She tears the moon

from a picture of the sky. In the hollow

of her throat a moan forms, ballooning

 

like the low notes of a cello

rubbing rib, sending circles rippling in a murky cup

of mud. She taps

 

the rim of amnesia with a demitasse spoon.

A hundred ants have died in bliss

in the sugar jar, unnoticed.

 

 

You wake each morning, one minute

            before the alarm,

                        remembering how yesterday

 

you tied the ocean

to a post

with a purple strand of kelp,

but it pulled loose, wrapped your ankles, and dragged you out to sea.

 

At each confession, you tell the priest

you nearly drowned, 

how your mind became a metal cookie sheet,

                                    but there never was an ocean.

 

Today, your alarm clock rattles razors in a pewter cup,

voices ping:

plinking nickels, wobbling dimes,

tossed tokens on an empty bus.

 

Riding forehead to the glass, you chant an incantation,

to unlock the sure connection

between a butcher’s cuts in wood

and statues weeping blood above the sacristy.

 

You must hurry. Bury your offering

with the other hidden coins beside the Laundromat

because the teller at the bank cannot be trusted—

imagine her pockets full of all your missing quarters.

 

Light flecks on the windowsill reveal

footprints of creatures once ordained to number

sins and tally times

you’ve nearly died and did not know it.

 

Each night, you rewind

this twin-bell clock, marveling

at the silent fractions between

            tickings—the disregarded increments, wherein death inches forward.

 

 

 

 

 

Before daybreak,

memory shelves its vast collection out of reach:

confession, absolution,

His pulpit cannot hide the blank—

abandoned stump, mute,

                        staring down whispering pews.

Adrenal grip, cinch of gland,

bouldering into the chill without his keys—

all lung-burn, feather-breath

stumbling.

 

“This is the word for road,”

and is this road: shoe scuff, dust, cold sweat,

 

arms thrashing to unmesh the twisted

calligraphy scratching the moon

 

 . . . to whom shall we go? 

 

In socks and hard-soled shoes, he shivers;

                           synapses gape.

 

 

 

 

 

The men were the mill. Their hands pulled the levers

that lowered cranes and closed jaws,

clamping twisted metal scrap. 

 

Their straining arms and salt-stained backs tilted

ladles of orange molten iron. The men

were the mill—not only the men, but the women

 

who washed gray work shirts, scrubbed slag

and mud off steel-toed boots, filled thermoses

with black coffee, packing last night’s leftover pork

 

chops in aluminum foil along with biscuits

and margarine tucked in tin lunch pails

at four a.m. The men were the mill, and the women

 

with red and callused hands

who fed the men—the men who fed the furnace

that fed the mill, which left its leavings for the town.

 

 

 

 

 

The silver-necked bird

eyes me climbing mossy stones, unaware

           

the daylight haze has settled into evening’s thin line.

Moist earth reeks like a bug jar,

 

and overgrown grass tickles the amygdala,

conjuring the copper-tinged field

 

beside the shed where we lie studying

the orthography of new bodies, tracing curves—

 

commas and question marks—hesitating

to cast off youth’s cliché for so much sky. 

 

Marking shoulder and neck,

we leave painless dotted bruises

 

that punctuate the moment red.

A rush of blue feathers flutter in the distance.