in air. You don’t know

& you don’t know & isn’t that Emily

the shape of it? A braided rope

becomes a ladder you can climb

into a hole. Underneath

every pattern is a logic

it’s your privilege to ignore

& yours is dreamsense yours is erasure

Hello you

are a vessel of vessels.

Hold your wings like the oars of a boat.

Don’t tell me the sun is an exit

the sky is a clamp.

LETTER TO S, HOSPITAL

Does it take a fever to recognize a fever

Is it true that you can’t love a man

Against his will & get away

Without a scratch

Tell me when did I know

Was I dull vapor     hoarse light

Was I walking damp with fog through a stand of pines

Forgive me I’ve been sick

I was so sick

With belonging

I wanted to keep my mouth shut

Loyally

I wanted girlhood circled around me

Like a coat

You said You should apologize I should have

Wanted to be saved

For worse I needed to peel my own paint

Miranda my own arrest

RULES FOR A BODY COMING OUT OF WATER

In a story, a girl is a tree / is a bird / is a wilderness.

A girl wakes up underwater, nail by nail builds herself

the same wooden raft, eats the mulberries & the blackberries

set out for the trap & she gets away from him

somehow, the price a piece of herself.

Compromised by longing & looking for language

to note the differences in the map: the pointed spruces

tipped against the moon this time

& the water halflit, star-slid—but it makes no difference

in the telling. The story is familiar

& she has been told what she can expect from men.

Because the body is incorrect. The body is fragile

in tar & marline, skin written over with shame

like a register of witch-burning. So the body is stubborn:

spalted pith of one lung falters, lumbers open.

Air, dirt air. When fingers reach for fox sedge, claw

for rushes, the air rushes up to meet her grassward.

So the body is inventory—shunt.

Clutch of hair like a root looping back on itself.

Her hair is juniper rope.

I’m asking: how can she get at the start of this place?

Blue river nameless, sky blank, pointless

code of moss—if she’s traveling north now,

true north, north to what?

I can say our voice is a burned voice

but she doesn’t know the way back

after the pigeons have eaten the words

I dredged with flour & left to rise.

DEAR EMILY

Easy to disown the girl you were

at 23: fluffed dove-gray

& bridal, eyes up, prim bird claws

pink on the brute arm

of your first wreck,

your original lesson

in leaving a fire

to burn itself to ash.

With him you were cob-eyed,

blind-cut—a tin girl

ridged & perfect,

yawning flora,

all vinegar

hysteria & brine.

So you dreamed

that he drowned

you. You dreamed of blue