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What is the structure of lips That take care of sounds, That can scream loud and long, That can wait and be silent? Yesterday I was mastering words And kissing lips lightly— Their loving weakness Now remains on my own Hardworking lips, Exacting, as if forever, My terrible punishment.

In a light chocolatine room with blackout windows, a loud clock drowns in soft dawn’s syllables, crisscrossed with a broken cloudiness I’d choose as my own bedcovers but cannot. My choice of sleep or sky has no music of its own. There’s no “its own” while the baby cries. Oh, the baby cries. He howls and claws like a wrongly minor red wolf who doesn’t know his mother. I know I am his mother, but I can’t quite click on the word’s essential aspects, can’t denude the flora or disrobe the kind of housecoat “mother” always is. Something cunty, something used. Whatever meaning the word itself is covering, like underwear, that meaning is so mere and meager this morning. Mother. Baby. Chicken and egg. It’s so obnoxious of me: I was an egg who had  an egg and now I’m a chicken, as usual scooping up both possibilities, or what I used to call possibilities. I used to be this way, so ontologically greedy, wanting to be it all. Serves me right. My belief in the fluidity of the self turns out to mean my me is a flow of wellwater, without the well, or the bucket, a hole dug and seeping. A kind of unwell, where the ground reabsorbs what it was displaced to give. The drain gives meaning to the sieve. As I said: a chicken who still wants to be all potential. Someone who springs and falls, who cannot see how many of us I have in me—and I do not like them all. Do I like us? Can I love us? If anyone comes first it’s him, but how can that be? I was here way, way first. I have the breasts, godawful, and he the lungs and we share the despair. For we are a we, aren’t we? We split a self in such a way that there isn’t enough for either of us. The father of the baby is sleepy and present in his way, in the way of fathers. He is devoted like few fathers, and maybe hurts like I hurt, like no fathers. I don’t know what someone else feels, not even these someones who are also me. Do they hurt like I do?  Why can’t they tell me, or morse or sign: let me know they know where and how and why it hurts? Or something? What is the point of other people, being so separate, if we can’t help a person get that pain will stick its shiv into anything, just to get rid of the weapon and because it can? For if we share ourselves then they, too, must also be in so much pain. I can hear it. Oh, my loves. The wood of the crib, the white glow of the milk (which must have siphoned off the one and only pure part of me, leaving me with what, toxicity or sin or mush?), the awful softness. I’ve been melted into something too easy to spill. I make more and more of myself in order to make more and more of the baby. He takes it, this making. And somehow he’s made more of me, too. I’m a mother now. I run to the bathroom, run to the kitchen, run to the crib and I’m not even running. These places just scare up as needed, the wires that move my hands to the sink, to the baby, to the breast are electrical. I’m in shock. One must be in shock to say so, as if one’s own state is assessable, like a car accident or Minnesota taxes. A total disaster, this sack of liquid flesh which yowls and leaks and I’m talking about me not the baby. Me, this puddle of a middle, this utilized vessel, cracked hull, divine design. It’s how it works. It’s how we all got here. Deform following the function . . . But what about me? I whisper secretly and to think, around these parts used to be the joyful place of sex, what is now this intimate terror and squalor. My eyes burned out at three a.m. and again at six and eleven. This is why the clock is drowning, as I said earlier. I’m trying to explain it. I repeat myself, or haven’t I already? Tiny self, along with a tiny self. I’ll say it: he hurt me, this new babe, then and now. Perhaps he always will, though thoughts of the future seem like science fiction novels I never finished reading. Their ends like red nerves chopped off by cleaver, not aliens, this very moment, saving nothing for later. He howls with such fury and clarity I must believe him. No god has the power to make me believe anything, yet I happen to know this baby knows a way out. This dark hole closing in on me all around: he’ll show me how to get through the shock and the godlessness and the rictus of crushed flesh, into the rest of my life.

Last night I traced with my finger the long scar on my love’s stomach as if I was following a road on a map. I heard the scream of tires, saw the flash of chrome, her six-year-old body a rag doll bleeding at the seams. It is foolish of me to wish I was there before it happened, to reach back thirty years, clasp her small hand and pull her away from that speeding car that turned her organs into bruised fruit. How easily she could have missed her seventh birthday, the lit candles waiting for her to blow out their tiny flames. How easily I could’ve spent last night in a crowded bar instead, my shoulders brushing against strangers, a man on the jukebox singing his heart out to a woman with the prettiest eyes he’s ever seen.

