There was nothing he couldn’t do. He balanced
a pencil on the tip of his nose, and the classroom
burst with applause. He ordered a drone strike
on the house of the teenager who’d ruled him
too short to ride the local rollercoaster. Now, now,
‍said his father as he backed out of the boy’s room.
The boy sharpened a screwdriver on a rock
and walked around the old town square with it
glinting in his fist. The world was all bulging tires
and soft throats. He could recite the alphabet
in four languages. He knew all the state capitals,
and he’d chosen what the new capitals would be
after the war was over. He stayed out past his curfew,
walking under the fuzzy glow of the subdivision
streetlights. The night unrolled itself for him
like a wet tongue. When he came to a house
he liked, he walked inside. I want to play
with your dog, he said to the people living there.
We don’t have a dog, they said, and he took out
his screwdriver. No one could do anything
about him. Why would they? Everyone loved him.
He’d made it illegal not to love him.

I’ve resolved to write
only good news
today. The house
burned, but no one
died. A man’s chatbot
convinced him
he was the messiah,
but luckily
he didn’t own
any guns. I lay
on my back,
and someone
set a burning coal
on my chest,
and it sank into me
as it burned,
but then I woke,
and it was only
ants, biting me.
Even the dictator
who slips away
to his bunker
will, one day,
die, drooling,
urine soaked,
his hand
grasping
at something
no one can see.
To live forever
the evil wizard
hid his death
inside a needle
inside an egg
inside a duck
inside a rabbit
on an island,
but the rising sea
washed the island
away, and the wizard
died anyway.
The newspapers
printed only lies,
but no one
reads anymore.
Every day, I hope
for a death,
and when I post
“Today might
be the day”
you all know
I’m speaking
about death,
and whose,
and isn’t that
a kind of miracle?
The bird
was dead,
but the cat
was fat and happy.
For two weeks
I was happy
enough I didn’t
want to write
this poem.

The king woke
drenched in sweat.
He’d forgotten
to sign the latest orders
of execution—
the dissidents
would spend one more day
with their heads
attached. That’s how it goes,
‍whispered the cricket
into the ear
of the orphan
as she slept on a pile
of dirty rags. Why drink
and dance the reel
when you can break
your fingers
in the cotton mill?
‍I was eating soup
in a restaurant.
A procession carried in
a coffin and set it
on the floor. It was so
small. The mourners
opened the lid, but I
wouldn’t look. I stood
and spilled my bowl
down my pants. Help,
‍I cried out, there’s soup
in my fly! The mourners
filled the coffin with
laughter, then sealed it
shut. I swear that’s the truth.
Meanwhile, the dissidents
in their prison cell gave
all their bread to a cat
living in the alley
below their window.
On the cat’s back
was an open wound
in the shape
of a comet. The wound
never healed, just got bigger
and bigger, no matter
how much bread the dissidents
dropped from their window.
Somehow, the cat kept
opening her eyes every
morning. She never cried out,
even in the rain.
And it rained every night.

For centuries I was small and gray as the peel
of a mouse. I sucked ice to stay warm, washed
my clothes in streams as cold as a tsar’s heart.
Imagine my surprise, then, at this swamp, so hot
the gutters burped roaches with every rain,
and storms swept down like pogroms.
When the whole neighborhood lost power,
I wrapped myself in the hurricane’s itchy wool
and walked to the local gas station mini mart.
I watched a fistfight break out over milk, a woman
weeping by her stalled car. They couldn’t see
the mud on their feet, but I had known that mud
for a thousand years. It never comes off. I walked
home. The sky was a broken window. That’s when
I found him, the baby, toddling in the roadside ditch,
a little toupee of mosquitos on his bald head.
I tucked him in my mouth for safekeeping. He didn’t
cry. Later, when I spit him out on my kitchen table,
he was asleep. I petted him with my mouse claws.
I tried to clean his feet, but the dirt wouldn’t
come off, so I dressed him in socks and an old shirt.
On the news, the king was cutting the ribbon
at the newest mass grave. That could be you someday,
‍I said to the baby, pinching his bug-bit cheek.
He looked up at me then, and grabbed my hand
so hard my finger broke. Was it love I felt?

I lived inside the receiver of the last payphone in the city,
and sometimes at night someone would pick me up
and cradle me to their mouth as they whispered urgent
news to someone dear to them. Or they wept. Or threatened.
I don’t remember now. I know I wanted somewhere spacious,
so I moved into the top floor of the high-rise abandoned
before it could be finished. I ate pigeon eggs and let the wind
blow through me. I think they tore it down one day—
it’s just a crater now, and sometimes when I walk by, I spit
in the hole. When I tire of walking, I take off my boot
and sleep inside it. All of my children used to fit in its toe.
Now they’re gone, and I can stretch out until my bones
crack. The light hurts my eyes. You won’t remember this,
but the light used to be different, thinner. That was many
years ago. Now, I wear dark glasses everywhere.
No one talks to me on the street, and I like it that way.
I have a safe place, in the sign above a grocery store.
I live there sometimes. I drink tea I brew myself
and stay up late. I have to wait to leave until
the manager has locked up. She always smokes three
cigarettes in the parking lot before getting into her car,
but she doesn’t drive home right away. She turns on
the radio and sings to herself, loud enough I can just hear
from behind the giant glowing W where I’ve put my bed.
She never sings the same song twice. I admire that. 

