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