comfortable hole (once a vegetable garden, before that rows of peonies) you and your lover will lie down (hands or lips locked) to wait (sleeping) for the next life.
comfortable hole in your chest (below the breast where your second heart should be) you fill with mulch, spit and fingertips.
I My great-grandmother tied her baby boy to a wooden Crucifix on the hot nights when he couldn’t stop tearing the flesh from his bones.
II He never grew old enough to fuck or think about fucking and she never prayed. Even before the bug spray, the waiting room, the air that wouldn’t stay inside his lungs, she never talked about angels or martyrs.
III My mother says I scratched as soon as I could move my fingertips. On the hot nights, I slept in her bed while she held my hands.
IV From my great-grandmother I inherited head turned skywards in Church and a wooden headboard. On a hot night, I ask a retired boy scout if he remembers the knot that fastens wrists to cedar.
I order a crow’s skull off the internet. I need somewhere cool to rest my fingers.
Everything I touch sets my skin on fire: the breast of the silver mannequin I cupped in my palms and pressed my hungry lips to, the deep pockets of my father’s jean jacket -- twenty years old, aging faster than his silver hair -- someone else’s hand I held, thin silver rings squeezing below my knuckles like a promise.
I order a crow’s skull off the internet. I jam my fingers through the eye sockets. The bone scrapes until my hands are red like raspberries, seeds and pulp, last meal in the crow’s stomach, last meal in mine.
I order a crow’s skull off the internet. I need somewhere cool to rest my fingers until they can fit between yours.
kiss me on my Adam’s apple when I tell you I am something bruised and bottom-barreled, kiss me on my Adam’s apple when I tell you my flesh has rot-spots, kiss me on my Adam’s apple, call me honey crisp or pink lady.
never share me, if I ask you to, tell me how I come from your rib, push the hair behind my ear if I ask you to share me, push the hair, tell me how the feeling in my stomach is clay from your hands, push the hair tell me no if I ask you to, carve your name into my ribs.
sweet earth, bury my ribs here like apple seeds, the sun and the rain, I will thank you, my god, bury me here under sweet earth, my god, with hands like shovels, with hands that made me.
pluck me when I grow again, my god, pluck me from the tree with branches sprouting open like a ribcage, pluck me, my god, wide, sweet pink, earthy honey, kiss my Adam’s apple.
