If I touch your face—
With lips, cool as cave water,
I am wishing well.

dinner was the trees
the grass the
animals doubted our sincerity.
makeshift ring temple beneath the
mighty oaks you are a
bundle of suggestions
weakly bound in twine i could
snap you open in so many words.

Sometimes I dig for it.
The lost fragment of my hips,
The way they swayed in front of your lips.
Now lost among the shredded portrait of our kiss.

I shove my fingertips into the night,
looking among the velvet moon and starlight
Between his long legs, underneath her tongue's site
Hoping to taste that bittersweet comfort of pain and flight.

To savor the honesty in the style I loved you
the silent mockery of poetic words desperately glued
to the confused pupils of your green eyes which unconsciously threw
those words of commitment under sly smiles and hidden hands tracing my tattoos.

But sometimes I find it
after a couple of beers and a sip of smoke.
Do you remember the rhythm those humid nights provoked?
They infected my brain with wanderlust and the feeling when time chokes
on whatever logic a perfect second shouts at the unawareness of a lover's hope.

If you are willing and obedient,
    you will eat the good things of the land;*
-Isaiah 1:19

You left your hair long in the hopes some
Jersey-eyed boy would braid flowers into it
Mark you with sequins and well written post
And treat you like a
Better than most.

But there was no way of predicting the air, up here
The dry dusk crackles with static and you know your head's a mess
but there is always the summer always monsoon season always
The way your little hands would break what they could not bend.

and all the eyes are on you now but they are desert eyes
And only in dark rooms. And only at night.
And they hold your hair back as you

And leave you reaching for the light.

And when the summer comes you are brittle brittle
Cakes baked in hot sun
and your hands have fought so many battles and
So many battles and
little hands they come undone.

and to you you are the only one.

Even the pine trees and the cedars of Lebanon exult over you and say, "Now that you have been laid low, no woodsman comes to cut us down."*
-Isaiah 14:8


the little bird tried to fly through the screen door and I
thought, if only there were more air out here.
if only the pines in their firm feet didn't wave your hands at me.
if only there were still water
in the creek.

they spent a week like this,
driving from port town to port town.
writing down the names of truck stops.
drawing sidewalks

with chalk.

we held hands and crossed into mexico with
tongues that flick across red lips.
we spent three weeks like this, trying to weep.
but the desert drank us up
and everything was thirsty
and everything was dry.