Ghosts for hire, whispers in her mouth,
cysts to feel, the symmetry of a gift.

I am still waiting for the lion

my love is a glass shard, a knife made of madness and moonlight,
and there are already way too many fragments in this house

I imagined a cascade of slow death for all / that mattered…

you quit wearing pants
loaf around your yard
in hole-nipped panties

You are strange, my mother said, dwelling on the past.

We found in his suitcase T-shirts, his siddur, gifts he bought for his grandchildren…

the man is stayed bent over the canvas
of my sofa. the man is me the man is him
self and I bring down the whip…

I don’t
know why
I’m in the garden
kneeling on dirt

You’ve spent a lifetime training
for this.

my friends’ fathers are
dropping
I mean dying
like flies

you know that
baby swallows make silver ripples
in wild rivers to court reeds?

Winter sat like a wolf
on the horizon.

My grandmother asked, “Does it feel like being widowed?”

There is so little left of the tomato plants.

Just starlight and some small scribbling across vinyl.

You said it was okay to blame
what goes wrong on the planet

I want to roll in this moment until I become its vocabulary
until I smell like the bones
until I am its echo…