Culling the flowers, I gather up
what is left all my small griefs
plucked from the furrow of my brow
to smooth across my lap like a tongue
laden with honey, moving hot and low
against my mouth a lover already lost
— I swear
no one can hurt me now.
I catch the leaping grass bugs house them,
backs against the wall in the shell
my hands make
and I am by all accounts kept,
only the hot air makes room for me
in that highway mirage where vision
writhes all that dares remain still, where
I find my hair curled in more clumps
around the drain than stolen away between the
fingers of someone I love
— when you reminisced
on the days you felt free, I hope you know
I was never free.
That year you forgot
my birthday, I sheared off the rest
of my hair and began making crop circles
in the backyard trampled down
the heads of grass until all bowed
at my feet with a praying mantis’
reverence and I am
pious in a field lit only
by candlelight, I too burn all the way
down to the wick a liquid heat
pouring out from both ends
but like Millay, I cannot disentangle
the knots inside
is it loneliness or love that makes me
shove my body
into a fence corner out by
the blackberry bush until the blades
of my shoulders slide out
onto the grass fusing together like
the back of a Japanese beetle.
Imagine this like the moment before escape the beetle's frenzied
squeeze of the fingertip the release oh how I craved some
tenderness be still be still lay
low but still I pick the fruit too early
the flesh too pink too young
the skin disintegrating in my hand
before it can become anything else
— and I tell you,
the body remembers.
I am uprising.
I always want things
before they’re ready.
that deciduous bird-milk milked-bird soaring
low those swallows long and dry that
bone-burn burrowing deep inside a burned-
wet empty-wet sock that perpetual hole in the economy-
shoe a kind of petal-sorrow kept at bay a
mothering-gaze of sepal-sorrow sometimes stamen-sorrow
is useful and lonesome like a false god a kind
of calcined-holy wetting the tongue a blade
of grass a calcified-holy milk gushing
forth bringing your butter-bones to their knees and
that bird-milk goes down singing right
before contact with that burned-wet
sorrow that sweet petal-sorrow.