News slaps on our borrowed stoop—

             a second chance to know yesterday

       not for its humidity but for its brash acts.

Plastic icebergs, blue carnations, glue

       made hard and transparent by patience, the year

             coalesces around a doll’s hair, its sap shine.

      Where a sidewalk sharpens secrets into pennies,

mica incinerates a whiff of light—
 

     Speak to me.

             Daughters, our faces are not ours

       but borrowed, as sand from shore

is sucked out to a sandbar.

       A monstrous house, its insides turned out

              in the wreck of time burns

       its red dress at daybreak.

I flick my pocket lighter,

      my first transgression:

           Fire is mine to hold.

      Gels mold over the peat, smoke its theater.

I pretend I’ve always scrolled down Broadway,

       never learned to count to twenty. Pretend

              I fear neither ash nor wasp.
 

+
 

Once, in a canyon

      I watched a ram charge a peach carcass.

The news rolls on. Like pretty girls

       in bodega light, I pretend

             not to see what sees me. Which is to say, I do

       not want vision, my primary form of suffering

             to close.

       I open my collar. A sparrow

               exiles itself to a black blossom.

      There is spring waiting in cardboard walls.

             On the step, the ergonomic handle of a razor.

       On the sill, three wicks curl. Dull blades

                  still cut. My legs

           are built to kick. Her legs,

                 tusks.

+
 

       In the club, a song sinks into the well

of shoulders, its beat, chief of blizzard and gunfire.

       I hold my breath for the length of a joke—exhale.

               Her eye nets shadows like the wings of extinct insects. 

        Rust, the darkening fabric of a pink spill and sound

               its cavernous appetite, replace the bruise. This is to say,

        the subwoofer clocks our childhood back an hour.

              Rabid country, your tune has lost its dancehall.

       Spits its anthem from one side of the boombox—

as link by link, the year opens

        its choke chain, says, put your head in—

                                  it’s time

           to farm new moons from clavicles. We’re still young

                 enough to pry a shore from its amputated palm. Later,

    in a bathroom curtain, black jeans long gray

in the folds of last decade’s catalogues, I refuse the day

      its art. I watch her sleep

with clenched fists, sing

       into closed fists, the sky

              pink and blue as a newborn.