Standing in the Garden of Myself Where My Lover Misplaced a Rusting Trowel

sweet nectar of firebush plumbing the fraudulent

____________________________________this argument from broken deities

__________________does it matter?

 

________________________as light unspools across the thorax of

_________________________________________inevitability___________________wading

_____course you don’t know me

_________________________________________________in this winter-colored dress, my wine-streaked cheeks, their hasty bloom

_____________________a zebra longwing in flight against

__________________________________________to the right, please, a sky constellating

 

the words I have tried to say but have not

 

 

_______what I have found is  ___________________________________almost—a consolation

______________thyme creeps in delicate ropes over the

___________________________________nothing worth writing about home

 

_______the marsh of desire

____________________________she said, Tomorrow, my dear, perhaps we shall try again

 

home as a concept as much as a place as much as

pours like velvet from mouth to ear

_________________________________________________thinking about the ones who stray

____________________________corrupted by benign neglect

_____________________irrespective of pine, or daffodil, or

____________or stay

_________________________________________still lost, into the peripheral moments

______________into the hours___________________________________waxes rhapsodic

 

______________and there’s that old ache, the one with its wings pinned under my breast

____________________________________this high-ceilinged epiphany

 

____________________________and how sometimes, aren’t they the same?

glass this thing that separates two bodies finally

 

and wanes___________________________________looking for

 

_______either fullness, or in supplication to the object itself

 

______________exquisite specimen of yearning, flash-frozen at the moment of its

_________________________translates

_______________________________________________beginning

________________________________________________a seeking

________________________________________________a crocus gulping into life

 

Signs Seen Driving Past a Baptist Church in Rural PA

Feed the hungry
Clothe the naked
Visit the sick
Build the wall

 

Metamorphic
See him, a geologist molding
ear to earth/ what shudders
through the caverns of her
just ballooning shape/ his hands
conjuring tremble-breath