Poetry
You recline in the moss,
pale flesh settled in among
cool rugs of lush green,
and a small blue snail
creeps across your shoulder.
You seem at home here:
forest spirit, conifer dryad,
rooted into cypress and cedar,
spruce and yew. The sky
fills up with droplets that want
to fall, but don’t, out of respect
for the moment shared between
the snail and the snowy shelf
of your shoulder.
I.
Birth by fire.
VII.
For eleven days
we three men
leave our Mother’s
arms but never
her reach. Earth
shines; the Moon
is far away.
VIII.
Mother’s reach stifles:
the nest cannot
hold us now.
We do not
go far: just
to peer at
the dark side
of bright Luna.
XI.
Luna welcomes us
and Mother’s heart
breaks in pride
and wistful longing.
My dusty footsteps
will linger here
for decades, but
Earth begs us
to return. We
leave flags, boots,
and predecessor ghosts.
XIII.
Birth by fire.
Oxygen is our
lifeline and our
fiery garrote here.
Luna falls away
and worried Mother
stares in horror
at her floundering
children. God beckons
but Mother won’t
let go. She
pulls us gently
to her breast.
XVII.
This is our
last love affair
with bright Luna.
We slink away
in black night
to touch her
and we linger
longer than ever
before, filling our
eyes with her,
our dusty lover.
We orbit her.
We orbit her
but Mother calls
and her call
stirs our souls:
Earth waits, children.
I.
This heart is rusty.
It creaks, it clanks,
it crashes and rattles
and bangs and it breaks
down without you.
II.
I don’t know
what is happening
to the brain in my head.
It’s like it’s full of straw and
I can’t think I can’t think
I can’t think I can’t think
of anything but you
and every time I do
I catch on fire.
III.
You rumble up
like a roar from my chest.
I’m frightened of these sounds
coming out of my mouth
but I like the way they sound
in my teeth.
IV.
Pay no attention to the man
behind this curtain of words.
There’s no place like you.
There’s no place like you,
and I just want to go home.
This is our first kiss as I remember it:
I squeeze the wool sponge and trickles
of milk, steaming white brooks,
pour over you, spill into the bright seas of
goat-kid’s blood smeared on your breast.
My thighs and my belly burn at your touch,
I wash you; you wander me.
My skin craves to be wandered.
My hand is yours: you wind the februum,
the strip of flesh the goat has given us,
the strip of flesh my thighs and belly are
striped and stung from, you wind it
and wind it about my wrist and your wrist
until I can have no thought of pulling away:
you have made me yours to wander.
My skin craves your wandering.
My skin craves to wander you.
Your tongue is in my mouth.
We are milk and we are blood.
Some days,
I think you are
a vased lily set
on a corner table
and I am
a patterned rug
beneath you.
I am hoping that
someday,
a cat will brush you,
an arm will nudge you
or the quaking earth
will upheave you.
Your white blossoms
and fertile water will spill
over the table’s lip
onto me.
It’s not that
I wish you turmoil:
I just want you
as a rain of flowers,
however unexpected.
You taste like cherry frost,
bedroom sunlight raptured,
captured by subtle sepia crush,
a rush of blood to the lips
and tongue, lungs full of the
steam peeling off your flushed
and shuddering flesh;
We are threshed
together, separated and laid out
against sheet canvas cocoons,
writhed and tithed and tied
together because I cannot keep my lips
from scouring the valley between
your shoulders, cannot keep strips
of my skin from trying to interweave
with yours; lattice-like, enwebbed,
ebbed and seeping out of myself
and into you; shrike me on your
lancets, only kiss my pores again,
pour kisses on me again, take these poor kisses
and illuminate your lips again,
conjugate our mouths ten
times, twenty times, as many times
as it takes to swallow all the rhymes
I am seeping out of myself
and into you.
You kiss like
a thistle switch, like God’s sunlight
glitched and wavered,
flutter shrike, I am struck,
I am plucked and strummed
and humming for you;
I am sung and strung for you,
draw my tongue into you once more,
crack your kisses against my throat
like soap bubble lightning eggs,
til our legs shudder in time
to the twinkle of a hundred thousand
jealous white-hot stars.
I’d like to pluck a star out of the night,
peel away its rind, and sink my teeth
into the fruit flesh beneath its gleam –
I wonder what it’d taste like:
subtle sweet like persimmon,
sharp pucker of juicy lemon,
crisp apple, faint melon,
plenty of seedpods nestled in the pulp:
new worlds not yet birthed,
ready to be flung from their mother tree.
A heart cannot pull away from its veins.
At the corridor’s end, one step shy of snapping
the arteries that bind me to you, I turn and flee
to your bedside, my fearful heart beating its fists
on the white doors of your room, as if it might find
them locked and barred, but they open, they
still accept me, you still sleep, dreaming to the
hushing lullabies of your respirator.
Your hand is warm and I imagine your fingers curl,
just a little, around mine.
I’ll stay here until you wake up.
I’ll stay here until you wake up.
I finally have words
for the way I love you:
you are a red wasp
alight on the doorknob
of my front door.
I don’t dare reach out.
I don’t dare let you in.
wash in the scent of earth and leaves
in breeze, breathe and remember
why the forests and their trees
ought to be kept safe, kept sacred
from moguls, from thieves