it’s easy to miss the juncos’ slow, sudden departure in spring;
messengers from colder warming worlds

they arrive a dulling autumn:
peppering notations of life in a landscape encased,
each deep dark demitasse
brewed on increasingly tardy dawns
painting a night sky inverted

standing ankle deep in first snows
searching for leftover springs beneath the detritus

but then they finally emerge with the warblers,
orioles, robins, and buntings

and pointillism fades beneath impressionist palettes
that flash over treetops and underbrush

but the last juncos linger:
quiet familiar trills outside my window each morning
disrupting stillness till it disappears

the leaves sway and catch sunlight
and i catch both against my cheek
and chase them down to my throat,
crush them into each other into me
into chamomile: a trickling summer

i drown in sword-shorn grasses and
in return for breath they write on
my skin in languages that have never
been spoken, only sung only felt
only studied with one dirt-painted
fingertip, fine hairs punctuating
pink brown imprints of trodden earth

ants count dozens of steps, climbing
the winding train tracks (and rocks
sleeping beneath) of my wrists legs
nose and untraveled stomach, and i
let them travel; let my body be gravel
become highway become interstates to
ugly and restful towns diners hotels

and even as sunlight burns my eyes
and bobcats stalk past forests beyond
the reach of my oven-warm wind-wound
open palm, ground allows its drinks to
seep into my sweatpants desert skin
and curls: an oasis i carry on my back

i lied about the exorcism--
that neon ghost
still haunts my phone
and though all of us are silent
you sing my tinnitus till the storms get back.

you don't know it's been raining all week
because i never told you;
i'm so scared of spirits and spiders
and weathering small-talk--
your sun and my curtain-clouded bedroom.

in a sunpatch on your floor,
i dreamt of leaping off the grid
and landing back in lake hylia a hero;

now i only dream of daytime drinks,
a summer solitude as dull as the ends of my hair
'cause i can't even throw back my dad's ninety proof
without the sun in my eyes

so the truth is
between zelda and zookeeping
i've been seancing on the dusty carpet
arranging myself around album booklets and ***** shirts

and maybe i couldn't help it

maybe i lit a couple candles by your name
not thinking you'd think of me
or think to shine solar snapshots onto my pillow--
a presence to make me breathless
enough that i can't
***** them out

and they keep me up at night

got caught up talking
balked through the window and fell through the back door
umbrella still in bloom

left rings of condensation as footsteps
and also frostbite in 60 degree weather
and also footsteps for nobodies to follow
freaked out by stale nature
valley-cracked teeth
translucent petals poking through nag champa clouds

lost spider solitaire
twenty-one times in a row

lost all the gaba napping in classrooms
and spinning circles around itself
untuned cerebellum in atrophy against the spins

lost it
won an advil liqui-gel
and quickly quit:
jumped off the peak of its dose-response curve
into the pool of a hallucinogenic july

doesn’t matter:
komorebi’s turned apocalyptic;
sunset's turned subvision

now you make shadows on the mirror and wet-floor signs on the tile
get caught in spiderwebs not a foot outside your bedroom
blast faith through android speakers suffocating in her comforter
drown your plants in ***** water

never heard a silver lining
only eat up deserts
for the cacti that’ll propagate later in your throat:

a seventy-five cent zinnia’s last whiskey-driven photosynthesis
rootbound

just like that the pretty girl in my dreams
disappeared freed my sheets to let them
suffocate as usual and i stayed there
facing the ceiling with cymbals’ collisions under my pillow

and for a haze i stayed
still and subsisting on spit and spider mites
like the sea wasn’t swallowing anything
till i was ninety percent salt and crystallized
breathing out dusty alphabet soup into the aether

like anyone with a disdain for capital letters
my circle sends its love along with mutual virtue parasitism
in distress beacons pinged through a dead battery and twitching fingers
and you know it’s for the best

no falling out of bed or breakfasts till the oasis is complete
under construction in the dusty pillowcase i call home
down the street from the abandoned asylum where i learned
mouth too dry and lungs too sharp

a shriveled cactus with paper spines

time is circling its core like a villain
streets are running under my feet
is that the inflamed sky

call me your fortune teller, disaster, whatever
I condemn you to the bestiary of my clarity
you'd better make up  another camouflage or transparency,
a savage new name for devilry each day

you smile an unfiltered smile,
like a Sisyphus of tease and play