Though my hair is not black, it is a perfect
dark. It is dark but I am walking to school, tracing the
path to morning. It’s true: this night is fog hung and cold. But
mostly, I am still ablaze with an embrace I cannot shake. My
love is a way of being. Coo coo. Your bones pitch soft
still, & a daisy still a daisy under your boot,
under the dark, too. The mist, still. My intentions always
less than blue. Fucking to police sirens and not getting free. Not
looking down at whatever tripped me. But searching for
my body with my own hands. It is this way that I become that
monument: a tree. No point distinguishing the moss from the
bark. I am tree. My limbs, clutched in your
shuttering wind. Look
how they’ve lied to us. The forest meets the shore in many places.
Look how my hands are ocean too. How my fingers greet my wrists
like the river’s delta to the sea, split threads you can wind back to
one with your tongue. Ask me in my dark blue amble if I dare
to unpucker. Fall
to the familiar entanglement of limbs, fall in love with this hurt.
Lastimar. Significa que te doy todos mis semillas.
Limbs vining everywhere. The casted foot peeking out of the
bathroom stall. The chugging arms of the man who hikes with two
bottles of diet Coke in his backpack. 7-year-old Abel, who my eyes
left untouched, kicking the stand where he’s selling flowers 25 cents
a bunch. My ghostly hold. Your scratchy one. May there be
enough ice caught up in the night for soft, sporadic rains by morning.
By June, may there be dragonflies. I’ll let you empty your stomach in
my lawn.
For now, November, my chosen solace is the sound of the street
sweeper making it’s rounds. The body’s labored groan is a hushed
and potent promise of freshness, a possible morning.