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

I tap at the alphabet while a single deer
taps at the dirt beyond the brush
on the far side of the tree line.

You let the yellow glow
from eye sockets. The building up the street
is burning faster and faster.

Any still figure at mid-late evening, when the long shadows make even crumbs appear arranged like furniture.

love is a soggy tea stain on a grocery receipt

Even as the sun warms the concrete
the long nights’ sensual cold lingers in my clothes.

Empty vessels
make the most sound, I think,
as you rip the fairy lights off the handrail.

and apples, mackintosh mostly, but any kind left in The Pub
at the Assisted Living Place

He has stories that I am not in
anymore. It’s healed this way.

we drove on through
the blue seal of morning as the turbines
turned and winked out their hearts

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

You’ve spent a lifetime training
for this.

I have observed, the theorist
I am

Long after midnight, we’re talking about our first time

Winter sat like a wolf
on the horizon.

and then her eyes fully opened — blazed through with strands of mud