‘SHOULD HAVE BEEN A BOY’ and ‘TRENCH WITH WILD URGENCY’
SHOULD HAVE BEEN A BOY
I want to become a salamander
a flattened fault line
I need to sink into another’s kind
restable shoulder
but the lifeless body they
built to support grunting
weight
should have been a boy
if only I were a widow
the spider with the belly
filled of fire
but the silk I have managed
spun into grotesque
heavy
should have been a boy
should have been a boy
or duck fat or a hall
of days
this meaningless
flower of a desperate child
this is no child
no man will love this
should have been a boy—
TRENCH WITH WILD URGENCY
I am here again
because I am
in constant reimagining. Catch myself seeing
that no, there isn’t a start
a body within all this
and the lines and circles just run and rail
into each other and yes, I have always
been wrong this is the end
of my name and he and I will always be wrung out
splashed and splayed within the same little
pathway, trench, maze, trough, channel,
bring me back to the father the father
who asked for so much who got it all
who craved pork, ate out the heart
the daughter
forget the mother
give the mother a break she's
been through enough
this daughter giving her mother permission to rest
but there is that process again
that kind of voice I need to
talk to my father to exist
in his lap
to remember that this self
this whole damn body
not a fixed graph not
perfectly aligned
let’s take the time to reconfigure the circles
these jagged edges these piles of dead tree frogs
this house cat thrown at the wall
in a pillowcase
give me back the cousins and the campsite and
these compasses
this is a begging a kneeling
a body who wants and craves and
keeps on going
asking
repeat itself until we all hate her enough
remind me what a daughter can be
what does she look like when
she's drawn from blood when
she’s asking for help when
she’s eating out of strangers hard palms and feeling it for the first time
I’m feeling nothing
don’t tell her the poet is always the person
