to see if my bones would glow in the dark.

My boat name could have been

HMS Floating, Though Barely.

Meanwhile I had a passion for cartography.

Not leaving, just coloring the maps.

I covered all the walls with white paint, whiter paint, spiraling out—

a weather system curling over water.

I always drew the compass rose flat.

I was metal-blue, I was running my mouth

like a bathtub tap. A bone picked clean of particulates.

Everything has some particular science.

By its nature, a vulture can’t

be a common field crow, for instance.

Look at the wings, look at that hard

mouth, look at the feet.

When I tell my history, I can’t leave out

how I hit that man in the jaw,

that I wasn’t good at mercy,

that eating nothing but white pills & white air

made me unchartable—

I can’t skip to the end just to say

well it was fragile & I smashed it

& everything’s over, well now I know things

that make me unlikely.

What am I supposed to say: I’m free?

I learned to counter like a torn edge

frayed from the damp. That’s how I left it.

Leaving the river, leaving

wet tracks arrowed in the brush.

BRUTE STRENGTH

Soldier for a lost cause, brute, mute woman

written out of my own story, I’ve been trying

to cast a searchlight over swamp-woods & parasitic ash

back to my beginning, that girlhood—

kite-wisp clouded by gun salutes & blackbirds

tearing out from under the hickories

all those fine August mornings so temporary

so gold-ringed by heat haze & where is that witch girl

unafraid of anything, flea-spangled little yard rat, runt

of no litter, queen, girl who wouldn’t let a boy hit her,

girl refusing to be It in tag, pulling that fox hide

heavy around her like a flag? Let me look at her.

Tell her on my honor, I will set the wedding dress on fire

when I’m good & ready or she can bury me in it.

IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO KEEP WHITE MOTHS

from flying out of my mouth.

I am 25. I paint the door blue. I go in when he tells me

to stay out. Next to a billboard

in Philadelphia that says Your Message Here,

I am sewn into a dress. On Broad Street, ravens

lurk on the Divine Lorraine Hotel as if to say

Always a corpse flower, never a bride.

Facing south, I can make myself apologize

for anything. My voice is thick—a shroud of bells.

But will I listen. What I hear in the dark

is my own blood stalking me

like a drunk boy wild on cheap gin

swinging his hammer

to nail a tree swallow flat to a barn door.

A bird is a vessel. It carries a field.

There are nights when I sleep on the couch

& lift macramé lace to my cheek from a hope chest.

Outside, a teenager shoots a teenager shoots a teenager.