Gleaning
Sometimes I imagine it is your hand that splits me open like a too-ripe
mango easing out the seed with fingers and teeth spreading me
on a white table cloth sticky with struggle and salt and lime sometimes
I imagine a gun pointed inside a voice that says come now and I
freeze because I can’t or won’t when I’m on my belly and it’s the middle
of the day and there are papercuts of light bleeding through
the blinds I’m a fish aching against the pulled back tide against
tight knots of barnacle and rocks hands of weeds tangling me down
I am splayed on a sundial obstructing time circumventing shadows
I am a speculum penetrating darkness widening the day into ventricles
and gills and cubicles opening into a perforated bruise
the pit of moon cold in the mouth hands closing like the steel
wings of eclipse outside there are church bells clanging and a car
that slows emptying out hardbreath and sizzle of dirtysouth twang and
sometimes it is my own death I am reaching for to pull it out of me
like a seed a snare the shrapnel of every man who’s left himself
behind the light on every blade on every tongue every swallowed
breath making me clean again.
The Heaven-Scent
When I haven’t stayed up the night drinking,
pissing in alley-ways, my legs writing bad checks ,
when I turn off the computer before I’m
exhausted, say goodnight to each corner
of the room, the moon dragging its lip
across the rim of sky, when I slip into
nakedness and feel the palms of my feet press
against wood and coolness, each open window
breathing into the bedroom, when I lift
the sheets and slide next to nothing but
a sideways pillows for my arms to wrap
around not because I’m lonely but because
it feels good, because the curtain flutters
like an eyelid, because I am home and not
running away, and the scent of me is alive
as the plant on the sill as the birds filling
a tree into one big self, I imagine them
pressing back into night, the heavens
torn, spilling honey all over me.
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