peripheries

iii.

Two sailors’ hemal inheritance sieve / through

my belly in ebb and charge / of aircraft, cardiac tick

carriers count in the fractions of a camouflaged series

​

Of maritime recipes sundered, / sundered

a hundred times / to anchor back

​

A thin blue house—the seawater / and splinters

on the shoreline of a familiar crescent sun / distant and cankerous

 

Between my lip and gum—this wet

dermal pain can get fucked / epoxying me / to apricots

and emery board, for drying me out / between the next

​

Pages of a book, a purple sycamore leaf /

and porcelain clover—think of me

as full: moonlit pride / of Eisenhower’s bicycle

 

Models’ filed 1040, a rowing team / misdiagnosed

as wolverines, smug, and green / carpet filling the cup

​

Of my palm where misery pools / pale

on the stone railing overlooking

 

The Seine / and into canoes, into the furrows of ankle

bones snapping / in the sharp air between bridge and cut-flowers /

in cellophane and promise—I slip a teaspoon / in the vase-water

 

—Sugar gathering / on earthquaked pavement—

they’ll live just / a little longer, if only I could dig this ache

from my ear / the piped instrument dawn breaks

 

Over / thunderheads and jumper cables

sung into a render / mustered by a mother-

 

Board running / to close chasms: hazel

diamonds / erupting from the caldera of my molar—a heart beat by da /

 

Vinci, Modigliani, Haudenosaunee, Montgomery hazmat teams / pouring

turkey feather ashes into Manilla envelopes / to: Sid Hill—who alive can

refit carbon laminae, curled / like an infant’s dozing fist?

 

 

iii.

Alive by olive oxygen tank and smoke aligning

by the horizon, a tennis ball / in a mastiff ’s jowl:

binoculars and absence / of hemoglobin—six rivets in a ship

 

For a husband / bound for recollection, reclamation,

exclamation—Lake Michigan / for a sidearm

 

Hold my hand like a goddamn man, elbows flat—/on the table

where the letters she’s ashamed to have / written, which I am

 

Decoding for the first time, in blue /misspelled cursive slowly

unravel unkind ribbons—still / I don’t know what to do

with someone who doesn’t like me/ who loves me—by pain’s

 

Greased shoulder joint, / custody of a folded quilt

in a dust mantle on a zipped-up duffel / which chips my mouth

open for water / like a brick path to the beach

 

Where robins / are relentlessly skinned from my arms—from deer /

born in the summer heat of knee blood—born in the grout / between epochs

 

Of ice: the singing mouth / beneath a palm,

the hot throat’s rising stone / of bile and fries and I—leave my hand

 

On the cabinet door / until I stain it with human oil,

memory / of The Name of the Wind and a heart’s

murmuring ululations bypass / seizures by one four-pronged

 

Lamp post / in a park afterhours, to another—a steering

wheel’s destroyed speech / centers and I cannot stop

rubbing my eye / against what tree that made this

 

Paper which changed their names / into evening—wear

the newspaper printed on your wings / and the omitted obituaries

 

Of my relatives / piled behind museum ropes, posed

with babies and spears / of light—

old on my face at the borders

 

Of fresh / cartographers tattooing my skin

with skin / how I imagine skin should feel.