where and when and also how
Adi Martin-Rueben


(keep this in a cigar box against the mirror on an onyx-painted dresser)
My body is an essay
apricot thesis pressed against the solar plexus.
Dig your thumbs into the crown of the fruit,
the broken bike ribs,
the senseless clarity, five swollen paragraphs.
My body is a geode
crammed with an icicle center,
soaked in sterling silver.
Crack it with a granite hammer     
on the driveway of your mother’s house.   

                                                                        By the time you have hit the chisel
in a line all the way
around the stomach, it should be
ready to open. If you do it
 right, you should be able to break
the stomach into halves
  that fit back together to where you
can’t tell that it was
broken.

Line of sun, line of fate, finger of mercury, I know the right amount of all of me to give, but give too much regardless. Here, this is a wine glass, this is my large intestine, this is a freckled strawberry apple. A femur. A kneecap. This is my old name. Use it incorrectly with the breath of something ferocious and imaginary.

I am trying to untangle my hands from useless chandeliers,
to strip fluorescence from bed linings
to sculpt and pull my matted fur.

But this is my favorite thing:
you are real because you
wear too many keys on the same belt loop
and ask for soft, impossible things
loudly.


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