Dog Days
A Poetry Collection
all lesbians go to heaven it’s when your heart beats twice, and your eyes shake open to find the ceiling still above you—but ahead is a long black tunnel, with a breeze and little white light and it's asking you in; or when it’s dog days and no matter how much you shower, the layer of heatsweatgermdirtfilm from the world that is stuck on your skin will not wash off—but mostly, it's when i pick my clothes and i wear my shoes and i braid my hair and i kiss my lips and i roll my eyes and i get up and i walk…christ!
transplant city there’s one in every city with steel shrines, a hill in the park where you with a long straight relationship, you with a beginning and end to the silver city go to sit and look. they gravitate to them like the ducks and the couples on dates do to the hills on which they sit and look across to or down at the city they’ve come and conquered. as you stare into the mirage you’ll feel that same didactic feeling i had my own transplant hill. in the boston common, it sat west facing newbury street and the gardens, and i could see the prudential sign. there were streets with bricks older than me, two trader joe’s, a statue commemorating someone who owned slaves, multiple investment banks, and a flagship dicks sporting goods store all in the five mile radius that lie in front of me. on cooler cloudy days when i could be alone, on freakishly warm days with strangers, on spring evening to watch the sunsent, my chest was warm but my limbs cold and it almost was enough and it was then i was supposed to understand then how it was going to make me happy.
my mom doesn’t want me to tell you this story because it makes us look bad because when i saw it i screamed—and immdediately i looked for the anchor, the thing that weighs me down to this earth and when i didn’t find you i ran to the sun and her stars and hoped her grace might fix it, and when she didn’t—or—couldn't handle it on her own she looked for you too, and instead found your shadows; one taller than the other, one braver than the other, and together they create a shape like yours, a movement like yours. and when we killed it without you, we cleaned up afterwards, and while we tidied we even looked for you in all the places you told us to but you weren't there. i shake my fists and i breathe deep—fast in slow out—i disassemble you in my mind, practicing for the day i can wring it out of you with my hands.
praxis
i'm dying. Yes I am, slowly, every second of everyday.
i'm falling, hard and fast and I'm spinning, quick and slow
i'm leaping, across to a ledge that I can't see, clouded in a shroud of smoke.
'we are not yet close enough to heaven' said the poem
in the cathedral, made of limestone and built by so many pairs of hands,
as it towered over me in it's monstrosity and held me in its song.
'queerness is not yet here,' said the scholar,
in the paper written decades ago, but i only read three years ago
in the textbook full of scholars i hadn't touched since freshman year of college.
i'm dying and i can't make up my mind about whether i like it or not.
but the paper says to keep going towards the horizon
and the poem says the let the opening be where the light comes in
and i say: 'sometimes i let the advil sit on my tongue a moment to taste the sweetness.' 