A woman builds a house out of birds’ cries and cries
all the time within it. The man she had wanted says,

“I am looking for a woman who is crying, but can’t
tell if anyone is crying inside that house’s outer

crying.” So she builds another house; this time, tears
for bricks, and cries as loud as she can within it.

Still he can’t hear her because the house’s
rectangular tears are too dazzlingly beautiful

to hear within. At this point, they both should be
laughing. The ceiling is neither of their mouths,

but full of teeth. The sky above: a chicken,
fresh out of a fake swamp, opening its eyes

and flashing its resplendent wings.

**

They called this coincidence
“summer” and continued
on their merry way.

She, like a man,
invisible when
opening a checkbook.

He, like a woman,
invisible when taking
off his clothes.

They both envied
text, only invisible
when someone

would claim it was
“poetry” like
a photograph,

only invisible
when said to be
"fact."

**

All walls lie.

Say somewhere an ocean is empty of leaves.

Say somewhere our dance is inside the roof’s burnt-down need.

The red shoe calls out to be danced in.

The potato calls out to be held like a doll.

The house calls out to be as empty as poetry

And say, yes, ma’am, I am empty as poetry.”

And say, “yes, sir, I am the soft spot on the back of a scar.”

Somewhere a harpsichord is weeping.

Somewhere someone can hear a harpsichord weeping.

Somewhere someone can hear a harpsichord weeping and tell us what
          the weeping is for.

A man holds a stethoscope to a woman’s closed mouth.

A man holds a tongue out to another man’s car.

This is just stereotype.

Those ideas:

a woman a woman a woman a woman a woman a man.

**

“Let’s say all poems are a Band-Aid on the word.
Let’s say a house is a poem that doesn’t know it

once died. Then to be a woman is exactly like being
a man, but to be a man is unlike anything a woman

might possibly be.”

This was the song of the house on the brink of the room’s
smallest eye hat cursed two belted felt smile, two knocked up
ideas, a prickly tremble inside a self made of nothing but noise,
while room temperature barbecue butterfly shenanigans drip.

To tell her story, you must know when
to put courage in a matchbox and conceal

it in a loaf of bread. You must learn how
a message betokened deliverance

when courage is simply a word someone
wrote on a slip of paper and the sweet

scent of bread could no longer sustain you.
You must grasp your other hand with what

grit remains, growing and unyielding.
To tell her story, you must walk in her shoes.

If forced out of your leased farmland,
don’t forget to bring rice if you can pack

only what you can carry. And if
your mother did not speak inside the bus

with the windows covered with brown paper
on the way to the barracks, it was only

because she was praying that you would not be
housed in the horse stall with the manure

whitewashed over. And if you were, she was
deciding what to do about the smell.

To tell her story, you must remember
the landscape from behind barbed

wire fences. You must gaze at your body
and know its history, look beneath

the tender, ridged scars and see the bone
protruding out of your right arm

and hole the size of a football
on your right thigh, wondering how

the lights never went out. You must
look at the image of your grandmother

with the weight of rammed earth against
what you survived. To tell her story,

you must say a prayer, not of sorrow,
but of grace. You must loosen the earth,

pick daffodils to the base of the stem,
remember your roots and ordinary days,

and the grit under your fingernails,
the way your grandmother taught you.