She unrolls like sharp and gold wire
toward decorous flowers.
I see the peach unmoving of them.
The family faces of them.
I hold a bouquet and push my face in the faces of roses.
Their childlike cheeks
satellite around me.
My father sanctions this tuberose carpet.
Who is the yellow bird that flies over?
Black arrows painted on ceremoniously on its wings.
Who is the bird?
Platinum fish fight through the sea
to have me / be had by me
I feel their involuntary muscles shatter the air.
I hide my fingernails.
I draw grass on the floor.
This isn’t true……….
My father wasn’t around.
For youuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu…..
I drink an iceberg
Titter the aureole of
my incomprehension.
To hold the ponytail of
your roan body
lambasting across the capital that hates you,
And yet,
My JOY
like aloe vera.
With her full arms.
Thanks me.
You’re in the next room with our daughter.
Basil as grace notes,
feathers of basil in the strainer
as water searches through.
I buy hats with brims
Then I black out
finking behind the berries.
This isn’t true………
I wake up with “party bruises” on my head.
You can’t be here when my roommates wake up. You are like Galilee,
the reflection off Galilee when we gathered around
the alto,
the ring bearer.
We were marrying you.
You were marrying us.
I told a bad joke
because I hated myself
but couldn’t afford
the classroom of my hatred.
You took martini glasses away from me.
When you proposed, I remember only
the upthrust of my greasy fingers.
What happens to a “regular” person
shame-walking through Confederate memorials?
TBH: It feels like you said this before.
Must you always be looking
into the trunk of our car?
Sometimes people somersault into your garage.
Hold knives to your throat
and cut you.
When you are brown,
you are a gambler, madam.
Do you know the son
wilted down on the concrete.
We thought he was dead.
Mammals do that.
They can do death to survive.
It feels like I’ve seen this before,
like we’ve done this before.
Like some
some new Great Plains wind changing species
manipulating each state
spring
break.
Image Credits: Leonie Nowak
