who was i to be so bold and who
were you with teeth like picket-fences
and eyes like my father’s lawn

and where was i to aspire to that 1955 smile and where
were you when i remembered all the lawns looked alike back then
and picket fences kept my father lonely

there’s an art to
pouring a guinness
to make it taste like
chocolate and
the idea of her

and there’s an art to
smirking at bad puns and
positioning your fingers
on imagined guitar strings
before you pull the rug
out from under her

and there’s an art
to doing both by accident
and realizing one tuesday
the next year

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.