My name is a form. My name is my father’s. THE STATE files our name.

"THE DEFENDANT MUST RECEIVE A COPY OF THIS FORM," & "VICTIM IMPACT STATEMENT"

I’m a poet, which is to say "which is to say" / often. To search for new language in old suits

Incomcordable & On Survivng

To feel like I’m siphoning myself to you / to feel the insurmountable agony of being / witnessed fully

Don't look at me I love you

[to create a new body]--[a kind of staving]--[to remain familiar] / [to create a new body]--[to mourn a new reality] 

I Want to Burn the Years

and outside Budget Liquor I see a squirrel cuddling a limb against its tiny open stomach, breathing slowly inside a cardboard Mode

Self-help book says I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be

I swear there’s a body in the lake. Bobbing. Somewhere. I’ve gone to the pier once a week every week for years, trying to find it again.

Therapy

Let me go is what I mean when I say nothing, Let me go is what I mean when I say Let me go, not the opposite, not another image of you letting go, not letting go and coming back with more hands

THE ALTERNATE UNIVERSE IN WHICH I HAVE ASKED YOU TO LEAVE ME AND YOU DO HAS BLOWN UP IN SPACE AND I CANNOT FIND IT

"all i know is unabashed spilling bellybutton light / I HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY i scream alone in my room / & the beams begin to snake & spin. i’m watching a sun / form." 


2 Poems

"we’ll talk of lifetimes / we’ve collected; i’ll spill my obsession with floriography / & you’ll speak of victorians who spoke in flowers."

A bouquet of yellow acacia

"my mythos comes to me / in disarray was left hopping in a pool filter / the chlorine staining narrative, bleach cleaned / and buoyant with pruney fingers was rescued by coming / to"

3 Poems

"& fuck me like zombies are knocking down / our door. Devour us, we say. We’re ready / for the unwell(come). I want everything with you / to feel like the sky is rushing toward / us."

When I Say I Finally Want to Have Sex I Mean I Want You to Fuck Me Like It’s the Apocalypse

"we go where the animals have gone and continue to go. the warm wet soil welcomes our hoofless appendages. learn we travel, not by instinct, by observation and trust of our star-sought senses."

outside my body is an ecosystem of smiles

"bird watching is a form of suicide prevention. my body is a discovered science experiment, an undertested variable. field notes: i react negatively to touch now. i am not magnetic."

If A took everything

"we C A N N O T  H E A R  T H E M we are not meant to. A group of flowers die together and nobody will mourn them T H R O W  T H E M  O U T because they are only flowers"

my obituary

"and when i’m left unsaid and undone we’ll piece our rice-paper wings together again"

my room and other wombs (excerpt)

"if there was a heartless / cut, a pomegranate-gutting examination of / what released me to the iridescent sharks know / (they are omnivores & not truly sharks. know / that we were both endangered)"


“to be an act”

"no man I am X / human but not man / not hu I am a hue / not a son of a man / a sun of sunsets"


C. Heyne

Selected work