Ⅰ

Girl, maybe eight is old enough to use a knife

to cut carrots after school, Wednesday night.

Pours grease into the pan’s porous brow, slips

cuts finger and reaches for the tap.

Ⅱ

Curtains of mist

echo across deserts like a monsoon or a moment

caught by the window droplets on the recluse’s web.

Ⅲ

Catch man home from work in a yellow taxi cab,

rivers run on the windshield, blurs all the street lights together.

Makes the city smell alive.

Ⅳ

Beads form pearl necklaces on pretty glimpses

of exposed décolletage, wears steam shawl over shoulder blades.

Alphabet runs down the drain.

Ⅴ

Downey blue coats the metacarpal to baby’s scar

oiled alkaline, water reaches to kiss.

Ⅵ

Kettle screams interrupts the metaphor,

feel like home.

Ⅶ

Steam brushes woman’s nose,

runs slow like cough syrup.

Porcelain bites skin, leaves burn shaped like a dove

behind on the left forearm.

Ⅷ

If it was a matter of need,

all I wanted was snow tonight.

Ⅸ

Farmer wakes early,

looks to the cornfields of September.

Rains like April.

Ⅹ

Five year old boy hisses, orange cup clatters on the ground

Puddles on the floor.

ⅩⅠ

Six tablespoons in the lungs.

ⅩⅡ

Cracked lips, Dr. said swabs with glycerin.

(funny humans) final symptom: euphoria, as the last droplets leaves the system.

Body speaks softly,

I’m dying.

ⅩⅢ

tap squeaks, she reaches out,

watches water wash away the red.

If I say the words,

they will leave me

so I will pick up a smooth pebble, and skim it lazily across the silence

of Autumn's opulent haze,

and the water will yelp like a child.

If I hear the water cry,

a silver shrill, like a toy copper bell

I will miss a sound, not the way

one misses a place, or it’s golden hue

but to miss the feeling of home deep within the rib cage.

If I think of home

the inkling perhaps will traipse slowly to my brain

where the wires conclude that things can still be so great

that they cannot be willed into the palm of a creased hand

like a great body of water left untouched by morning.

But, if I think of water you must stop me.

Because, water brings the hum of lavender fields

calling me across a brook, and I shall follow it to where it gives way to a river.

For if I am a river, the fish are poetry, you are in love,

and I have written it all wrong.

I don’t drink coffee.

I remembered how

You said this

at the grocery store one night,

in the aisle where they sold dried mango, you told me you wanted to talk about the time

when we had sat on the bench outside for hours,

and I read and you thought about how the night sky could carry silence,

and the people, and the car lights, and the sweetness, and

how it tasted, the mango lingering, and

the stupidity of it all,

how in all of the places in the world we chose to end up here

and how I thought it seemed poetic,

and you thought it was a musical,

but we both were right,

because this would never make it to a mantel, we knew,

that this would become the page.

Then, you chuckled a bird whistle laugh,

and you reached for the cup at your sides,

you paused, squinting at the shopping carts, raising the cup to your lips,

drawing a sip beyond the smoke beading of the rim and

shortly after spitting the contents across the concrete, I learned how

it was perfect.

You hated coffee.