When we moved with our first newborn / into this ’70s raised-ranch house, / I pretended some benevolent ghost / could soothe him.
Of course they sing—/ we have given them / no other verb.
Absent bounty, anarchic and asymptotic, / Bedlam banked as beauty, captive cuckolding / Capital and its camel-faced captor, master, the / Devil is in the dove’s details
that color is not color. The red flower, / she tells me, absorbs all light / but red, so reflects red / where she and I can see it.
What’s the thin break / inescapable, a sudden thud / on the porch, a phone / vibrating with panic on the nightstand?
Out here, I’m lonely enough to open / my body for anyone that finds me
You can’t control what people make of you. / Some see sacrifice / where others see torture
Some mornings, I come to on the floor, / my neck burned with moon tracks
Like an ermine looping through the snow, mouth a pink line, / I’m suited for my habitat.
Here’s a lesson: If you leave a hole in the forest, / leave a mouth open in pain, astonishment or grief, / something will come to fill it
