Read an Excerpt
Virginity
Clouds in his throat,
six months’ worth.
He bodies into me half cosmos, half coyote.
We become night on Bread Springs
road. Shirts off,
jeans halfway
down, parked by an abandoned
trailer. “No one lives here,”
he whispers.
We become porch
light curtained by moth wings,
powdered into ash.
***
Swallowing Kept Secrets
Mornings turn out green thread. Alder and safflower—wilds of this ilk—
bloom in bloodstream. His chin soaks in lactic acid,
chlorine, and zinc. Untwist from blankets
into aftersmoke. Hill sage cusp in his eye.
He mouths oxeye and antelope sage. Pinioned,
he removes his shirt again to unveil wood rose
and feather cindered black. He calls for the fires as he undresses into nightjars.
***
Buffalograss
Barely-morning pink curtains drape an open window. Roaches scatter,
the letter t vibrating in cottonwoods.
His hair horsetail and snakeweed.
I siphon doubt from his throat for the buffalograss.
Seep willow antler press against the memory of the first man I saw naked.
His tongue a mosquito whispering its name a hymn on mesquite,
my cheek. The things we see the other do collapse words into yucca bone.
The Navajo word for eye hardens into the word for war.
***
Love Poem You stand by your car, man in meadow now deep white—slow teeth, slow ice.
Fallow-night footprints follow through stiff with each crunch in the snow.
Frost crystals on my tongue.
Your cheek bone cold against my face,
a whirring rock marrow deep.
−
I open the word and crawl inside its spine, barbed wire, turbine with dark belly, coil hierarchy.
What word, you ask. Your body a cloud flattened in my hand.
Your body coiled with mine. Air snakes over ribcage, cracks into powder.
I say thorn. I say mouth.
−
Desire is criminal. You being here is criminal.
You sip from the delta near my tongue. Ossuary deepens at the clavicle.
Eyes stutter open. Limbs crepuscular over the bedframe.
I watch you shower after.
Tributaries, confluence, mineral stains.
You rub the holy off your skin. Your fingers in after-soap jaw white.
−
Bent wasp hums behind your throat. In the iris,
orange whispers into deep yellow slather.
Uranium corrodes to spalling black,
speckles on hyoid horn. Your shoulder blades gawk open, wings sylphlike.
Torso woven with sweat chalks down to bone.
Skin can be too loud sometimes.
−
You have the night’s bristle—yolk noose from penumbra.
I lick the railroad down your back—
admire black water in your hair.
Before you go,
I unbury the jaw. You swallow frozen sand.
I say you can go now, you can go now.
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