1. Princely I am, as Michigan loam, as carefully turned mud, as old, old dust––
my breaths are still and unresolved and don’t dissolve in alcohol like snakes or dead, bloated fish––
I am nothing monumental.
2. Stuttered breaths lie in limp open circles around our feet, hanging by threads of unmade promises––
symmetry was never my forte. The bent nose, the crooked lips, the slow-ballooning wen where nitrogen bubbles–– my flesh is like untilled soil, all raw and swollen with possibility.
3. You asked me if it was probable to find life on Mars where the iron-leeched sand crumbles like dried hemoglobin.
I don’t know about amino acids or genesis or the first man of Dust,
much less mysteries of lovesickness, respiration, really good ***–– We’re barren in different ways;
your dust comes from dreams, from heaven, crimson and majestic and dead as Olympus Mons
while I am like moon dust, just as cold as your bone-dry lakes of carbon dioxide, but paler, heavier,