Though I cannot lavish praise on stamina
            alone, I must acknowledge a femme

            fortitude. Last night, I tell myself,
a misstep at battery’s expense

so as to never consider the sentience
of a pleasure machine.

How her trembling must have lullabied
                   my drunk tongue the intricacies

                   of sexual decorum even in sleep,
how she may have throbbed

all night beside me, anticipating her
own reciprocal and tender invasion.

when I hemorrhage against design it ain’t incognito. the neighbors walk their dogs past me. that’s me smoking in the alley, letting roses from my wrists. petal to puddle, a misgendering of matter. these hooves unhinge themselves as tiny meteors to cudgel dusk. I redress the splintering woodwork notched to my likeness, venial beneath the pomme and lilac cornucopic delight. to partake in a gender, to do so as a participant, and to fashion one’s self a living process of gender is like casting a net of postures, adornment objects, and grooming techniques into a future tense. where have I gone, and who have I built to take my place?
 

I want the sweat of boyhood
its ease and virtue on my neck 
I want my nature known
because I am the softest
I can ever be in this moment
when I don’t rough my mutt
hands on their throats 
for making terrible light of
the second-hand the sub
-human my survival 
instead I talk to grass
but a sapling myself
I am made everyday like a bed
like a person makes another
and nothing ever asks to be made

A friend asks, “What are you waiting for?

The straw that breaks the camel’s back?”

Maybe I am the straw.

Maybe I am hay. I made a list of rhyming words:

Bray, flay, array.

They all seemed to relate to farms, decaying things,

gray days, dismay.

I am recently reckless about making a display

of my unhappiness. Perhaps you may survey it.

Perhaps I may stray from it, go to the wrong home

by accident and say, “Oh! Here already?”

You know I’m fraying and just watch it.

You don’t even try to braid me together.

We refuse death by spells.

We refuse death by attack.

We refuse death by falling,

and we refuse death in depressions.

We refuse the spirits that attempt oppression,

and we refuse the spirits that attempt possession.

We refuse humans who call themselves gods,

who try to graft hellfire onto our bodies,

and raise columns of fire in our yards.

We are looking for better myths.

I want us to get off before this screen sleeps.

I want to make a video

and play it on a loop,

let it ruin someone’s dinner.

I want to tell you 

I had a nightmare about Oscar Grant’s murder

before it happened.

I want you to believe me

and turn me over and over.

Say: This hole? This one?

Cover them all. 

Fill my mouth so I stop tasting blood.

The formatting of this excerpt differs from the

original poem.

but we are still at sea     we climbed into the rocking

boat again     the things that we could not afford

to remember in the vernacular      

                                                                       sun

                                                            sinking backwards into the world’s

                                                            light industry    Eros in idle hands

The moon glowed blue through the tears in the clouds

The moon glows blue like Orphesus’ severed head

The tundra swans bark like dogs in the night

Or dogs bark like tundra swans

I have lost again the fluidity of tears

I am once more the child filled with unformulated words

A loony-tune torn apart by the trees

I wrestled with an abstract geometry—what

                                                          is an angel?—for a name

to stitch to the breast of my fatigues, to stick to my forehead’s

opaque tar, wrestled for the press of its celestial digits into

                                                 the indistinct, featureless moon

                                                          of my skull.

If there is no one to name you,

                        name yourself, says the Listening Machine.

We unyoke owl pellets from marrow

in desert meadow. His mouth a pigeon eye,

a torch, a womb turned flower. He, still a boy

dug from cactus skull, undresses into bark

beetles. He unlearns how to hold a gist

with my hand.

This beer turns into another

            before a fist and a fist and another fist

to the face pale & blue

they held each other the night before

            before pushing away

boys only hold boys

            like bottles
 

t’óó łichíí                naked or all red

hastįįh łichíi’go     man naked, man all  red

łichíí’go                   I am naked, I am all red

shida’ łichíí’go       my uncle naked, my uncle all red

shínaaí łichíí’go     my brother naked, my brother all red