You rise first
Nestled and warm
You watch your friends sleep
And see the child in them
Moving now
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Tusk—waddle—storytelling over dinnertime—dew of the foot when the sock slips off—in the waters off naughty dorset—boy in arms vers boy—hair coarse—tortoiseclaw, enamel, a sublatent sense of shame—beachy foreskin stretch over inner thigh…
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Just imagine being this alive:
an atom on the planetarium ceiling,
a government moon
shrinking in the cold
tethered to data
barely a germ when all this began.
Annik gets excited covering other people’s faces. Loaves of bread, silk scarves, their own with a hand if you try to get a picture. They have a sunny face, a bright face like a fried egg. It’s fast to worry about getting caught.
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The thunderstorm is a verdict
on the day as yet undelivered,
prophesied by a boisterous wind
that cools with the fresh clean smell
of a barber dusting the hair off your face
with a talcum-powdered brush,
the gentle swishing never ceasing.
Between the lines creasing on their foreheads,
before they tuck themselves into bed,
lies a tender silence
of a twenty-seven-year-old romance
that needs no words for celebration.
There was Judy, my twitchy-eyed doll, so much smaller than I remember.
And Canyon, the cougar—where was his girlfriend Cinder, the bear?
The couple who never had children, but always had each other.
Like any Korean altar,
fuji apples, nashi pears,
and navel oranges
are constructed into
neat cylindrical towers.
The magic of stacking
fruit upward is skewers
Like the dot of a lowercase i
think vertically but am still dis
connected from the body.
i is cut in two—beheaded,
Years later, I think to myself
of course it was you
the first to give me all the things
I’d always longed for
I told a cop I was sober for a decade
He said he didn’t care
I made an L shape and cocked it
He called me an easy son