the strands of your hair on the bathroom tiles aren’t sketching defeat. that’s you spitting disease in the face with another day you’ve woken up to.

I have an axe
with hearts gashed

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

this is what I want you to to see:
leaves falling because it is too late for them not to

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.

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

a folksome, gruesome opera
of gauze and malcontent.

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

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

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

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

Now that the Israeli has left, it falls
on me to make the salad.

You’ve spent a lifetime training
for this.

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

In my universe, my arm carries a heart and flowers,
my back a misguided quote

Winter sat like a wolf
on the horizon.