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        i.        The conceit is this:

                                   I love you

your little deaths

the sun in your smile

the space of your skin

your unseen everything

 

      ii.         your unseen, every—

leaves me topsy

turvy, and I fall

tender upon ebb

cresting your wave;

an exorcism rise

 

   iii.          an exorcism rise

unfurled as God’s

wink: a desire

I hum to shadow

unspoken

unspoken

 

   iv.           an unspoken rhythm

broken within bone

hymns pulling marrow

marrow pulling hunger

& you—open-eyed love 

and its bare conceit

October

 

Dear October,

 

                        you’ve disrobed

                                                breadth of earth

                                                littered

                                                            in your sunset

detritus

                                                cast

                                    to the whims

                                                of decay

                                    bare—

 

you whisper

                                                corners

                                                to the wind

                                    stolen eddies

                                                            plucking strings

                                                of home

 

                        and I

breathe you in  

and linger

                                                               

September

i sip
reverent—the nip
of yesterdays &
their call

i’ll linger here—taste
the equinox,
its air

and the moon

i’ll break
gaze—bend
darkness
to its halo

this too—a devour
of home

Another universe

 

 In a parallel universe, August is the only month

and I am the end of the world, watching the last sun

curtsy

 

In this universe, I dress Love in my skin

and you and I, city-blind

feast

 

on golden-hour cloudbursts

sousing sunlight into gray seams

as the horizon bleeds technicolor

 

and I break upon prophesy

remembering—rainbows fade

before the end

 

In a proto-universe, I am God’s

thought bubble—empty

midnight before light

 

 

DO YOU GUYS EVER THINK ABOUT DYING?

 after Barbie

 

 

 

only after a stiff drink

when the taste of butter

swallows stale

under dark

 

only after midnight

when the walk home, muted

and each star becomes a wish

for a different life

 

only under fluorescence

when the din of Netflix

dips to a clock tick—a countdown,

a pulse of descent

 

only after Call Me Chihiro

wondering why saving herself

is the same as forfeiting

everyone she loves

 

only after I’ve saved myself

for the 116^th time

looking for the rainbow,

exhausted

Things I know

 

after Laura Gilpin

 

 

 

that rain is the joyful collapse of cloud

and silver linings are pricked hearts

that the sun silks down its yellow into red

and sunsets are failed prose

that desire is the shape of windows

and each darkness, a prism

that the hollow heart can take a bullet

and eyes become scarred fractals

that humans are maladaptive inventories

and we have all been unsafe tolerance

that the continuum of anxiety is a snooze button

and the left-hand side of wrong is an empty bed

and that I’ve mined past the dark of Balrog

and the joyful collapse of cloud is me