Orb Eater
Float a line on the wind
and see what it catches.
A radius of silk built on the Y
of a wishbone and a wreath of smoke
haloed above your head
and below the moon’s skull.
Eat the tenderness morsels first,
and kitten lick your bloody cuticle.
Translate the dark hieroglyphics
power washed into your vinyl siding,
last year, into the language
of survival. Dismantle the idea of home.
Take the day’s hours and hide
away from and behind your own eyes.
In the apocalyptic dark
the hammock will hold you
in a fractal embrace
when no one else will.
The trampoline, a giant web doused,
made to glisten with lighter fluid dew.
Set it sacredly ablaze
and warm yourself with
an approximation of love.
Eat what you built. Start again.
Beading the Alphabet
You walk the dog because it is snowing,
fat flakes so big they catch your face and melt
into almost droplets. In the dark, the snow seems
to radiate out from the street lamps like dandelions
gone to seed and wish-blown, and the dark between light posts
reminds you of connect the dots and hopscotch, both, as a child.
A picture emerged; you rolled a rock and hopped on one leg—
you could use pencil lead to bring to being something that had not been
there just moments ago. You could skip over chalked boxes and turn
and bend to scoop a piece of gravel, all on one leg and you loved your body
for it. Your house is teenager loud and frenzied, full of music and jagged laughter
that bounces above it. The dog is wild with joy, but inside, you are still, and your body
sought the stillness of the glowing gray and silence secreted in snow. Not a single car.
You love your body tonight too, although it won’t be controlled and caused
embarrassment earlier by bleeding. Your muscles are soft and move with a warm oil ease
you attribute to sex, not all sex, but the sex you had this afternoon. You melted like
snow—all of you, inhibitions included and if you closed your eyes during, it was to go
deeper, not disappear from yourself and others, and when you opened them it was to read
his face like a page, eat with your eyes the taunt muscles of his arms, trace the branches
of the tree on his shoulder. Later you kissed the soft, hollowed hinge between forearm
and bicep and sighed because what words are there? The smell there can be found behind
his ear, the hollow of his throat, the ridge of his collarbone. You connected the dots of his
smell. Your fingers hopscotched his face, neck, arms. His hipbone a handle your palm
covets. How shy you feel, and ill equipped to articulate he makes pleasure seem an
alphabet, letters to be taught and beaded together into words inside your body and across
your skin. Pleasure so abundant—and newly discovered—so that it is this and this and
this and yes, yes, yes that and that too. It is only as you are driving home that cliché
climbs like Creeping Charlie and you think maybe what popped out of your mouth
authentically could be the talk bubbles above a storyboarded porn’s protagonist: Oh god!
That feels so good. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck me. If anything, that was real, the deep place, like
the eye of his kiss, the core, the unthinking only-being-in-it, forgetting everything but that
which is pressed up so fine against you. For a moment, the last streetlight before home,
the snow seems to bloom
just for you.