Excerpts from the Pinocchio Interviews

Tell me about your birth.

People forget I was alive before I was
_____a living “thing,” that before

there was a wooden boy
there was only space
__________where a boy should be.

But I remember the root’s furrow,
soft garnets of cardinals jeweling my ear,
every leaf’s pore unfolding
to karaoke the rain.

When you say “birth” you speak of a cord
knotting events, rending blood
_____and inevitability.

But I was no inevitability.
There was no space before
_____I was an “I.”

There was longing.
And the longing held an hatchet.

My birth was that longing
_____felling me, telling me

“Father” was its name.

________________________________✧
But what was it like, coming “alive” like that?

When the axe snapped
my cords, my needles and cones
gasped into the mud,
_____the song of the rain
_____plumed into the air—

when the gasp of my last ring
lay bare, vulnerable to the sun,
and the only music that lingered
was my bleeding—

when the last taste
was the bee’s fur
wriggling out my hollowing veins—

when the man said “This
will do,” and brought a veiner with his wishes
and lay me on the table—

when a life left me,
and so I was left “alive”—

did you know, at first,
my eyes couldn’t dilate?

For days I didn’t know
what separated “light”
_____from “flame.”

________________________________✧
But you must have felt something when the fairy waved her wand…?

I didn’t feel the enchantment’s grip
the same way a red carpet doesn’t feel
the sun over decades bleaching it orange.

And that magic’s smell—vernix and blood
and sweat and earth—I didn’t register it
as life. I sensed it and saw my decay.

This is what I am saying: the self existed
before the self was actualized; instead,
it was language I felt, pouring into me.

I saw the woodcarver and thought: knife.
I saw the fairy and thought: government.
I saw the tremble in my hands and thought: run.

“A real boy?” Come on. I was
born, and then I knew.
There’s no such thing.

________________________________✧
Tell me about your first love

I will not surprise you by saying it was not Geppetto.
I had become a boy but not a boy
he wanted. I made friends
at school, I enjoyed being
a kind of boy
but I enjoyed being
a toy, too. I whittled my nose
to normal length. I shined my hair.
I reapplied the polish at the shore, where
I fell, I scraped my knee. Sand glittered inside
the clear scab, winking from under the seam of my shorts
when I hurried home, as he taught me. Like a good boy.

The sea, I learned
on the back of a pigeon,

is, like most boys, real
or imagined, insatiable.

I will surprise you by saying it was not the Fairy.
She saved me from the lowest oak limb
stripped of leaves, yet refused to
see me enjoy a kind of life
between boys
and toys, friends with
Candlewick and the bandits
who dug my coins from the field,
no miracles in sight. But they made no play
of their intention when she enjoyed making me wait,
waving her wand years after, as if she did not know how
I lived. As if the gift of life only rewards unspoken penance.

My life, I learned
as both toy and boy, is

what I must love first
if I am to love others too.

________________________________✧
Can you say more about that?

Candlewick said, A tree is a ladder,
his fingertips climbing my back
while we huddled inside

the Coachman’s wagon,
to the only part of heaven 
boys like us can reach.

Boys like us too often swing
the first branch
by our broken stems.

________________________________✧
So Candlewick was your first romantic love? 

In that space where a boy
_____was supposed to be
_____a boy, not a limb
_____people forget

nature never wastes a leaf in the leaping pile,
never explains why boys are mostly water

as spit or night sap, tears
_____of pitched hee-hawing
_____when Candlewick attempted
_____to break his stem but
_____bent it,

a pink fruit hung about my ears, around the space
where I kept my first love for myself quiet

when the Coachman motioned the Farmer over
_____and Candlewick left the space
_____where we were supposed to be.

I joined the circus, performed tricks, bent
my leg the wrong way. Tossed into the sea,

the hungry fish reminded me
_____I was a toy, not the boy
_____Candlewick let me be.

Nature never wastes a leaf or limb. They grow, again.
They grow green and felt, like a vest a father knits
_____for his boy.

________________________________✧
When did you first feel desire? 

The thing with boys is that names are not a currency.

We didn’t exchange them
in the adult way. I didn’t call him Romeo
as his father did, didn’t take the light of his skin
in exchange for the bright of my polish.

It wasn’t desire when he touched me,
it wasn’t philia or ludus
when he pressed his ear to my chest
and made a joke about the air moving there

being the thinnest coin. It wasn’t desire
until he pulled away
and showed me the splinter
docked in his thumb,

until he slipped this thumb into his mouth
and pulled the splinter out with his teeth.

“Does it hurt?” I asked him,
and he said “Yes.”

He said “Here,”
and put the splinter into my palm.

That first desire was how, afterwards,
I swallowed it.

It was how I could feel
the hair of it

rattling there,
where my heart should have been.

________________________________✧
And what did you do with this feeling?

I did what every boy does with a feeling
he cannot name:
_______________I teased it,
chased it around the maypole

to which every boy
in the Land of Toys
was tethered,
__________a pink sash

around my waist
__________a wish I didn’t know
I could make of the sun or sea,

__________even the Fairy
who had warned me about boys
who glow, any weather, day or night,

who, like a lighthouse beam, blind
my dry mud and indigo eyes,

who watch while I absorb
their rain songs of sorrow,

their geysers, splashing
their little puddles,

__________oh they are so full
__________of the sea,

a feeling of floating
_____or like floating—

I cannot always tell
if I am flotsam
or the tide

when they cling to me
I know, I know

that rattling is my way home.