Chile, the S-curve,
northbound
lane, South Shore Drive.
The scent between us sheds its skin,
its song floods the basement
of my eye. I see it swirl up
the heel-scuffed steps. You blink and it takes the light
Every glimpse of you is a gift, flesh-flash
in deathchance that blew itself
out. Straight thru me. This scent
from your breast
stalks itself thru the long odds
of my body. I’m alive. You
blink and I die. Blind tip. Your tongue can’t see
the hard-domed
entry wound high on my shoulder.
The one below, you say, looks
like it’s sleep
with a half-open eye. One
bullet’s still inside me. Dead metal
in my voice. You say that dead metal
when I say it,
you hold the metal in your name
like the bullet’s in your mouth, too heavy for its size
You blink and draw back
like you’ve heard a two-by-four crack.
You say, for you,
it’s a red-light boy with his hood up die bitch
you saw the kick push back his sleeve.
His gun, jammed, is always there. Deaf click of an open O
in your eye. You blink again, slow and long,
always and I stay dead
for ten seconds. Eyes closed,
you say the imagination’s infinite, the chance
of meeting there unthinkable.
I’m wounded in a way that makes me think
I can heal
around the metal. You say no matter how
much heavier than its size
allows,
it’s not enough. No
matter the metal, it’s no more than the sound
of sunlight and the taste of tin caught
in a bright sheet of water thrown across the grass from a pail
Like the shape of a scent, a voice with a bullet
in its chords will never
cover its shadow like lace
thrown over the top of a mirror. As far
as the mirrors go, you’re right.
You hold one. I, the other,
and light blows pieces
of us thru the room. I watch you kiss
the mask on my back. You wink a glow in a stainless
eye and scent shadows splay across the wall.
You’re in your full-length robe
of precision
and falling glass. I’m gone in blue light
thru a broken window
in your back, my limbs
break the beam
into spectrums of useless motion. The exit route
took a piece of my third rib, you
find the bone notch
with a finger and say this wound’s our fifth
nipple. It points away, rises always
to reach where the heat of your voice comes from
The snare rhythm of Method
and Mary from a passing car, —foryourbodyandyourskintone
the wrong vowel’s a pain net,
a stress in a word can turn flock of knives.
I gauze your face with my hands
and every night we lost what we lost
while you blink pours its wing-footed weight
back over us.
Eyes open, I see you seeing
me here. You blink. Pigments collapse
into a wound
and lighten the skin around it. An orbit
of surf against an atoll the weight of your name
what we
lost in my voice. The sound of that car rounds
the corner, loops the block,
you’re all, I need—lie
together cry together—they’re police, you say, they love that song
I push you back, away
from the light into velvet shadows
of the vestibule.
Clouded liquids
from a bowed sky bent like real trust
move between our mouths.
There’s always this
always between us. This metallic click. Our bodies
open and pressed against
the cold steel
of the front door, the
