his ears picking up on the announcement of 
corn chowder from twelve to two
but also hearing the thin, white-mist howl of wolves
pushed past wet muzzles and blue-dotted tongues
(they go in caves, Danny, where it’s warm)

Wallabies stop; sniff the air, bound off up the hills and away. 
Snakes take to their hollows. Something has changed but 
the sun stays the same and the heat and not even a cloud 
in the sky when the mullock heaps stir. Hands sifting for gold 
emerge from the piles, push back stones from the dirt.

Nothing was ever just the wind or the house settling or probably nothing ever again would be afterwards. Our wait for silence was actually a vigil for the noise we had so missed.

Call me Biter:
rubber and blood,
just an accident.

Five minutes turn into ten minutes turn into forty while thin tendrils of blood are running across His arm, down His hand, and he’s crying because His ‘go-to’ has finally collapsed from hundreds of jagged needles, missed shots, and dehydration.

My wolf, I have your four long legs
but I have not learned to run.  My wolf,
some scents are missing, in the tapestry

Think of me as the
right moment to 

bloom into sickness----

But we are better than what we run into. 
We do not call out for the judgements, they just come 
and come and come 
and cross over us like birds uprooted, 
fleeing something else.  

There are people all over
this town with my 
teeth marks in them.

When I fall, my head hits a desk, 
leaves a gash. I dip my fingers 
before heading to the nurse, show Mr. Crone.
Thin he answers.

Cut the turf of the wall. Don’t take him out

Through the door. What leaves that way

Can also come back. Now the corpse is through; seal the gap.

His fingers are stiffening; give him his axe.

when you smell fire & charred fur on mineral bite of winter 
I am thinking of you 

Cash only for the
needle of gin, confetti
pitch of the sax,
and Capone.

We paint ourselves a mingled memory
of wet words in a clinging storm

that congeals pleasure into folds
and bitter flesh into pulpiness.

My mother wants the dead to go away,
tired of how they pop up among the list of the living,
in whatever the last profile picture they selected
not knowing it was the last.

how she stays silent the whole time. 
Her eyes are closed and her lashes fan 
out across her cheek: 
I decided that this is what religion looks like. 

In the bar, Miss Carey’s song on, “Honey.”
If you were ten years younger, had no kid

wee’d still be smoking along the river,
watching Frogtown ducks swimming in the dark.