I donate an ion. I donate a verse. I donate an egg. I donate a hearse.
These are the tiniest of traces I bring to this swollen earth.
I take my wounds to you not to free them,
but to work you into the cut.
I expose my belly to you first so that I lay down my arms.
And for the Irish, that shit’s real tough to do.
But if you knew your enemy was a poet, would you still slay him?
If you knew your lover was a wolf, would still you clamor to cage?
Towers delight the daywalkers
and caverns retire the tepid.
I have loved mice men
and challenged jaguar women
All to bring triangle to close.
And in the aftermath of all bacchanalia,
the jaguars live bright but burn hard,
The mice live small but die long.
And who are we to say which is better?
…when agape comes to burn holes in us all?
She is a dandelion blowing her blame out to the righteous.
A dainty victim made of iron and sturdy rule.
He is the damage that comes from diplomacy,
The impotence enacted by good etiquette and faked grace.
For within every good defense, is a sturdy attack.
Your taste is now the creak of a swinging gate,
That both lingers and vinegars the soils to come.
And with my tongue cutting at you, and your silence filleting me,
We are two angry livers where only turning north used to be.
He gives it for eve and then takes it back to city.
I give it for life and let it be without walls.
Better that I do it, the breaking.
You are a promise that was never made, but is hoped for still.
He blisters through an apartheid
that is self-noosed and razor carved,
A knife to bark in permanence, a ring to finger in penance.
To find my truth I need to know his.
But she dragged him back by a taloned ear,
like a pinching nun doling penance.
Beating him down with the poetry she had stolen—
An interloper noosing him by our words.
Hovering relentlessly within me there is a bird
rattling its cage to love you recklessly.
Though he is without compass and without claim to Her,
He tames my wildness by blaming me for the loss of his.
He loves me timidly and then wildly and then carelessly.
Fracking me open to dissolution with the shrapnel of silence.
And then asking me to make him breakfast in the morning.
We bunny wolves to boxes and walk them down aisles.
We ride them and ring them and then retire them.
Leaving her old and dry and mortgage-tied—
With a calloused heart and an angry muffin top.
But in every compass, there is a quiet set point.
And always that little bit of you inside that little bit of me.
A magnet in the needle
dedicated to the best days
found inside the reaches of you.
When a decaying wave reminds her
that she was nobody’s North but her own.
