Watch as I tend
these ice-blue flames,
poking and prodding
every faltering gash.

Through the blinds of my ground-level apartment
I see the flash of red taillights; someone’s car
backing into a parking space, sending forth a
sudden claret flare like aliens landing in the night.

I run out of ways to keep you urgent in my mouth,
stomach your shouting relic.
so, when grief comes for an unburial, unearthing you into the forgotten,
I stuff you under my tongue.

The moon is a ghost, a god.
She is a white rabbit of silver
Eyes and whiskers.
He is an ancient demon, a teething child.

In my mind a butterfly catches pneumonia:
Flap flap the world is changed.

There’s a second life but not a first,
there’s you and no there’s just me—

dot the j and cross the seven.
upcoming in neon, in oppressive heat
we dream with night-opened windows.

In the small hours, under the wolf light.
my best friend throws peanuts
at my window. It is the nymphs.
They are migrating.

The forest lands link earth with heaven,
spruce-tree tips like dendrites of elder earthen gods.

We are crowded sisters
with roots that tangle and quiver
in the wind. Our roots cling
onto brittle pieces of shattered ...

The opposite of Time is Might-Have-Been.
We travel through the tempered void and thus
can change the stream of time to flatter us,
but currents pull us toward what we’ve seen