The careful moon maunders through the glass ceiling
on these long nights
when I try to alchemize my visions into ships.
I imagine the mist moping among the larches—
the dewy bark that wakes,
looking for shadows of loggers in the grey.
On cold nights like this I sleep beneath a sheet, sweating,
dreaming of China’s violet sky exploding with hues
of a butterfly’s paper wings.
The summer air crackles above the pale girl’s tent—
a counterfeit ankh hangs between
her naked, sagging breasts—
and she sees the future in the reflection of her eye
on an Opinel’s blade—her iris wheezing into shapes.
She tells me there are gales ahead
like ones in schoolbook etchings of Poseidon.
Boys will choke on salt, she says,
or the ice will kiss the little princes to sleep.
But she coos how they look like dancers at a ball.
How many boys will be lost? I ask the girl.
All of them, she says with opium on her breath,
but this won’t stop you, will it?
In my favorite dream yolk sizzles on a cast iron as mother sings.
My older sister laughs, cheeks full of sourdough and jam,
and father’s wet hair drips onto his paper—
the ink of little letters smearing into bare branches.
The dream helps me forget that rain never ends where I wake,
where guilt’s proboscis feeds on hardened veins.
To whomever’s my son, please don’t put me in an elegy
where the memory of me will rot like wet wood.