winterkate

Find yourself put out on the street like bones for a wire-haired dog, find yourself lost at the next bus stop. The maps are all veins you shouldn’t trace back to a perfectly well-beating heart. There are places you can’t visit. In this room, family only. Recovery isn’t done by halves, or even full pockmarked moons. And I have loved your low harvest, your thrush of cold; I have felt it sit on my shoulder and sing. The pool at night, all the light inside magnified by absence, the girls night mermaids – streaming hair illuminated by your nothing. The place you terminate is where I choose to love him. Don’t drag

i. When I was six a phoenix tried to drown me. Underwater I grabbed for fire. Like Icarus, I was reaching towards the sun. I hope he still has bald spots. I hope he still cradles searing scars. He was death, I was the bird. ii. My uncle knows plastic- wrapped soaps as well as he knows fine wines. If he drinks enough, he thinks it’s love- carved names rubbing the silver drain smooth. Diver: 28 days sweating, ship black against sea. Like it had been peeled from amber tongues. iii. On my fifteenth birthday, the boy with stars on his fists and Saturn’s rings in his eyes told me I was pretty. It was the first time anyone had

“Words, words, words.” – Hamlet i. All I knew then were ghosts. Her body an excuse, pale and stripped in the vague gray-white. Second-hand sheets. The room wet with winter, the window she could not force closed. One mosquito, wailing. When she tried to date, it was Tantalus clawing for a low vine. It was her mother’s halo. She existed in what would not die around her. I like you because you’re a smoker, she said. I bit her lip and sighed ii. exhaust. Her body numbered inside itself what was not her. She woke here from a Kindly One’s chemo dream. Edith Hamilton played my garden for diamonds, said P

I know your body’s smallest ways: the nest of raccoons you hide beneath your tongue like gangbanger’s tooth-split razor in jail, the pickets of your nails, all studded sideways: your body a ten-cent California, illegal- raised home. This is why hands heavy with bruised fruit will haunt you; the way they broken-English ask how to slide iron inside. This is why the hinges of your voice will fall open, why what scratches you will grow the wrong way. Back to your blood. After, you said I didn’t know you, like I hadn’t counted the blinds rattling over your heart, a window with a dead sparrow crumpled outside. Body like

I don’t want to name you in languages that will or have already died. No Latin brands for you and I - neither of us are botanists. Neither labels shoots and leaves every time we discover something new about how our breathing blossoms bright the moment that we close our eyes. Remember what the chemistry coach said, that Friday of E=mc2? Einstein and his fantastic theories; we are all just concentrated sun. Light woven by the invention of rain, of God and planets when everything collided, like you and I did that day in the research section, when we decided 100s didn’t matter  – that we only ever needed us, t

I don’t love you anymore. I was going to lead up to this. Maybe claim there was something caught in my throat about beetle wings, cochineal – you know, they make that stuff out of flight. Lipstick, I mean. I mean the truth is I can only smile like an inferno because something else isn’t going to be flying away. And I was going to say I’m sorry but I’m not. I was going to lie to you like you needed me to, but pray tell me how to grace through three weeks I hoped   for some kind(ness) of hurricane, so we could recalculate in the aftermath, and nobody would blame me then for judging that we came up empty.

And you’re a fat bastard – I should know. I am one too. We have a brotherhood of naught-brothership, of driftwood drifting apart. I burn in all the colors like the salt-stained. The dry-warped. We both do; yellowgreenblueblack and such trace hints of pure red crackling against the sea with her mouth set in a breaking line. One day you asked me why the water wasn’t red, if the sea’s really a fuck of closed mouths, broken teeth.  I told you fuck’s not making love. That you don’t need to say anything. You set your red lips tight. Didn’t speak a word.

The poem tips nothing. Perfectly balanced, it nods with curt politeness at me, the waitress with the emblazoned name tag reading I am just trying to get out of here too, and it does not pick at my bones (polite). The poem tips nothing. When it gets up and leaves, it leaves exact change, stacked silver balanced on the blank plate, enough to rework my lungs and pewter heart for when it comes back again.

Sad is such a small word. Pedants try to expand it. To puff up their sadness with crammed letters; lugubrious, melancholy. But sad is such a small word. You could slip it in your pocket. You could slip me in your pocket too, something else to be forgotten.