Lover

i find whispers in the telephone ring tones
your voice is set to ringing, ‘answer’
and then we lock eyes at odd intervals

(a flat note from a woodwind)

do you see me smiling with someone?
their joke is not funnier than yours
& i can smell you from here.

so flush with a thought of you
capillaries rise, a cut pink
the ideas fixate themselves in front

it’s hard to articulate the very snap
of your skin to your bones or the slow
cook steeping of the tension between

you

i think like a coward clown fish
in a full reef, no place to stay
safe: “if it isn’t you, it’s someone
else.” but else never is
you don’t ever stop.

but you should change
your number. it makes the future
come faster. even if you write
their's down on a post-it
it will always be stuck
somewhere.

four years ago i first saw you
the you appeared prematurely
and i knew you would somehow be
the shark that unhinges a jaw
and eats the fish whole.

instinct. origin. (2010)

when you died, i swallowed a part of your spirit that no one with a mother needs. i want to feed and clothe more than. i want to guide and love and chisel maps into stone, break the glass in case of emergency, trying to hold on to the same axe as someone else’s. it’s not a competition but a repetition no one needs. It’s a useless talent that can’t go anywhere without a process of adoption. i ask if they are cold and it is an empty gaze back. when you give, you expect to release that gift. i am standing at a child’s party holding a romper that won’t fit, fit for my returning. “send a gift certificate, it’s okay.”

i have absorbed part, i— not needed. a cat looking out a window at a nesting bird with a full bowl of food on the cold tile kitchen floor, infinitely refilling. i can’t create one but i can create one in me, maybe in a decade or so. it seems. is there time for my own? what i won’t say is that my life is not one built for longevity. statistically, based on parental mortality i won’t see 60. when most of us finally take the time to sit and look out the window. i am looking at the window now and i see closed blinds, a shadow of a tree against clouds. i see books scattered on my floor. i am in a chair, but i should be on the floor. gift of sight, no one cares to see. come back and take this away from me. i look out a window you will never pass by, or stand in, or be in again.

there’s only room for one. there is no one else here.

wild

we roam around each other as collective entities packs of wolves finding the other through scent. the forest for the trees, you sit tall. look at me. slightly cock your head to the right. howl at the moon: your eyes guided in time, all of the rising tides. when your eyes fall away, the water only lightly grazes the sand— like the tips of your fingers against my face, when there are no phrases, just the scent and night.

how desire feels like hunger, how assuaging desire is feeding, how i give myself pieces of passion to digest slowly, how i cannot ingest it all without becoming sick, into something that is too much but isn’t prey, tell how i could— consume your skin with my skin, my skin a mouth to eat your skin. our skin—mouths resting together in lip-lock. your eyes green dimmed behind glass, the green grass, the forest tops.

marks left and not left visibly, i find the spots, those are the spots we go. we circle, claim, circle, and the stakes. we are at each other’s throats. i find you. i know you, so solemn. disheartened, so confused in your compromising the most troubled bit of your herd with the hunger of the pack. let—

do not concede doubting thomas. all of i wish to be nothing less than yours.

Bodies to Drew Kalbach

i find the need to invest in bodies. there are 20 dollar signs at the end of my email signature followed by an emoticon of a penis, which i have colored purple. i have been looking for the right body, i have been looking for the right shade of nude color that fits the obliviously nude body. i found myself in The Gallery examining bodies. I took notes on all of them and filed them inside of your mouth, the jaw, the hinge to a filing cabinet if you can keep it in your brain. I have been thinking we should get rid of the brains and keep the necks. there are some interesting bones and arteries. i thought about this in my kitchen while preparing a dinner entirely composed of bodies of pulled plants. i took pictures and sent them to you, since you can’t eat without your body. you printed the pictures and ate them instead.

I, Still

sometimes it is there in the morning and it drives
the quit to buy a pack. it is so implicit that if i said it
i would be sure but it would sound of another

language. i pull back from you because to be
totally within you is the truth. how your skin is
the verdant grass on the rolling hills
of a country i could call
home but have never stayed—

and the magnolias in Philadelphia
could be you if I had my nose
buried in the nape of your neck.

the non-specific morning rings of you
as I wake, peering through the blinds
at a concrete cove, it pushes through
hours, to night, end—

you are my crimson sky at set, a sign
of smooth seas, to have you would be
to know, to be
sure, of everything
else,

and without i
wake and hear
you, in all of
the leaves;

i, still, after all of this time