He bursts in with an armload of mangoes
in various stages of perfect, rotten, or too soft. One rolls to the floor and
without hesitation, he picks it up and bites in, luscious unwashed, juices dripping down his chin.
"It's warm from the sun," he says, "and the ground. I found a lot of these on the ground."

I still my tongue and watch him eat it whole, like he eats all of life.

I asked him recently if he thought I was crazy, as some do.
He said no, I want all the same things.
I wished I could tell him how I always washed my mangoes and wiped my chin,
I thought if I wore a sweater and a slip and a hat at the right times, life would turn out okay.

I'd like to call him, tell him how the wind is blowing hair across my face now.

Instead, I sit quietly, in the backwoods of Virginia
eating an unwashed, unpeeled mango
with the juices dripping down my chin.

skin cells tainted by your
touch of rust
your plague
a gaping wound
bleeding out
within my throat
a gasp
a silence
.
i wake up.
you are gone
and my flesh is pink
clean

body
is an ecosystem
of nebulas
between my legs
a blooming
garden
ravaged by
apocalyptic hands
red forests
bleeding trees
fill the voids
with a looping of deaths.
rebirth and creation.
a body
felt
in every crevice;
a blanket
heaving
with breath.

your ****** body hangs
a flower to be plucked
your ****** body
is a door that you can open up

it isn't all black and white
the choke-hold of history

shades of red and brown
paint the scenery, too

the documented imagery
forgotten in the fray

a little big horn playing mournful
songs as the cavalry marches on
to the tune of galleons and guns


no passport required
when the port was young

émigré and immigrant
displacing native sons

who also once were pilgrims
breathing in the sun.

when you asked me about certainty
and if my mind was a tree
rooted in cement and truth
i was on my unaccustomed knees
blinking into a sunbeam's architecture when
the brilliant wind brought you to me
to cure me with the miracle touch
i was alone by a window dreaming through glass
you bent toward me in a mile wide sky
a butterfly with a skinny voice
or an adorable tomato in a retail uniform
before that i only knew the clouds
as bears wrapped in pastel baby-blankets
before i first kissed you in the street
i knew the sunset as a drop of fire
in a barrel of whiskey and
suddenly your eyes like a deep pool in a forest
seeking out my past with the molecular traces
of your fingers across my abdomen
mandalas blooming out of our palms
only touching at the fingers
as flames from mosquito torches filled
the round coral faces of my gauges
with apricot light

amounts of you, honey
come flooding in hundreds
an abundance of flutter
that plummet my stomach
I could suffer in wonder;
pick up & run from it
or find my lost grip
from the crumbling I numb in