tides pull.
Are you there, Kyle?
He was singing in a cartoon.
You have fourteen days
before lunar night turns to lunar noon.
Have you heard, Kyle?
He was hardly in a car ever.
I’m still ringing through loose strata.
Laika needs a lullaby and you
used to pet my dog’s soft ears.
Shade
Fingernails under wallpaper
scratching sound like palpable
air, scatter-pattern of hands
behind your headboard, the face
you’re sure—a third floor
window, the peripheral whisked
looking in—what don’t you
believe? A boy the color
of a lightbulb cowering
in the corner of an old
hotel or rounding a wind-licked
house in full flee. Not eyes,
not corpuscles or corpses. The stain
of shape. The sand-scrubbed
rubbed-thin trace of veinery
pressed into stone. A violence
so shattering, his body not bulwark
or ballast enough, the spirit
jerks loose and imprints itself,
releasing his huddled, focused fear
like dust from a hung rug.
Skin icing over nerve, you want
to believe feeling evaporates, leaves
nothing, not even
a wet mark. Emotion a scrim
like early morning mist or just morning
touching bodies in their beds.
The Dead, Dreaming
In this half-gleam
we don’t
sleep, but glisten
continuously.
Where the light
might
—we catch, sheet
lifted and bit
in the pin.
Does it concern you, this
being of one body?
Consider
hair, how much of it
is wind, how the wind
tatters
to tendrils and the tendrils
touch.
To be inside such
opalescence,
skin of milkglass, with inmost
listening the bridge of evening
and a child’s lost progress
past us
disquiets.
Dreaming, her one foot
leaving, we cling.
We would air her
nothingness
among us, safe
from the brightness,
the pulsing,
and the pocket of eggs
seed
deep in our teeth.
Before the flickered windows,
daily dirtying of [] pages,
[] murmured words
you’ve tried so hard to inherit.
Myth
She of the unwritten
question, and he who plucked
her lambent answers
into hymn.
Who’d twined her with a strummed
thrumming and taught
her tightening eyes how a self
from all its hemmed-in skin,
insistent listening,
can unhinge.
Now outside of her
smallness,
following.
She owed him
his hunger, the chance
to diminish her.
Or diminish from him, and to her
some air,
the sound that flows on the grey hills
and gathers, alluvial in rooms.
She was learning how to be
limitless,
a scented stain, a tarnish
wandering, child
wading for the first time eternal
into the far glittering
where
