epilogue of the bear trap
I sleep in a square. I bookend my profiles with pillows and I keep two below my head. Waking means lifting and climbing’ sleeping means sinking. I dream surrounded.
In the back of the house, rotting limes. They liquefy. Porous green to a brown gray mass, happy dents.
Tell me what surviving […]
Successful hand transplants. Do the veins and nerves ask each other to dance? Do they tangle like tree roots, fire their guns into the other’s shins & lapse into tango for life?
My coat attracts snow flakes, stellar dendrites on my shoulders and sectored plates up the nose and on the lips as I walk […]
Your face,
a dagger smacking
back moonlight.
Grin made of molasses
spreading out the center.
It is here,
tucked in the lesser referenced corners
of rotating clock,
where every suspended disbelief drops,
lunar light finding your crooked tooth
to sparkle like diamond,
to render all crickets silent and blinded,
to disorient blades of grass left bent
in the imprint of your body.
Never you mind, paper plate sun,
yolk below […]
how all lungs in the room
flutter flatten ripple
with vibrations.
One of these dead ends, which is it? One where I and a country boy kissed in the grass as if things like parents, age differences and chores never existed. Two things against the earth with grins and elbows, anemic shins.
I am trying to find your porch light. It is dark, I am tired […]
I keep spelling mustache wrong. Moustache. Mouse Stache? MUH-stash.
Lately I smile at strangers.
Halfway through spin class tonight, the instructor turned off most of the lights. Sprinting in the dark, the swarmlike hum of our collective fly wheels.
I printed out my entire book so that I can hang poems around the writing room and pace/fret/pace/fret […]
artemis moves in on ryburn ave.
He painted the room with a gun jammed in the belt, a ticktickjangle of keys when he bent or stretched or ssshhed the roller vigorous against the wall. Pushing harder and cylinder spins, spraying the finest dots of blue into bristle on forearm. The television blared political, beer cans defended […]
It goes back. Way back. Past the butcher paper tracings of our bodies in elementary class. Before the infamous “ain’t ain’t a word” argument of ‘88. Before the blood on Halloween at ten and a half. Before the first kiss, first swig, first burst through curfew, too early for my interests. Always after that experience […]
& the bridges of my feet flat-stepping your ribs,
a rope by rope descent
of bone,
the spiral staircase to a drop down moon.
Your wrists in my hands,
the glass by the sink,
both covered in lips;
behind curtains of meteor, behind
the papercurl of your smile bends, behind
your compass above the magic of magnetism
and the fickle of north–
behind us in […]
In the Atlantic
where ships fall apart,
you talk about building a house there.
You use your hands, eyebrows, entire body
to say things like
property line, blueprint,
community.
Halt the explanation
to take your waiter’s hand,
lips against wrist whispering
“and you will be my gardner.”
Playing pretend pours out of you like water.
Only Alices are left, pedaling for the keyholes.