there are more S s in possession than i remembered / my name hinges on the S/ is serpentine / has sibilance / is simple / six lettered / a symbol / different from its sign / sound shapes how we think about objects / the mouth shapes how sound spills out / how the speaker’s seen / a sigmatism is the homosexual mystique / my parents sought treatments / i was sent to a speech / pathologist / sixth grade / a student / she gave me exercises / i was schooled / practiced silence / syllabics / syntax / my voice sap in the high branches / my voice a spoonful of sugared semen / i licked silk when i spoke / i spilt milk when i sang / when i sang sick men tore wings from city birds / so i straightened my sound / into a masculine i / the S is derived from the semitic letter shin / meaning my swishiness is hebraic / is inherited / it’s semantic / no matter what was sacrificed / the tongued isaac / a son against the stone of my soft palate / still i slipped / my hand inside my neighbor’s / waistband & pulled back pincers / sisyphus with the sissiest lips / parseltongued assassin / sassy & passing for the poisoned sea / now when i say please / let me suck your cock / i sound straight / as the still secondhand / on a dead watch.

a stabat mater listen mother, he punched the air:   I am not your son dying the day fades and the starlings roost:   a body’s a husk a nest of goodbye his wrist colorless and soft was not a stick of chewing gum how tell?    well a plastic bracelet with his name for one.    & no mint his eyes distinguishable from oysters how?    only when pried open she at times felt the needle going in.    felt her own sides cave.    she rasped she twitched with a palsy:   tectonic plates grumbled under her feet soiled his sheets clogged the yellow BIOHAZARD bin:   later to be burned soot clouds billowed out over the city:   a stole.    a pillbox hat    [smart city] and wouldn’t the taxis stop now.    and wouldn’t a hush smother us all the vascular walls graffitied and scarred.    a clotted rend in the muscle wend through the avenues throttled t-cells.    processional staph & thrush the scourge the spike a stab a shending bile the grace the quenching mother who brought me here, muddler:   open the window.    let birds in

I wait for you to come to brush your shoe against the blade of grass I'm sitting on touch me with your hand as you reach for one last violet to take home or pick up a worm to place gracefully in the garden even better if you lie on a hillside to watch the sunset or breathe in stars I will feel your warmth, bury my head next to that freckle on your calf, that hair on your forearm, or just behind the lobe of your left ear I promise not to take too much blood into my swelling body only what I think I need and I will never let you know I am here though I will love you deeply

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller, Knocking on the moonlit door; And his horse in the silence champed the grasses Of the forest’s ferny floor: And a bird flew up out of the turret, Above the Traveller’s head: And he smote upon the door again a second time; ‘Is there anybody there?’ he said. But no one descended to the Traveller; No head from the leaf-fringed sill Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes, Where he stood perplexed and still. But only a host of phantom listeners That dwelt in the lone house then Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight To that voice from the world of men: Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair, That goes down to the empty hall, Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken By the lonely Traveller’s call. And he felt in his heart their strangeness, Their stillness answering his cry, While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf, ’Neath the starred and leafy sky; For he suddenly smote on the door, even Louder, and lifted his head:— ‘Tell them I came, and no one answered, That I kept my word,’ he said. Never the least stir made the listeners, Though every word he spake Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house From the one man left awake: Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup, And the sound of iron on stone, And how the silence surged softly backward, When the plunging hoofs were gone.

You wept in your mother's arms and I knew that from then on I was to forget myself. Listening to your sobs, I was resolved against my will to do well by us and so I said, without thinking, in great panic, To do wrong in one's own judgment, though others thrive by it, is the right road to blessedness. Not to submit to error is in itself wrong and pride. Standing beside you, I took an oath to make your life simpler by complicating mine and what I always thought would happen did: I was lifted up in joy.

Pushing the seed into the ground isn't enough. Whatever blooms in this place is dumb and blind. Foreclosure is a one-eyed man. Nothing falls from a sky like this except a little rain, never enough rain. All night my wife looks down the neck of my guitar passing the bottle back and forth like a story she's been telling for years. So many baskets of hard bread. You take the shovel to the ground. The land stares back at you. The corn drifts towards the sky. You don't know what dirt is until you bury your first daughter.

We are of one mind and too much has not been said about all the quiet afternoons childhood offered us, lit gray like a cat, or blue, and cursed with an early moon. When father wore an apron or crept like a bear, we screamed. Nothing is so gone. Where is his record player or the channel that forked a distant year toward us, kind, slow magnet? There was a song we shared without your listening, you widowed soul crawling away on your elbows. I sing it to my child, with a full hand I flick its rapeseeds everywhere, clear, and slow, with all the sincerity its author indeed felt in his ten-gallon hat and his thin, whisky-soaked shirt.