in the bedroom dark, lit by a perpetual city,

I am gripping a rock in my right hand

and he is gripping a rock in his right hand.

We face each other, muscles poised for sex

or war. Who dropped the rock?

Who cast it? I’m unsure,

even now, who cried mercy first.

After the __________, time turned like a mood ring.

My mood changed like a thunderstruck sky. The sky

changed like a breast, engorged, staining the front

of a white silk blouse. I got laid off. I went thirteen days

without wearing a bra. I changed my mind about

the fiction of money. Money changed hands. I washed

my hands religiously. Religion changed into sunlight—

something allowed to touch my face. My face changed

into my mother’s. No, into a mask of my mother’s face.

Traces of heartache changed into a pain in my right hip.

The stock market dipped. The S&P fell freely. I did not

fall to my knees, promising to change my life.

The price of paper towels changed and the price

of toilet paper and the price of white bread and milk.

Whiteness did not change. Some things stayed

the same. We named the moon for its changes, but

it remained the same. Gravity pulled at my organs

like the moon’s tug makes a king tide. America’s king

would inevitably change and inevitably stay the same.

Resembling Flowers Resembling Weeds

I’m fourteen and the smell of singed hair

circles me like the halo of a pre-Renaissance

Madonna. Loss already on my face.

A summer crush holds out his fingers

for the other boys to smell. The next day

I choose a cute outfit: shorts with tiny

repeating fl wers. I braid my hair

into a wreath of juniper and dandelion.

There’s an iteration of myself with gills

and fins, who my twin brother knew

as well as he knew himself, then

there’s me with petals on my thighs

and in my hair, fl wers even inside.

The untrained eye can mistake yarrow

for fl wer or blue-eyed grass for weed.

Facing the mirror, irises grow wide

across the field of myself. They’re so good

at making use of holes. I want to balance

pitchers of seawater on my head. I want

to be more like my eyes. I carry holes

and purses and a picture of me, age six,

Easter bonnet tied under my chin, shins

grazed by bluebells, a steeple I can hear

beyond the frame. An image I’ve held

in another’s retelling. The scentless girl

I was has a fragrance I recognize

in the mirror. The girl and I bring

our rose-perfumed wrists to the flesh

below the ears. Flesh that will one day be eaten

but not consumed. What is covered now by cloth

and petals will be taken wholly. A tongue,

feeling like many, will coax woman out of us.

Of Being in Motion