Three Poems

Leaving Bed After a Long Weakness

My throat reknits
like a long zipper:
Only the husk of hurt

remains. I will stretch
like this for the full
of the week,

for the sum
of all weeks. The sun
is roiling

inside my thick limbs.
I am not in British Columbia.
I am not on the Danube.

It is winter,
I smell the pavement under the snow,
I hear the cars float by
on the expressway.
I am bread,
I am soaked leaves.

My legs grow dark,
My fingers uncurl—
You’re gone. I’m fixed. I’m glad.

I’m glad.

Former Lover in a Statue

You appear again
like trash hiding behind
a trash can.

You smirk in marble
Demeter’s face.
The milky nakedness
of your chin, blank
arm draped over braided head,
makes you delicate, possess-able,
as mine did perhaps,
chest bent to hips.

The four o’clock sun, graying,
glints into the museum cafe.

I see you so clearly
in this light—fragile
sternum, breasts
like young white fruits,
soft waist, over-plump thighs—
I’ve made you a woman.
You’re me.

Now I know
how to hurt you
like I want.

Now it’s you on the mattress, butt plug in.
I love you like this.

2 or 3 Things I Know About Desire

i.
An opaque text—
I see myself now, sitting up
& typing something to myself, not even words
just a knowing as in dreams that says
there’s something here I must read,
or that I’ve seen already,

but light filters in
over the bed before I can,
your back half-turned away—its letters blurry
as a ‘30s marquee, black serifs retreating
like a pupil into the iris, blooming
from a long sit in the dark.

ii.
Once I couldn’t sit in a chair
next to you, that foot rotating
slowly like a thick tongue in a mouth.
I held my elbows so I wouldn’t rub
my cheeks along the carpet
under your chair.