Rube Goldberg Machine

(A) is raised to the mouth, pulling (B) and thereby jerking (C), which throws (D) past (E). (E) jumps
after (D) and (F) tilts, upsetting (G) into (H). Extra weight in (H) pulls (I), which opens and ignites
(J), setting off (K), which causes (L) to cut (M), allowing (N) with attached (O) to swing back and
forth. 

(A)
The desert surrounds me
when I walk into a curio shop
and encounter a live rattlesnake 
pale in a glass case with raw 
forms of semi-precious stones.  

(B)  
In a rare travel photo, you stand 
before the Grand Canyon and 
shrug. It’s not the ominous maw 
I remember in a pre-dawn fog, 
but a canyon in glory, fissuring 
the midday light.

(C)
Birds suspended on strings
constellate a cavernous space
that feels subterranean but isn’t.
They peregrine along a winding
series of staircases and carpeted 
ramps. By existing, the birds 
expand a room into a world.

 
(D)
The fortune teller tells me
I’m hard to understand
because I like to be alone 
and I don’t trust other people.
She says it’s clear I desire
to destroy things but afterwards
I’m sorry. I sometimes wonder
if it’s possible you’re still
where I left you hiding 
your hands inside your sleeves.

(E)
My lucky number is 7. I must keep
my eyes open. I’m not certain
if stories you told me are true
or only cruel. Did that woman
really ask you to finger her in 
a restaurant? Did your friend’s wife
come to your apartment and beg
you to double her over? Do you
push away anyone who loves you
or just most people who love you?
 

(F)
Spooky dolls line the walls and turn
on carousels, a constant presence
on the long dim journey through
the House on the Rock. I sense
the people the dolls belonged to
staring at me through their
glossed eyes. A doll’s proximity 
to the human body makes it 
more unsettling than the gun
cabinets and rows of knives.
 

(G)
My husband watches too much 
YouTube and tells me about a woman, 
a famous ceramicist, Mary Borgstrom,
who was also a hoarder. The man who 
bought Mary’s home worked 12-hour days 
for 12 days and took 9 tons of garbage 
from the house. Among old newspapers, 
the man found several priceless vessels
the ceramicist had shaped with her hands. 
In an interview Mary tells the man, 
“I did what I had to do, 
and that was it.”
 

(H)
In 2004, on the way to Coachella 
to see Radiohead and Pixies and 
The Cure and Sparta and Beck 
and The Flaming Lips and Q and not 
U but mostly Radiohead, my friends 
and I stop at the Petrified Forest 
National Park. When I say “my
friends” what I really mean is “my
ex-boyfriend and my husband 
and his ex-girlfriend.” When we 
get out of the car, I expect a 
rainbow forest because that’s what 
the sign says, but we find only 
dull rock logs the guidebook calls 
“colorful.” Years later, I press 
polished petrified wood against
my palm and close my eyes 
to help me remember that 
I have enough. There is enough.  

(I)
The air smells like fire,
and smoke from where you live
hazes the sun until it’s carmine. 
Ash gets in your hair. Your candor 
when documenting a disaster 
endears you to me. I’m entirely sure 
my life unfolds across time and space, 
but I’m not sure how to hold
all this time and space. At its core,
this poem is about containing
and about being contained.
 

(J)
I drop a coin in the slot
and watch the skeletons 
creep. A door opens to 
bones. Bones rattle inside
a clock. Bones shiver 
beneath blankets. Curtains
drape bones. It sounds macabre, 
but it’s oddly joyful.
 

(K)
The internet won’t reveal you
or reveals only superficial parts 
of how you might or might not be.
Is this you doing street magic?
Is this you looking into a stranger’s eyes
until they unravel? Is this you
shuffling away on the sidewalk?
What can’t hide you is your 
handwriting, immediate and 
familiar. The internet can’t thread 
a narrative because it’s coreless.

