M.

I slept in your shirt last night, over-sized and forgotten at the bottom of a pile of long-washed clothes haphazardly shoved into a closet with half-broken hinges.

day 0 & day 5: the kiss

Poem Used: an excerpt of when men started calling... by Shinji Moon

I’m wearing my skin and it 

clatters when I walk, and

no one prepared me for 

this.

Day 4: If

time is linear,
you will never happen again.
                     --  love me now

Day 1: fragmentary

To just stop will mean no more swish or fizzle or bubbling, no delusion of
an interval.
Then, the music.
In the meantime, don’t ask, he won’t hear you.

from “The Book of the Dead Man (Silence)” by Marvin Bell

1. When I first found you, I thought to myself how interesting you must have been to have shown up in the middle of this tumultuous ocean with me, emerging from the underside of a boat near-sinking. I hoped you would teach me how to tie a knot to combat the raging sea or slit a throat without wincing; instead finding out that you had escaped a prisoner and knew nothing of the water.

2. Best viewed under moonlight, under premise, under siege.

3. I will never recover from you.

first date idleness

The curve of lips
curving, curling
folded like cloth,
a stack of linens
a swan sitting
on a dinner plate

perhaps pressed
against a mouth
to dab away red,
pressed against
a neck, pushed into
a blouse, lipstick
staining, fresh

the curve of lips

burdened

She watches him speak

Twenty is such a hollow number, barren and earthbound

imagine surrender; running in the night from blindness

falling like a tree in an empty room silently sobbing

damp soil beneath worn boots on a manufactured forest floor

the bones in his mouth  grinding profanities when he cannot sleep

in a stranger's house he still hears the fighting, voices raised, fists

where a spine should be; crumbling

the idea of place called home

She watches him speak

The same lips loved by a twelve year old girl

now quiver with the sorrows of a boy who has kept too quiet 

wishing to fasten his buckling knees- biting down

petalled mouth bleeding, skinnied and sun-burnt and cliff-edged; 

spine shot straight, eyes still

wandering like a child who has walked the earth alone

a soldier by the side of a river waiting for the forest to burn

She watches him -

he is a pool of something viscous, crawling from battle

hands over discarded rings; 

imagine surrender.