an everyday question That doesn't need an answer The first love I remember Stands where the grass gets taller Because she stands there And she hopes when she pouts her lips It makes a sound like dogs barking And it does. I trade my time for my stomach Over coffee With the rain everywhere Just begging for me back To mix with the bones in the bricks And I curl up in the public bathroom sobbing While someone reads the paper My first love Stands naked over the galaxy In an abandoned resort casino Drawing moss from the sweat Of the boy who works at the gas station This is what happened To the kids of the twentieth century Who wanted to be astronauts So they could run away from home I measure stones with my pocketwatch Perpetually interrogating The ground under my feet For signs of a past I wasn't there for Or some ghost who needs vigil So I'll at least feel useful It's not that it's quiet here There are sounds I just Don't know how to answer back Back home where the water's words make sense I walk along the levee barefeet in tall grass Where the sky curls new colors out of itself Where the bone in the soil weaves dandelions And where the lyme bug sunk it's teeth Into my hips And named itself Leaving And named itself Cody I've called this abandoned A sunken ship and all it's graveyards But out across the water Where my boots don't know the rocks yet Something A lot of things Are still growing

Hollow waisted and smooth Auburn Standing In a softglow dream she births a fox Dripping Matted Wriggling from her chest To arms Sleepy Dewey wonder she mouths words Assessments Compromises Thought aloud into the caverns Of kitchen floor Of afternoon Of gently rocking and mewling housecats "Say Hello" She says "This is the year two thousand and sixteen"