It was night until it wasn’t.
It was night until you crushed and ground
              the bones
to dust and swallowed around it.
Until you
               licked a stripe along a jaw
and laced your
             fingers in the notches
of a spine and
                                     called it holy,
               made it a sacrament.
The phone is ringing in another room, another house, another life.
The phone is ringing and you answer,
                                            but no one’s on the other line.
The phone is ringing and you answer,
                                              but it's not for you. The phone is ringing and
               you don’t answer.
Your lover walks into the room,
                                                      phone in hand,
and says 'how long will it be until you love me?'
You blink and the light turns silver,
                                              liquid moonlight hits your skin.
You blink
            and your lover walks in,
phone in hand, still ringing, and says
'it’s for you. your uncle’s dead.'
So you go the funeral, a different phone sitting like
        an anvil in your pocket,
and your aunt is the color
                                                   of famine.
There is wheat growing in the fields, still, although winter has sunk its teeth into the ground and ****** away its life.          
                                   Your uncle is buried under a broken sycamore tree,
still blackened from the fires, still shaking ash and dead leaves over the burial mound.
Your uncle is dead and interred in the fields of his farm.    
                                Your lover calls you on the different phone that your pocket protects and says 'if I were were double-headed and suspended in bliss, would you join me? if I broke your collarbone, would you forgive me? if I shoved your face in the gravel and spit in your mouth and snapped all your fingers and cracked open your head like an egg and told you how I really felt, would you still love me?' and you,    
                 standing next to the freshly-turned mulch, say “yes” and hang up.
                        You return to a hollow house, a room where the
light doesn’t quite reach,
and bathe in blood and milk.
Your lover rings like a bell,         like a flower opening and closing as if rehearsed, like a butterfly migrating,
                       like a deer’s head bursting open from the pressure of a bullet.
They ring and you come running,
                               slipping and spilling, from the waters.
You blink and, through the window,
see the dark-denim of the night.