here the rocks are breathing
how i say your name
pushing each vowel delicately
like they are their own language
every consonant a new small world
of meaning.
how i tear it in two
my eventually, my soon
my never in this life.
at least losing you
feels a bit like
how i hold your body
in my palms, a
small paper boat run
aground under my name
every fraction of the night
is a new kind of hell
how i suck the earth into my lungs
one string at a time
tethering me to a youth
i’ve never been
i see her, i mean me, young
and she’s always growing up
but she’s never fully grown
how i remain constant
gravity in the middle of the moon
like a turpentine spill in the
back of a room where
you fucked my brain
with your wild mouth
how i was sure
that i could be a starling
the second row of bark
on a willow tree. snug and dry
that i could be waxwing and dove
or some flightless thing
dying in the grass, never knowing
sky. never knowing how it feels
to move through unfamiliar
hands and feel new
and feel free like water
through a spring
and oh, God knew
how i loved you
and he blushed to know it
a tiny affectation on his dumb
cheek. he kept telling me i
slipped through the wrong
skin. but now that i know
about you, about this,
how will anything be the same?
how feathered bird, how lichen
how mossy cliffside
how i need, how i slip
how i pine and soft groove
how i splinter, how i silk
running behind the boat
drowned and useless and
waterlogged by the current
the urgency sitting over in
the next world
on her sad whore lap
even the fear knows.
she can smell it
how i saw the whole thing
the brushwork exact
but by the time i knew
what we were
in that life
the picture skinned
its child knees on
the ground
squashing itself flat.
it was leaving, slipping
into a never-world
and i was a birdcall, trapped