I once showed
the letters
of my heart
to a miscreant
(a *******)
then watched as he
jotted them down
on college lined paper;

he threw them to the wind like
brown candy wrappers.

(it was winter
we had not yet broken
grandma’s gravy boat)

A-Y landed on
empty ground, one letter
for each square foot
of naked topsoil.



I found Z in the Spring.
It had caught on a chain-link fence
and lost most of its color.

glass slippers shatter.
i asked my godmother for
a four-oh-one-kay.

i took the laces.
i can't breath but good god
do i look skinny!

a snake visited.
he brought an apple, but i
know that fairytale.

this one time i lived
in the garden of eden.
it wasn’t that great.

Words drip like diamonds
from your lips; but I love the
frogs and maggots too.

My tongue is charred
on the planes of your chest;
fingers seared from tracing the
patterns in your skin.
Forest-fires spark between us.
The hairs on my arms are long burnt away.

You exhale.
Your breath is smoke and I gladly breathe it in.
My lungs survive.
Later the doctors will be amazed that I
lived as long as I did.

We leave no ashes.
The flames are too high.

And yet–

Nothing matches the fires inside,
where new suns are born
every time you speak.
Words drip like diamonds from your lips,
but I love the frogs and maggots too.

My plates are shifting.
The internal landscape speaks for itself:
I listen
to seismograph readouts,
details of soil composition and
tidal patterns,
and hear your breath
in every charted line.