I want to ask someone, someone I don’t know

I don’t know where this person would be, or who

I want to ask them when we stopped knowing

was there a minute a specific minute          when blood got freaky

                                                                              when I felt good and did not need to proclaim it

is this a question for God for the banks for (who knows) (I don’t)

Mom says Dad couldn’t be in the delivery room with her

Some men just can’t honey, Mom says she just wants me to be safe

 

And like, on the other hand people always feel like this, felt

Yesterday giving blood I cried over all the terrible boxes I didn’t have to check

Have you been in contact with animals in foreign countries do you have skin grafts

                                                                                 who cut into your body who slicked it

The slick the slice sluuuush shhh when my friends were when I was eight Mom said

I want the first dead body to be someone you don’t know, and she took me in the morgue

Take your daughter to work day he was meat, long and flat and God was away

 

God wasn’t there, I can know this and also I can wonder if I even believe at all

I believe in lighting candles when I’m afraid: is this fear, and not “is this normal”

but does everyone feel it because if so: not only why haven’t we fixed it but why why

do we just go on, hats over our ears against the cold (if we have hats) (if ears)

 

The last time I couldn’t breathe I couldn’t breathe, this is a fact and if we rest on it

The story suffers / I took off my hat and my sweatshirt and I took an orange

I walked outside I felt the metal in my ears go cold my skin turned red and blue

My throat like meat like a weak tube connecting thought to sex

I walked outside and I ate the orange naked as a centaur (I guess centaurs

are always naked, but they have half-body-fur anyway you know what I mean)

 

I ate the orange I ate the orange I looked at my hand and thought: here we go again