After Natalie Diaz 

—My mother says, where are you going every night?

Someone is going to kill you one of these days. 

—I lose my voice in his apartment: it is a tiny basement I find myself coughing in,

 cramped with potatoes and space heaters, suffocated by a bonfire of smoky butterflies. 

—My mother wonders why my phone keeps blowing up 

with voicemail from centaurs and scream queens, and I have no explanation for why the roaches keep snowing out of my backpack. 

I thought you were classier than that. Isn’t he making you breakfast? 

—I keep dancing around her questions about test results and SSRI prescriptions,

why all the batteries in the house stop working, why I keep rationing so much light,

and why bags black as hawthorn berries bloom under my eyes 

when I squirt obsidian ketchup onto a plate. 

Dear Mom, you’re making me miserable…

—Like my sister, she keeps brushing my scalp with its hair of dead sparrows

and sucks on my cuticles full of dirt. I never tell her I’ve been spending time

in graveyards looking for the single pomme seed, the small red clue. 

In my room she finds nothing but penis candles, unused condoms, and benzene. 

—I retain a sensitivity to fridge lights, to needles, to pinpricks, 

to all her jokes when she cracks her head back to laugh, a grackle in graying weather. 

—She picks through my love notes; I never know how to hide them. 

Then lines my room with extinguishers in case I arrive every night with nipples 

wreathed in flames and she has to douse them.

—There is no room for all the DVDs she keeps slipping into my braincase. 

Freddy Krueger nightmares, or how he might have HIV.  Infomercials target me

about new prescriptions and condom ads at 9 o’clock, 10 o’clock, 12 o’clock. 

He never texts back when I ask if he’s carrying seeds that can kill me.

—I wonder which of the bat-winged creatures is telling him to clasp my wrists to the bed.

Why his room has so many bug-filled curtains in it. Why the leaves keep floating

like eyelids owed to the sky. He admits, finally, to being a lake-sized cummer, 

a witch of dead mangroves, and of spike proteins. 

— I know I’m in trouble when he collects luxurious tears on a plate made of cyanide. 

His breath plumps my lips like maraschino cherries, with Hiroshima ash,

until he calls me one day, tells me the mouth of hell isn’t as hot as the one he’s about to enter. 

—In dreams he’s still fucking me with fire-sweat, palms clamped to my waist. 

I still wear his necklace of handprints, which worries my mother, makes her furious. 

In the world above she’s stomping trees into bloom. 

I become as dark as him so she won’t find me.