An Imaginary Table of Contents

Samples of Our Days

Introduction: From Nude in the Bathtub to Enclosed Interiors      1
Musk      16
Blood's Insides and sleep       18
Greasy, bare teacups       27
Porcelain mornings       30
Theories and discontents on knotty breath       36
Nudes       40
Water as drapery and/or x-rays       54
Compartmentalizing fingers, hair, and honey jars       63
Handfuls       75
Bare breath       79
Hmmmm       82
Slippery foot wind       83
Ripping, sewing, ripping       85
Things, people, and their giant teeth       91
Melting skins and adaptation       97
Boxing worlds and repugnant beat-toned faces       108
Clumpy foreheads       112
Analysis words thin, celery, and spine       115
Something at rest       124
Innocent tastes of pomegranates       126
The air's accounts       129
Pasting cartoons on daily objects       139
Bodies as nuts and/or grape clusters       144
Consequences of inhaling too little color       155
Boiling for tea and time       163
Shattering hot and/or cold things, both imaginary and real       167
Late night races       171
Conclusion: weight in grams of novelty, relaxation, sugars, and irritation      174

Untying

I want a pair of loud and sour shoulder blades

because I've been dressed in

quivering bones for long,

and people and light are exhaling

their crawling, ivy breath into my fingers.

I want to         claw the air so that it smells of ripe nails.

I want a pair of loud and sour shoulder blades

because in England I sucked on black,

my breath warm but cracked with openings.

I want to step on my seaweed blood,

and for you to, too. It would be

so nice

to have a thumping laugh

that stuffs our chests and taps at our feet.

That pair of caper eyes made me know

I want a pair of loud and sour blades.

I want to be spread so that I am

all thin inside and feel around me

so thick, padded on the edges of my body

like laying in a bed of pear-flushed grass.

I want a pair of loud and sour shoulder blades

because in Portugal my breaths sank

in handfuls down invisible throats.

I want to unzip the soil under and in me,

beneath this sliver of lettuce sky

and move like the moon as it curves into itself.

I want a pair of loud and sour shoulder blades

because in Brazil I tossed my bundled breaths

and chased after them.

Mixed, mossy insides marinating over years,

           I want a pair of loud and sour shoulder blades.

Inside you can find my sifted voices, so I need

           I want a pair of loud and sour shoulder blades

because there are shadows clotting my eyes,

turning them to sleeping sage.

because I want to           fall

into

my breaths.

Reclining Figure II, Frank Auerbach


Crusts

I fear my flesh because
thick words
pulsate in me, out of me,
choke the air with their self-important limbs
and breed thin peaches for voices.

I starve my body,
leave it soaking in its skin,

skin that wraps,
not reaching in
between- where roots soften and wither
into drizzling yellows-

skin that puts streams to sleep,
so that colors and joints shut silent.
skin that does not stretch past our stitched vision,
that never breaks from the bone.

It crumbles, capturing shadows into its pores.

But, when I
inhale down the roasted brown of my eyes
and hum with my sleeping thighs,
our breaths reassure me,
as they wrap me in their tender meat
and spill at my dense corners,
that I
am not carved.