******* no longer feels like I am trying to pull a
glass heart from the smallest hole in my body
but I can still exhale poppy seeds
from between my legs,

have sweat catch my hair with its Elmer’s glue,
split the mermaid fin into ten spread toes,
tune guitar strings with my fingers,
and paint a postcard whenever moonlight spills milk.

I capture every **** in nature
fantasizing about the points of a star protruding
like *******.

It is natural for my skin to slip inside my skin
to break levees the way waterfalls open for summer –
drown sorrows in the sink
that creates freckles on my love’s face.

And when I think of him, and when I finish building a
bridge to the self-nirvana I taste,
I am as a mother bird making a nest twig by twig.