At school my brother whipped language

like a horse. He wrote

the history of heaven.

He never drank the teachers’ blood.

His militant beard grew black teeth.

My brother walked in puddles. He called the post

office heaven.

Nobody has the right to destroy stones.

Stones made the cathedral. Doors

move from north to east. Each one is a

vampire. Each is a glass of orange juice. Honey

comes from the soil like stones. My

name is hair and I flutter between poppies.

I am wires. My sister is wires. Together we

soak up the hot tears of heaven. Tomorrow I

will become an almond. I will become a horse.

Nobody will destroy me or drive silver spurs

into my flanks. My blood contains the image

of mountains. I hold a bundle of chickens

beneath my tongue and drink them like wine. I

suck on stones. Women are mountains. My sister

whispers to flower petals like eyelids. Her

bullets pass like stones through the skin of

deer. Tomorrow I will sizzle and burn.

The goats moan

like chatterboxes.

Their aura died.

They trampled

arteries that brought

blood to the

spleen. Now Hamlet

will die twice. His

heaven is bullets

and poison. Hamlet

killed a hundred

sisters and bared

his chest before

God. Now the goats

have twisted tongues

like snakes. They

want you to balance

along the white

cliffs. They want you

to drop.

My second sister lived inside a

brushfire. She slept among owls and filled

their mouths with gauze.

She balanced ice blocks on her

knuckles.

Suns rose through a covered bridge

and graced the pigeons of Mississippi.

Behind her, buoys caressed the far shore.

Like an ocean on fire …

like a thousand little fingers …

kisses arranged on lines in the sand …

she blindfolded sparrows and

slipped them past the godless river.

She saw strangers in her bathtub.

She invented tentative shades of blue.

The colors shrank inward

they became ingrown

and ripped out the single eye

of our blind world.