THE SHADOW

for Elizabeth Grosz

Toggling time
by eye
a couple blinks
into the future
makes the kids dizzier
to leave one blonde
comma and return through another
while the gap is stuffed
with rough visions of brain life
we watched the shadows turn back
into a dumb basil leaf
when speech combs for beauty
we rave against it
like weary green giants
sleep against valleys
rising and falling
to cry
quietly forward
without the courage
of crying harder
we buried our disguises
within the complication gender
brings easy to our pronouns
which must all be reinvented
watching the shadows turn back again
into a wound on someone’s body
where they were split open
by the disruption blinking makes
time travel isn’t easy
it rips everyone apart
I lost everything
when I went
and had
to reinvent
all of it
even the pronouns
even the way I
turn myself into shadow

THE PAUSE

for kari edwards

These pauses
fill us up
like Joe’s cut flowers
to shore against the hollow
where talk suffocates luck and safety
to pile the clouds against home
in the eyes of someone’s animal
I tried to unthread numbers
but that’s what time
seemed to be
moving toward
face decimated
by war-sex
verbing all the objects
that knew I’d do anything
to get out of this microphone
saying your bed name to strangers
who only want a light
there’s an ugly hollow
between the waves
this decade
striking out
what goodwill founders
in the open mouths
of the dead we bought
I couldn’t be more not myself
trembling at logic’s severed silver edge
so here’s the hopeless part
my mouth is open
kept that way
the dead
gather there
in the pauses
or else sew flaws
into its tight red webbing
because we must say something wrong
if we want the hollow gone
whose intelligence is proffered daily
like a bright food
that only starves
in cluttered
throbbing pauses
we must trust
the air to carry
us past absence into flesh
our pores pausing open like moths
where dust is part of light
and our song is carried
on by the particulates
we busily sloughed
to fill
the room

THE STORY

for Ish Klein

What still
asserts here
its closed mouth
hum through sun
asserts all of it
sky in the fly
hand folded into grimy hand
or a pimply Egyptian lime
bobbled onto the cold wet grass
to hide amid the early green
evening shadows like a knot
the thing that I love
is letting that hum
flame quietly from inside
as she sleeps
its yellow murmur
slowly unfurling
between her
strange open lips
stranger still for
what they also assert
in their quiet rumble
the story wants to disappear
like a pulled slipknot does
in the hands of someone young
enough to wonder after its going
and it seems she could
free all of herself merely
by the air’s consort
to rise unevenly or
shyly diffuse through
this sunning room
where hum
moves on