you don't want to ***** this newness with yourself
you lie
half-woken, a story
slipping in vomitous avalanche
of nowness, mourning
on a stack of crumpled sheets

night-stuck whiteness, imagining all
the games you might play
if you were to forget
your age: shaking
all that powder into the cracks
of your muscadet
dry skin
notes of apples,
saline

weather-woman, with her green screen showmanship
had not portended this outcome
this modern diviner you hold in high esteem

you always liked the way magicians seemed
to make something out of nothing
(a rabbit from a tophat gap, coins out of earlobes)
and winter is sort of like that, too
you wake up and everything is blanketed, you don't remember
the process, how it all got there
a snowshoe hare leaps
like she formed right on the snowbank
paper that came pre-sketched
free of gestation

beneath the avalanche muscadet turns to claret
but we can't see it happening
for miles and miles a blank page
what dies under the heel of perfection
a magician never reveals his secrets

Pupils incredulous
with dilation
hang stalwart on diction
and circumlocution—feed and bleed
affixation
on gold star delusions
of corpus analysis
and physical education,
prurient practicum
and conjugal conjugation.
Introduction to body
paragraph to bang-and-shut
conclusion.
Passion, pursuit, neuter, second declension:
𝘴𝘵𝘶𝘥𝘪𝘶𝘮.

Floss popping through the crewel needle.

Pearlies on a powder-gloss 𝘛𝘪𝘮𝘦 spread,
China clay coating the centerfold.

Wet-slap thighs on a marble countertop, and your lips slackened,
stone-of-marl cuspates like the lake-rotted innards of a lockjaw-
tinged tin can.

Scholastic sterility decamped to a catocala
backwing dauntlessness.
You flicker in my hands,
mythic as the peplos
at your Prado stone-pooled feet.

My flint-flame Thalia,
I am the cautery under your brand
new fingers, the clueless mark
of your mad dash catzerie.

Tomorrow forgets you but for ivy in drywall
Jesus-toast imprints, your laughter in a hot slice
of ghost against my mouth.

What would the crunch be like?
My grooves in the grooves
of your deciduous molars,
shards of enamel erupting vampiric
into my gums, sinking
into dentin like calcite
spongecake, pulp splattered, cementum
like a magic riddle hidden
amongst stale white ******* Jacks.
The rest strung on a red thread
candy necklace
haloing vertebra C7
like the shark teeth adorned by surfers
or like how sometimes we wear
spoils of the hunt on our bodies
to remind our prey that they,
too, will one day wear our teeth
around their necks.

dip yr tongue it tastes like soap & sodium
clary sage & double bubble pink
threadbare silksheen specked w/ white anthodium
piggy chou & rosette colored sheep
sink! it feels like sleeping
in winter throw & length of flannel sheet

(mary trembles, moss logs twined & twitching
himalayan salt to wash her feet)

Black-plumed
cantors in formation,
all prim in three lines;
black binders,
ink crotchets writ black in their thighs;

sorc'rer
his wand at the ready—
he lifts it in time;
their spellbooks turn
and bleed
and the story reads:

Savior!
This glorious child—
this mother betwined
by fate—
this star—
these sheep—
this rémscela to
the greatest tale ever told.

This ****** mother—