Nothing’s hanging out going to Whole Foods

You can’t imagine it: the smell drying onto cardboard & into an old
Red wheelbarrow full of stomachs heavier & whiter than the moon. They do not
Do that where you are from. Where you are from, a velvet rope runs the circumference
Of death & you stood in line with a ticket just to touch it. Your mother told the school
You had the flu. Where you are from, we longed to have each other’s orgasms, & we ate
Pineapple from Whole Foods under a sky fractured by crabapple blossoms. Where you are from,
There is a guy golfing into a bedsheet hanging in the garage. He is your father. In the dream, my
Father puts a tie on me & ties it even though neither of us has ever worn a tie in my life.
I make a shitty person but I would have been an amazing tree,
Filling these astringent hours before dark with a dozen spotted towhees in my branches
Above the snow in the backyard which is unmoving & deep as this new shadow
Cupping my face. It’s not that I want to feel nothing, I want to do nothing
But feel. They discontinued Chiclets in 2016 & I didn’t even notice
Them disappearing from around Our Lady of Guadalupe, like shakers of baby teeth,
Different colored squares that tasted identical: citrus for an instant & then
Nothing. Chops are $9 a pound & most of it is bone. There was a two-horned ram who split my
Hand slamming through the catch gate I held closed, not suspecting the herd
Could release an individual, one who wanted to live desperately, the way I did.