there’s a witch grave in Tallahassee altar for tea-thimbles
pennies I tell you her wedding date carved into the pillar
sandwiched between birth & death & 100 years to the
day before my own parents married you glance at the
sky like you’re waiting for a cloud to bruise you god-
fisted these days I am remarkably sunlit absorbing &
considering tenderness a verb hold breath to walk past a
cemetery find wishing instead a collapsed lung a word
loses meaning the more you imagine how it would move in
front of you sincerity unbearable as squinting into the
wet open throat of summer people like us aren’t looking
for happiness but these trees might be enough Pisces moon
& sentimental fern shadow burn away clean as brushfire
nobody loves a city nobody loves what can’t love them
back but if I sit still enough & let my voice play
painter in the cave if I’m hermit & gin-soaked it’s all
language of possession the only difference between
selfishness & love is who gets to walk away from what I
tell you I once stumbled on a wedding photo was shocked to
see my parents holding each other ’s gaze my mother’s
eyes fearsome blue & wide how finding that grave
was the thriftshop version of a capsized magic I always
meant to get around to feeling & you tell me as a kid
you were made to stuff poison into meats feed to dogs
on the other side of the fence not knowing why it shouldn’t
be victory walking into a room & feeling just one thing at a
time life such terrific sandpaper vaporous crosshatch of
limbs on the other side of the page some boy in some lake
floats in the nailed-shut window of what his heart doesn’t
know will leave him unscathed the difference between
empathy & fidelity is who presses what words into whose skin
who pretends to or to not swell with narrative who carries
story like a clung rot tooth nobody can bear to pull
