why don’t you open me up & sip from my heart
then glance towards your landscape
and pull it towards you with an umbilical cord
stolen from one of my countless holes, gaps in me

why don’t you open the sun up & let it breathe
just the way my pancreas pumps, sinking in
                      and spitting up
little shards of glass you wedged inside

gathered from tree-babies, lifted from the sky
the world’s so green but you would rather separate  
                                           my thighs
         see the realm that grows in my body

give the fauna a wet kiss & sip the gore stringing
from the core of it, pure poreless skin
i tell you what to do but i really just want you
to want me the way naïve terrain curls around life

your hair is on my desk
it must have fallen out when I
found your comb and caressed it

with my nose, my fingertips
I gathered one last whiff
of your scent

your hair is on my desk
follicles of it are kind of dead
but I think I can feel your breath

thank you for leaving me this
small present.

Your hands rap-tap-tapping on my thigh
the beat sounded like a rhyme –
I replay it in my head, it sounds again
like two bodies swaying across a city line
and wave the departing trains goodnight.

Neither moves to enter it. We just sit.
Your hair grazes a bone along my neck –
lays long enough to curl down my chest,
I count the seconds where we rest.

Everything has become a song to me
and the tune plays effervescent on repeat,
passing as buildings do from our seat in
this car strumming down December leaves –
seven days I had you from jaw to knees.

I kissed a man and he called me a *****
the name floated like a swan upon glass waves
but I tucked it into my nightgown,
I saved it away. Then one morning he said
it again and I wore it just like pearl feathers –
oh, such a shine that brightened my face!
I am a *****, I told him, but at least I get laid.

The man I fell in love with is tall and dark.
I want to center jewelry on his neck and fingers,
lace it between edges, pits. He is tall so
my lover has more acreage than I ever will –
I can hide my secrets in his head. I
can wrap my veins around his wrists, I can love
the scars in place of where a child once bit.
I will even show him where I am most
pink to make sure he knows what brightness is.

I felt more pure after I lost my innocence:
your breath on mine, the scent of angels
chorused from our neck to spine to cheek
and drifted to a southern ridge of my body –
I knew, I knew it was the best I’d ever be,
merged with a man who found my purity.

It was light on the skin, a delicate blend
of morning’s hellos and an evening’s rest –
you you you grabbed a ******’s pale breast
and I I I let you ******, handle, change it.

Then no longer a girl, I laid on my side –
oh, how I felt when you were still there!
I was not chilled or lonely, I became alive
and kissed your coarse edges I had known
inside my frame, my pinkness apart so
he would find my purity going by, by, by.

The ivory flower
in stone, she cannot move
and breathe as petals do

separate
and separate

I see the centerpiece,
the head reaching from a
black hole

it says if you do not
move, I will want to be

inside of you –

an ivory flower fell from
the stem from which
it bloomed

and became as hard as
stone

separate
and separate
the flushed folds of June.

I am glad that I can love you again,
take you from the attic and
remove the quivering death things –

we are alive! Not the ghost of
lovely beings loving, but ourselves.

And how we sin together, how we
have the courage to inhale each
wine-sweet cupboard’s wood chips:
upon bread, the wheat can breathe

a fawn shade your skin, the lamp
of which granted the only light
speckled for months in your eyes –

I gave you enough, but not truly a
love to life for. It was a brother

of dust sheaths or a sister of winter
leaves, their final lapse of green
having swam from her mother tree:
I am glad that I can love you again

and that you continue to love me –
independent of the attic packed
with our dark, decomposing things.

You were as small as a seed –
     a package I had opened and life
                    jumped out at me,

blank, but ready to grow.
                No, I said. No no.

       I do not love the things that
are not already alive –
    that way, they face no death.

And so I aborted you that day,
     Goodbye, seed, I said.

A package won’t let you breathe,
             may you jump out from a
        more deserving belly.

Perhaps I will have love made to me
soon by a kiss that sloshes like sewage
and feet hung limp over the carpet:
our entrails laced in its plush, a spiral.

Mine tried so hard to reject yours –
as you sipped my pink flesh, coral hit
a very funny part of us I thought I
would bleed. But it was just me
opening, closing, opening & shutting.

The words were local: I need I need,
still enveloped an umbrella above
our pea-shaped, wintery things.

And spherical as scallops or stone,
I had mind enough to breathe in body
air, dust, slivers of your bedroom –
the corner where another love
will be warped & coiled inside of me.