(L)
I offer you my sheets,
but you don’t want them.
You offer me your stuffed heart,
but I don’t want it. You were
the only person who offered me
coffee when I drank too much.
I count you among the many
who have sung me to sleep. 
When I address “you” in this poem 
and myriad others, I’m conflating 
at least 3 people, one of whom 
I haven’t met yet.
 

(M)
I think if I could go back
to the beginning, everything 
would start again like it’s been 
waiting just for me. But after 
you’ve walked through
the House on the Rock,
you don’t want to go back
and start again.
 

(N)
I see something miraculous. 
Somewhere in Wisconsin, 
a tree grows inside 
a roofless silo. Imagine 
what it is to be surrounded 
but, simultaneously,
to be sort of free.
 

(O)
The thing about disappearing
is when you curl around yourself
you’re supposed to breathe in.
I hope you understand that
I’m sorry I can’t say goodbye right
with all these jewels in my mouth.

Firework

    Gather words, my friend, but no one will ever succeed in describing fire exhaustively.  
-Werner Herzog, Conquest of the Useless

Once you wrote me a short letter
on a scrap of paper about why people
who write about the ocean
write about the ocean. The words were out
of order on purpose like a shared dream.  
I folded it and ate it,
and the bone around my eyes exploded outward 
like a firework. You know, light. 
I try to describe it in fractions in an overgrown sonnet:

The light oil burns. The light a field coruscates. Los Angeles’ 
light in the night. The light of Venus in the night sky. Lights on 
the Autobahn at night. TV light washing over faces. Orbiting 
light of a satellite. Light reflecting off Henry Kissenger’s glasses. 
Light filtered through gauze. Light in a dove’s wings. Vigil lights. 
The light coal burns. Light reflecting off a casket. Light caught 
in sap. Light caught in the trees. Roseate light. Chartreuse light. 
Softened light. Light in its aching glory. Plains light. Light caught 
in a stem. The light chemicals burn. Light on a lake. Light on oars.
Jade light. Ginger light. Light surge. The rogue zigzag of lightning.
Light rolling through a blackout. Lilac light. Innate light. Light
preceding a premonition. Light reflecting off mylar. The light
gasoline burns. Traffic light. Ferris Wheel light. Crystalline light
of snow. Light through the windows of homes. The light of fire.

What if we patch the light together
in public in the street or on the Metro?
What if the pieces won’t stop
falling from the sky like bits of torn paper?
What if we could project light instead of eating it?  
You’re a burning asteroid among ordinary rocks,
by which I mean other people. How am I supposed to
douse a fire like that? What if we only get
one life and it’s full of this inexhaustible

heart-rending, photosynthesizing, apple-halving, threshold-
glancing, bloodletting, brace-bending, dream-slipping, skin-
glinting, paper-slitting, cell-blanking, ache-tricking, bone-folding,
vessel-carving, neuron-blighting, sight-wasting, time-haunting light?

The morning sky is filled with smoke
like last night I went in and set the 
city on fire. You held me in my sleep again,
and now I’ll carry you like a match all day. 
I keep moving forward except the parts of me
that don’t. Do you remember me in your sleep? 
In the air the trees are nerve endings. I’m looking 
for a continuous place to stand, but the smoke 
confounds the landscape. We could be anywhere: 

bent in like the sea. In the ruins of a space station. In a resurrected 
post office. In a shared forest singularity. In a rectilinear anarcho-
scholastic lean-to. In an ambivalent minefield. In white balance. In
Arkansas, but why? In a misplaced organ bin. In a text with no body.

You send a box to my doorstep. It’s full
of crumpled paper with people’s faces
and biographies printed all over it. Maybe I feel
the topography of every fold
asking for a sign. Maybe I search every face
for a resemblance. Maybe you’ve circled some
words into code. The same paper
that shifted between your fingers
rests between mine. Maybe it’s enough.
Maybe it’s all there is.