This poem is about the game I would play as a girl where I would lie on the shore and let the ocean wash over me and let it get in my nose and in my eyes and in my mouth and stay very still and not move except for when the waves pulled me
in one direction or the other. The game
was called letting the ocean do what it wants
to me. There’s an island made of salt
where baby goats keep getting kidnapped, swapped for changelings with stick eyes, chalk hair, coal teeth. Midnight, one of four, was left alone by her goat-mother, who did not have the milk to feed her. She was taken
by a giant, whose elbow she nibbled on, playing
and hoping. Giant, did it feel good, pretending
to have what she needed? Can you turn your single red eye
onto your mistake? Obsessed, the giant pawed at little Midnight like a symbol. Obsessed, a sick girl in a sick house pawed at piles of sick cats trying not to die and dying. To love a thing so much you ruin it. To hoard the cats with their fog-heavy, dew-crusted eyes. Imagine the mess. Imagine
the shame. A woman who was once a girl chopped
the red limbs of seventeen rabbits, plus the liver
of one dead cat, and pushed them in then out
of her, making them each hers. This was seen as her whorish and ignorant hoax, yet she carried the egest in her body for weeks, beared it forth and chewed ice, felt the pain of it like sharp light. Weeks before, the woman had a miscarriage upon her excitement over seeing
a rabbit. Obsessed, she could not love it, and so turned it
into meat, into a tool to end her suffering, to transform
what had happened. Symbol-sick, a girl in girl heaven
kissed a girl on a zebra-print couch, reanimating herself into a person. The girls pressed their mouths to each other’s necks, velvet scrunchies pulling back their hair. One began to tell a story: Once there was a man so obsessed
with a girl that he [ ] her without asking,
[ ] her while she was crying, [ ] her
unceremoniously with not enough heart
and a slightly embarrassing lack of aplomb, [ ] her while knowing she was too gone to remember, [ ] her half-wanting to kill her, killed her half-wanting to [ ] her, licked her after in the lamp-light and this is how
he would absolve himself, how
he would remember it: gentle,
like a favor. The dead girl asked
the dead girl to tell her something nicer, but she could not recall any more stories, only prayers, and so they wrapped their hands in pearl beads and married their mouths to the dark of the room. All of the girls in the dark began to laugh because they knew they would be loved
wrongly and loved to death every
single time and the girls knew
they would die laughing at the absurdity
of still having to beg to be believed. When the moon heard this story, it took its seat in the telepathic mind-field of the ocean and the grasses of the mind-field were long and understanding and the girls were in the mind-field causing energetic jolts
in the minds of those who wanted desperately
to be absolved, and the girls did not really feel
like absolving, and the moon said I miss you
and the ocean said I miss you and the moon said I miss you and the ocean said I miss you and the girls said, is this really the end of the play? and the curtains so sadly began to draw themselves together. They were so sheer you could still make out the happenings
behind them. Behind them, the moon
and the ocean were no longer acting
and the moon rolled like a ball in the ocean
like a child and the girls laughed and placed their hands over their faces and peered through their fingers and felt shy, and they too wanted to roll like children, like a light on in a mud room that is all yours, with no entering,
like a mud floor in a mud house with a mud
door that you built yourself, like prayers that multiply
into stories, like real love, soft with no direction, pulled in by a girl.
