god of the gaps

all night i hear those
bugs in my bathroom,
their knifecut drone
digging bites into the drywall,
so that when i wake up
the next morning
i’ll find the sink scurried
away to the opposite side.

invisible architecture,
we say,
the world now
an inscrutable stranger.

outside, there are more planes
than any other kind of star--
the black night
a white screen,
a broken field to dust off
our shoe dirt.
even those grooves and slants
are make-believe.
recently,
i've started to mistake
the windows for cliffs,
their sleek frames for the line
on the horizon,
as if the world had amputated itself
on the sill.

you know,
we tread this unexplainable
darkness,
fingertips bandaged and
unseeing;
we have but a voice to believe
other voices
exist.
and so my hands are nothing but
hands
that sleep at the bend of
my thigh,
idle around
my clavicle,
press over the bones of
my ankles,
tug at the tips of
my ears.

on new years,
my family doesn’t
pronounce me a model
when we speak on the phone.
when they look at my hair, they want
to gauge how much
time and effort
i poured into it.

you know, these are hands
that cradle
strands like gastropod shells,
slip water down in sprays.
they keep still as they wait,
listen to my head
when it whines from
the wet strain.
these are hands that fold
laundry and lettuce,
shred lip skin like paper,
render angels
askew.

mine is a garden,
or so i hope,
tended to in fractures,
long faults sliced
open by
tiny incisions of needle
that will soon sew them
back up.
or so i hope.

i hope to live in these chasms;
to have sighing fingertips;
to name the exact stitches
that have closed these slits.
to recognize the left rear
of my head
by texture
and my bad poems
by their
hopeless
splendor.

i tire of seamless
specters.
i miss when you could
still see
the skeleton.

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