Meanwhile you
my dear composer
are flying up there
in your very own
turboprop fighter trainer

I didn’t cry, so we drank wine on our dark purple couch
and you fell asleep in a little ball listening to the weatherman
talk about how much snow we were going to wake up to.

What he would do
is just a little harm. With his bitty
bullets, a meager massacre of
men mass manufactured and plentifully
in stock.

About the morning I was born, I know
nothing---about the first, sharp contractions
that tore Mother’s belly, bending her over the back
of a chair.

Our roots fibrous,
souls still hardened in our ankle-bones,

We danced on sand dunes and hung
in parallel crescent moons on mud

I wanted to have faith,
and maybe I could have,
if not for all those cries, the men
running up the hill

This night is a shard
of glass. It is a dark, shut mouth
and I am stranded inside.

forget death, drinking your
coffee, reading the news, six
a.m. It’s there, an invisible
deadline taunting in your ear—

A stumbling red fox in New York City
is like a child in the sun on a summer day,
scattering details, desperately solving
problems that are humanly possible.

wind like angry prayers
and soil turns to lifted ash

and desolation’s face remains
glued into the earth

She walked away, crossed the street,
plopped into the plastic swivel chair.
Her bare feet pointed and flexed over the
metal bar, beside the pile of curls.

This year is different.
Out of two packs of seeds, a dozen nasturtium and cosmos
have come up. A dozen all together. A small victory.

once upon a time, you were softer
but every lost puppet who called you Blue Fairy,
tried to make himself real in your arms,
only transformed you into something other than yourself

An organ is an instrument or wet smush inside a casing

Turn sideways to navigate a movie aisle pre-Covid

What is a movie and how large is it? How many hands?

Their mistress walked into the room, carrying no watering can,
No refreshing draughts of fertilizer. She didn’t question
Why a broken stem of Christmas cactus lay on the floor,
Just shoved it in a glass and added cold water.

You carried sea moths brightly to their tombs. I have tricked us far too long, make you slide me letters on wires as I dangle low on the dock, watching the infants grow legs

“Oh, sorry,” I reply with a neutral expression, though irritated by the gouges in my door. “I look like the artist,” I say, “but I am not him. I’m actually proof of his mastery—a copy sprung from a self-portrait he did a few years back.”

She carries a rose in her mouth that absorbs blood / turns into a sword when she needs to fight a beast / her horse looks like a robot horse but breathes air and loyalty