Mosquito Read Free

animal
But do not say dog. I will check for the baby
Beneath my dress. Now, we have highways
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    & nothing seems far enough away. The way
Of holy eyes—morning & knife-in-the-box
That act of misunderstanding, which is
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    Much more casual than a glass dusted in sunlight
& because we call it casual, or a glass in sunlight
It will not break or bleed. This is fundamental

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    & nothing came before. I adore you the blizzard
That going blank, that’s fine. A raccoon
Awake & thief-mouthed in the dumpster
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    The half-chewed chicken bone is a truth
That little victim is suffer everything & joy

DNA
    You have to admit, pushing my wheelchair
was better than painting my dead lips.
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    Maybe , the surgeon said, caressing my head
like a hurricane. I wished I was a tan girl, hands
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    overflowing with perfect shells. You needn’t
ask, Mother, I forgive you. Stop nailing yourself to trees.
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    Pray my child never has to fall asleep cold,
waiting to be cut by strangers. Give them nothing
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    of mine, I’ll tell them before they shake
a heart to life in a test tube. Science:
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    make it red hair, brown eyes,
& by the way, Mother, the market
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    where we cried biting apples, Whole
Foods —they don’t let me in there anymore.

Goodbye Song
    I’ve hummed it so many times I can’t feel
the right side of my face & now
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    I’d rather be gagged with guitar strings
& dragged behind a hot rod than sit
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    deadlog in a wheelchair. How many times
will you push a needle into my thigh
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    before something more brilliant
wakes? O, whistling skin of a pierced
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    & patched body. I stumble through life
like a kicked dog. How many have dropped
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    wishes in my skull? Dipped,
then pressed wet-tipped fingers
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    to their lips? When the body quakes
& pink bubbles crawl lips, push
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    the chest down—squeeze & plunge the knife
so the tongue is frozen & bit.

Swallowing the Scalpel
    The hospital’s bell-throat moans
as my roommate dies. Remembering
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    where the goodbye letters were hidden,
the scarred clatter spoons in the hall.
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    Doctors gulp, click their teeth—
hum when skin accepts the cutting.
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    Tomorrow my head opens. If I am still
here, someone let me know what I am.

    Paint a still life of my pillow. Use red. Be messy.
Remember the time you rode to the fields,
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    watched the calf work itself frothy in barbed wire.
Scribble that churning, the emptying of wails.
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    Remember how the dissected cat leaked
its chorus of sweet end? Shade in the hunger—
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    the not keeping anything down. Remember sheets
scabbed with stains. Pull out your hair, rub the fibers in.

Dip your fingers in the toilet and flick. Remember to scrape
a blade to best show what stuck during the night.

    These pills are a lover sneering motherfucker .
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    Melted lungs, oil smoking from a lathe. Too many,
and moths waterfall from nostrils, nuzzle the body’s graffiti.
They are the last gasps of a premature baby.
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    Rattle them off my teeth, let’s pass them with our tongues.

    I would have handcuffed myself to a bumper, jumped
from a bridge to feel my lungs. But I watched the seasons
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    from a wheelchair. Doctors fed me steroids, stretched
my legs. A nurse scrubbed me clean. Months passed
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    before they wrapped my fingers around a cane.
During winter’s first flurry I dropped everything—
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    spun half-drunk away from my mother, cane standing
as if held by the dark sky—and ran like a storm cloud

before falling into the slush. Overturned, my eye patch filled
with snow, lay like a mirror that would never show my face.

    I shave my head because my eyes are monks swallowing
their tongues, and only hunching at a table
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    in a bookstore can make me whole. The Lorax ,
Where the Wild Things Are , children point openmouthed
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    at scars. They buy with jars of dimes.
Read books where fat words lumber the page
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