floodwater mold,

the traps he set

wire by hook.

You waited for hail,

a plague of swollen fish

to sting his mouth

before you slapped him,

before he told you

You’re the one

who ruined your life.

You knew

all the reasons,

the ledgers, the birds

caught in windows,

your hands flaking rust—

tin girl clutching what,

holding what

to hide your nakedness?

Give her up now, that girl

who can’t be you,

who can’t be anyone

flung over his bed

like a sheet.

III: CIRCLE

Every woman adores a Fascist,

The boot in the face, the brute

Brute heart of a brute like you.

—SYLVIA PLATH

AUBADE WITH BOUNDARIES

You think you can choose to remember our story

however you want it. That you can run up your flag

& say True Love Lost & we’re even.

Even the whiskey, even the salt we licked from the table

won’t return us to our roles of wanted & wanting.

In an argument, it is better to be drunk than to be right.

When you screamed at me You don’t know everything about me

there was snow melting on my hair;

we were blackout drunk in a ladies’ toilet.

Black sharpie under the mirror commanded me

UNFUCK YOUR HOLE LIFE.

I couldn’t stop drying my hands. I was saying I’m sorry

but my mouth was obsessed with the word precedent.

Girls are taught that adage early: To permit it gives permission.

How many implements of shame should I hold against

myself? Blight, motherfucker,

is the introduction of a bruise down one thigh.

Now I’ve learned to say remember like memory is not

the axis on which the world shifts

& interplanetary garbage is not, like, just drifting.

Go back & go back & go back to the beginning is useless.

I can’t remember the chemicals for choking roaches

& the roaches are everywhere.

Orange light slides over the railyard

where I watch the workers circle the tracks.

They replace one empty traincar with another.

FOUR HAWKS

circle the same mile of Indiana where I force myself to look

at every dead deer on the road, as if that braces me, as if I believe

it will protect me from losing anything good.

I can’t stop dreaming I’m hiding

my own prints in the snow, convinced

my mouth is a metal trap, a part of it, apart

from you, & when you pull me awake

it’s because I’m lining my body with burrs,

because I’m antlers & talons & I know

the smell of cedar is home, is a ring of sky

I love, but I can’t take it when

you say Only deer, only hawks.

Why is there nothing wild in you

to explain it, nothing killing; why

am I the chased thing horrified

to overtake myself in the brush I wonder &

if a deer darts across this road & the dead don’t

take it, don’t the dead wait, don’t I know,