PURCHASE

Dear Rachel Corrie—
(1979-2003)

Hybrid of light & dirt, bright as a lemon
pinwheeling in a pitcher of blood. There is

no flesh like yours. Neither before or after,
knotted not from not knowing but beneath rubble

a spotted bird’s egg floats in its blood-dress,
startled portent potential. Elaborate rung riddle,

the force of which pushed itself outward in
elegy. You just can’t imagine it unless you see it.

Bone-black combat boot grinding opalescence
halted haunts hunting tumescent scent

but bludgeon return a bulldozer’s bellow,
gear slippage, rock on rock on bone

though she once lingered in music, skiffed
in her brain was a little story, locked & near,

shippy-thin, knocked on consciousness.
The cry I bring down from the hills belongs to a girl

still burning inside my head. When I got to the river,
she the only one living, the rest of us are dead.

First published in Zoland

Dear Michael Myers—

Witness the difference between kissing
& asphyxiation, between diagnosis & prognosis.
If you find it, you can cut us in –

we’ll play at the hedges & wait for you.
Or sit inside writing on a slightly steamed window,
the schism between cram & quell, steel

& bone. The loud undulating plunge
of one body into two. Multiplier
of streetlights. Inside, housewives wonder

why a girl’s writhing in the backseat of a Buick
that doesn’t’ belong on their street.
Further inside, housewives do not wonder

at what they know men do, then refuse to move
from the window as a cardinal explodes, leaving in its wake
a litter of crushed balloons that once held

some hopeful breath. Blood-spackled ecstasies
or choked up prosaic partner. A mask not a man,
a blue uniform that moves its emptiness towards happiness,

only to smash it with its own insistence,
sickening regiment & forked blue brute force,
you absorb fear until it fleshes you out, stuck

on the buzz of butchery. Your eyes
winter trees stark & amazing. Flashed out
by such nothings whose lives were built

expressly for your kind of surgery, where a blade
becomes horizon & a dozen dead husbands
hang in your half-forgotten dream.

First published in Superstition Review

An aptitude for bird

Dear Dickinson, I write you each evening
dreaming of your ankle socks. Waking, what

are you not wearing today, which is not to say
thoughts of skin, empress-soft & wife-worn,

but melody or holiday, your houndstooth
fascicles woven below tumescent gaping sun

or what transpires beneath your skirt, under
your drowsy oceanic grace is not indecipherable,

but disallowed its desired place, your search
for sovereign. I envy your pollen-studded mares

for what they refused to do. Their refusals
looked back at eternity & said be damned with it.

Your witchcraft has been moored
inside of what once was. You contort,

yet still conceal. I’ll be a wing
to your intuition & spell myself upon you,

shine & slant the light to your advantage,
blasts of perfect sound forever.