Ode to My Neighbors

You’ve been a single step in the morning’s wine blue,

a mechanical howl from a faucet, sizzle

of iron skillet and heat-hungry pans. The first time

I heard your muffled grunts through the walls

my chest thumped like a warren of rabbits,

my fingers gripped across the bed’s bare edge

and then your moan, like silk pulled from the magician’s

throat, wrapped its gauzy fingers around my leaping

lungs to remind me humans make love sounds too,

so this the first of many lessons you’ve taught me,

and the second, that I’m too fond of illusions

of being alone, that I’ve taken for granted

the unbroken boundary of these sweet cream walls,

assumed that a foot of asbestos and drywall

might swallow every clamor and cum—

when I realized you were having sex, I fumbled

for my cell phone, searched Spotify for songs to drown

your lust-rattles clacking my walls, then stopped

remembered my own bold cries shored up in silence:

arguments with my partner, late-night movie jags

until the screen glowed with the spun-gold sun,

or the time I threw up a shrimp wrap, the tail hooked

my throat’s soft meat until I barked like a strangled

seal, you bore those sounds with saintly patience,

and you’re the only neighbors to never use your blinds—

many nights, on the way to the dumpster or the car,

I’ve glanced up at the light warmed in your rooms

revered your headboard, your golden lamps, slender view

of your love-blued neck sauntered from room to room.

I’ve cried in need of love before.

The night after the night in blazing Charlottesville—

two days of hateful faces on my feed, voices

licked from the news reel like a vengeful flame

I was afraid but out of toilet paper, so I drove to Walmart

haunted by figments of hands on a torch’s neck.

I cried before I ever left the lot.

I would’ve welcomed any display of love then.

Would’ve lined up in the produce aisle to watch you

bareback on the bananas, doggy on the dates,

would’ve cradled your love cries like a newborn,

would’ve nursed its miracle. Show me sweet neighbors

what it means to love loud enough for everyone,

cup the chalice of your hips, vine that ooh, baby

praise across the grapes again, the produce displays

sway in harmony like a church choir—

pious plums, tomatoes unbridled and blushing,

kiwis, who turn their one emerald eye in witness,

their seeds twinkling hallelujahs in jade.

The Last Time You Are Close to Your Body

you are at the table where family dinners have to happen. Your stepmother is telling you, again, that you’re disgusting. This time, because she caught you scrubbing panties in the bathroom, like your aunt taught you when you were too poor for hygiene. Your father, who is past this past already, is not at the table and wouldn’t be because this isn’t family dinner. She is listing all the reasons you disgust her. You are surprised she doesn’t mention your mother. She mentions your mother when she wants to hurt you most; she is never without your mother on her tongue. Your mother is barbed wire hurting you both. You want to ask which part of this is wrong, but you already know it is you. It is why, when you wash your purple-printed panties in the sink, you hope the steam will swallow the mirror whole. You remember your mother in a ratty blue bathrobe, before your father was synonymous with money. Your stepmother would never wear that bathrobe, would never touch anything that feels like poverty on the palms.

fat girl is Obsessed with Jellyfish

because, as a girl, her mother took her to Myrtle Beach

in November, too cold to bloom

her girlhood in the sun or clench a happy clam

from its cradle of foam—instead, the two of them

wormed their toes through a half-mile of coast,

plucked shells from the surf, chucked sand into the breaks

between waves, and there, beside a fistful of feldspar

peppered into dirt, a jellyfish’s rainbowed remains—

luminescent dew, a gelatinous porkbelly of blues

smoother than the moon’s bone edge, wider

than the ocean’s open mouth—how to resist being swallowed

by tentacles, the shore crowned with gems of near-dead

cells, nematocysts barbed to protect, even, their rot.

How could fat girl resist the hunger of becoming

a woman whose hips fan like bells, whose stretch marks

flood their canals, whose vortices of stingers

slipper in cyclones around her neck like pearls?