I worked for a while as a maid at the resort—you know
the one. I gathered damp towels from bathroom floors
and pretended not to notice what I saw in the trash cans.
I cleaned while the families played in the park, I cleaned
while they ate, I cleaned while they slept. I was like
a painted-over water stain on the wall, invisible but soft
to the touch. I worked for a while in a call center,
forty of us in a room with headsets, a manager
whose jacket was too big but who would let us
lie on the floor of his office with the lights off
for ten minutes each day. I worked at a factory where a flood
of plastic monkeys tumbled out onto a clattering belt.
Every third monkey covered its eyes. I worked in a field.
I mopped floors at a 24-hour burger joint, and every night
when the same man came in to fill his pockets
with ketchup packets, I stared deep into my bucket.
When I drove a school bus, I kept a cup of markers
for the kids to color over their bruises with. I filleted
10,000 chickens on the processing line and never once
glanced at the wide, dark drain in the middle of the floor,
though at night I woke to my hand slicing the air
with an invisible knife. I ate my lunches in my car
in the parking lot. I learned there’s nothing sweeter
than letting a phone ring and ring and ring
and ring. This whole country is a blood-stained floor
covered in rich, shag carpet. The carpet is so soft.

I love the wholeness of the old stories. Once,
there lived a husband and wife. Then the husband
up and died. Etc. In those days, we didn’t speak
certain words. In their place on the shelf, we put
something lovely. Honey-wise, we called the dark
shape sleeping in its cave. When a woman
disappeared, we buried her name in the middle
of the forest, and we buried the forest inside
a story, and we read the story to our sons,
and our sons grew up, and our sons laughed
and said, It’s just a story. Our sons’ favorite
story is the one about the bird that transforms
into a beautiful woman when a man shoots it.
Over the years, I replaced all my teeth
with iron, one by one. Now my tea tastes
of blood. My biscuits of bone. Our sons
stopped visiting. We saw them on the news,
giving their speeches, digging their trenches,
selling a sharper shovel. They hold out
their naked hands and say, What claws?
‍They smile and say, What teeth? I pour
honey on my bread. You’re overreacting,
‍my son says on the phone. I ask him,
Where is your wife? and he says, She flew
away. She’s sleeping. I didn’t do anything
wrong. Why are you like this? My silence
is darker than a hole in a forest at night.

I wanted to live a gabled life. Green eaves over
a lawn of wildflowers running down to a sea
at once gray and inviting, the kind of water
that could grind you to nothing but you wouldn’t
mind, no, you wouldn’t mind being just a tiny thing,
a smoothed over pebble the size of a pinprick.
I never thought I would think the thought
I’ll have to wash the dishes at least 10,000 more times
before I die. I thought I would grow into the shoes
I tried on as a girl, but instead my toes sprouted
claws and I walked around scratching the dirt.
I wanted to dream but instead I stayed up all night,
poured scalding tea and stirred it with
my finger. I’d thrown away all the spoons
because I never wanted to wash another spoon
again. I didn’t want to think about the price of milk
or revolutionaries lopping off the heads
of kings and kings’ daughters like the tops
of daisies. I wanted to walk the old road
by myself at night and not think about walking
the old road by myself at night. I wanted
an old woman to come to me at night and hug
me so hard my bones broke. But she never
came. And now I stand here, with my arms
outstretched. I know what you’d like me to do.
I’ve been there before. That’s my sweat
in your sheets. That’s my hair on your pillow.

I was collecting cans in the Kroger parking lot
when I saw a group of hawks getting dressed
in the skins of soldiers. The skins fit them
poorly, their blond beards tattered and crawling
with bugs. With new, pale fingers, they played
with their zip ties sized for a grandmother’s wrists.
Country music spilled from the open door
of a van left running, and the hawks sang along,
shaky at first, but after the chorus came around
a second time, I could hardly tell that they weren’t
men singing. The street was empty. The world
looked like someone had turned it on its side
and shaken it out, like shaking spiders out
of an old shoe. I’ve seen it before, a hundred
times. A twitch of a tsar’s mustache, and there go
a dozen shtetls, up in flames. Back then,
young men would come to my hut in the woods,
begging. Grandmother, teach me how to fight.
‍Maybe an evil wizard had stolen their beloved.
Maybe some Cossacks cut their little brothers
in half. I said, Do you see the skulls that decorate
the fence around my hut? The killing is easy.
I gave them tea with a spoonful of jam dark
as clotted blood. I let them sleep one more night
as boys, and before they woke, I turned them
into frogs and hid them in the grass along the road,
so whenever the Cossacks rode by at night, sabers
glinting, the frogs sang a chorus of insults
that made even the cavalry horses laugh.