The way there are stripes of light that cross my wall like small bodies
of jesus; the way a boy once dampened me into his chest
and then spit me out again, like spoiled goat; the way the crumbs
that have spilled onto my bed remind me of your body; the way
there are flocks of geese here instead of blocks of concrete

(The way I am not a wolf like you think I am, the way there is no fur to cover
my belly)

These days I have felt much more related to my father
than to my mother – these days there is wine in my system
the same color as the blood from my first period

these days I am looking at my body the way a man with a gun
looks at deer ****

I picture a beach covered in deer ****
with you somewhere in the middle of a pile of gory antlers

On this beach it is winter, my hips shivering with ice,
your hands over my skin – skin like the walls of a slaughterhouse.
Your hands are somehow not trembling; but somewhere
I smell jellyfish as though it were a corpse and somewhere
my body is as brutal as another boy’s bed

For a week I was sleeping in another boy’s bed and proud
to tell you --

Some nights it is as though there are no streetlamps on this campus:
“I am no longer in the city, stop talking to me.”