i remember the time you told me that
ginger soup would cure my cold and that
eating pizza with a fork made me so strange
that you weren’t sure we could be friends
with a sideways smile lighting the corners
of your amber eyes

i was drinking wine from a jar cross-legged
finally bold enough to ask you over

and i wouldn’t let you kiss me but as you laced up your
boots for biting february, i called out to you that i’d changed my mind
and you kissed me so **** hard it nearly hurt
but it didn’t

a year later, cross-legged again
so many days between you and now and the fading
memory of your warm chest on my ear
and i wish i'd crawled inside the ticking clock that day
tucked the minute hand into my elbow crook
and stayed

i have known the taste of violet; it has
stuck in my molars long after i’ve finished
it has been my wine-stained secret
i have known

the striated forearm and clenched fist
the mirror in the ventricles
and the hardiness of them
the measured beat
beat
beat

i have known the scrapes that even cardboard leaves
with a slip of the hand on its way out
i have known better the scars that mouths leave by association
on the shin, on the skin, on the cortex

have i known anything but
violet
i wonder

breakfast cereal disintegrates between tooth and cheek like
andean snowflakes do underfoot where I go to get
gone from the day-in-day-out ladybugs on the ceiling

I swallow it for the calcium
it doesn’t taste like much

and they smell when they crash into the mirror

I saw your daydream face like I used to see the ghost of my brother after I'd all but forgotten I had one. My lamb eyes and your lambdas crashed in mythological accidents and I all but forgot that I had you too.

farmland, not death, is the great equalizer. death separates the famous from the infamous, the young from the old, the lucky from the alone. farmland, stretching to the horizon, makes pennsylvania into connecticut into ireland into kansas. you can't tell monet's haystacks from mine.

we make the best of things, she said about the rainy season
our ten-dollar words swallowed by timid tongues and our
mile-wide headaches on our shoulders

we make the best of what, quizzical I ask her
she stood to lose more but she was better
she ran five kilometers at a time
she ran pretty circles around my holiday smile

ten-dollar words instead of money I carry with me still
to remember that I got there once too and
to feed to the mechanic when the engine stalls

does the engine ever stall
it does

the bitter and undersold other-edge of perfection
where it turns around twice and settles down among
stuffed turtles and hedgehogs and buries its nose in its tail
only to spring up at the noise of passing traffic or
loud voices next door or
a sigh
overtakes the perfect first face of it
the one you seek your whole life and that
comes for an instant before fading to gray
and you scold yourself for the growing thought that
it looked better from a distance