My body is so much bigger, and I am always wanting
to write a memoir. The bow at the end of class
is called a "reverence." Things keep waking me, haunting

Julie, there was the time
You went on the De Grasse with E.E. Coulihan
Unknowing. He, a student, and you, met

In Belgium on his day, servant girls knew
to stay away from the fields, because
he gave the cabbages large heads

This is the house of the wooden roof
where nobody sleeps past dawn.

The house of the wooden roof

We are going to dip English backward
by its Shakespearean tresses
arcing its spine like a crescent

When Mutual of Omaha supported
nature shows, it spared us sex and gore.
We stared as peacocks preened and rhinos courted,

I sit in a body & think of a body, I picture
Burnens's hands, my words
make them move. I say. Plunge them, into the hive,

My mother wants to see me again. That means she'd like me
   to shave off my beard.
She points her thumb at the dark portrait of a bearded man,

Maidenhair borders the upward trail,
trims the margin braided green
and lives here—thrives—in the dark
beneath these arches, in this

Kenneth noticed a man staring at breasts,
the way he, Kenneth, might look at an ass.
Kenneth felt a solidarity of need.