I.

I am not a spook, nor ectoplasm.
I am flesh and bone. fiber and liquids.
a mind. I understand people see me
like bodiless heads in circus sideshows
surrounded by hard, distorting glass.
when they approach they see figments
of their imagination. my epidermis:
a peculiar disposition, a matter
of construction. a figure in a nightmare
the sleeper tries—with all his strength—
to destroy. let me confess, it's seldom
successful.

II.

I am invisible. a spook who haunted
your Hollywood movie. invisible
because people refuse to see. they see
only my surroundings—everything,
anything except me. no invisibility
is an accident. invisibility occurs
because eyes look through. I am
not complaining, nor protesting.
it is advantageous to be unseen (though
it is wearing on the nerves to doubt
if you really exist, whether you are
a phantom). say—out of resentment—
you ache to convince yourself you do exist,
with fists make them recognize you. alas,
it's seldom successful.

An erasure poem from Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man by and Glenn Ligon’s painting Invisible Man (Two Views).

The starlet’s facial features do the dance
demanded by the camera’s music: Snap.
A girl like that could do it in her sleep:
that look, immortalized in that romance,

the sculptor, carving up some pale ideal
and how he tried to make it love him back.
Miss Monroe’s blank and tired. You can see
she’s done with trying to make that smile look real.

Then Daltrey sang about his precious Lilly
completing the circuit: eyes to brain to hand,
a line a pixel, the billion points of light—
a limbic money shot of willy-nilly.

How many looks attempted, then discarded—
the duck, the hungry sparrow, baby fish,
a sucky little game face breaks the bank,
and stuffs itself with everything it’s started.

Like sugar—wet lips hungry, silent, so
they’re force-fed phalanxes of angry boy
until the psyche chokes. Are you done yet?
A million lonely housewives want to know.

Our man is walking, lonely on a beach,
without a hand in his, no candlelight
or quiet conversation, please, no games—
just eyeliner and implants, waves of bleach.

The truth is terrifying: In no way
is this what was at some point guaranteed—
by dint of dudeness: “Hooter’s type,” long legs,
some alien abduction, swiped away.

Now hand on gun, he’s hardened; resolute.
Be Seen, the billboard says. Be Seen. Be Loved.
The smile in that one photo was for him.
The dissonance enraging, playing cute,

while she is scanning all the sparkly racks
to amp up this and that, and try again.
The mental contact sheet of shots extends
to the atmosphere of Mars, which now attacks.

Consider the distraction: what it took
to blister reels of real life, snagged within
the teeth of the projector, motion stilled—
in hope that he would look, and look, and look.

you and me, together, in a house
that is just small enough to hear us hold our breath.
two tails, eight legs, and a pair of wet noses
running around our knees - not a single child in sight.
two cars in the driveway. a christmas tree touching the ceiling,
always four months into the new year. your hand on my waist
when i am sleeping or cooking breakfast or dancing in the bathroom
before bedtime. my nuzzling your clothes every time you leave the house
for a jug of milk or a midnight snack. gold rings glinting
in the muted light of the moon. a fluttering that lives in our
skin for as long as the sun turns in the sky.

I.

I wanted the wolves to let me stay
where I was, to let me keep what I had.
If meat lay rotting in the yard, I’d step
around it. If mold grew in the gutters,
I’d breathe the spores. The house’s outer wood
was sad and grey, but inside it was new enough
for furniture. She brought sofas and her own
made table. We had a fireplace and a mantel
with a photograph. But the wolves sent grief
running through the storm drain. They sent rage
that made the housewood warp and bend.
They forced me out from there with nothing
on my back and no guide.      I listened:
voices in the leaves at first, then voices
of the dead and then, finally, voices of the living
ran up my veins like chlorophyll
thickening a stem. They took me
to mines and watersheds.
I breathed. I spread my arms.

II.

I met two men: a half-girl I lost; and a second,
starving and heartsick. He sang me
to my knees, he heard, he loved
the voices in me. The scars on his chest
inked into morning glories and I held fast
to his listening ear at my sternum.
When he grew violent and frightened,
I dimmed their gnash and howl,
staved off the wolves that gathered
in the weak apartment light. The voices
cut out. My breath went out
like a windstruck candle. Rigid-mouthed,
sleepless under the helicopters; the wolves
sent heat, sent visions of my own arms
cut open into pools.      Only because
I’d repelled them. I walked into the woods alone,
the snow a balm to my throat:
spine-bent, following their tracks.
I want to be what I was.

after Erika Meitner's "Outside the Frame"

Outside the frame a toppled tree, a burning telephone pole, our wish to call our father who is reading headlines drinking coffee, steam rising from the rim to his face, a pleasant heat. Outside the frame melting asphalt, a sea of tar, friction and tires, a bus sinks into the road’s dark bed before pushing off for the day’s commute. Outside the frame particulate matter helixed in a window’s light, a wheezing refrigerator in an apartment that won’t cool down, a son teaching his mother what wet bulb temperatures are before she changes the subject to describe a new mask for sleep apnea. Outside the frame troubled sleep and orange skies. Outside the frame, brunch across from the park where children are playing, the stacking of spoons, cream gyres in refilled cups of coffee. Outside the frame a television’s light flickers against our walls, tourists running toward waves, aerial views of refugees carpeting boat decks until we are floating above flames to a panorama of char and embers, a ragged orange line across the horizon and we rise to the smoke’s dim curtain, the white sun that burns behind it and we lift higher still, through the thermosphere, sunset-singed clouds, contrails drawing new borders into a map of loss as we catch the sun along the earth’s curve and we realize all this time we’ve been burning together.