9.7 / July 2014

Robin lifts her feet off the floor as the plane leaves the runway. She heard a rumor once of babies born in space and she totally bought it, soaked it up like mollusks suck ships.

we drank champagne with skittles at the bottom like our wedding night. the rapture comes up in conversation again

First I notice the moth in the housing of a halogen bulb— the murky outline no bigger than an infant’s earlobe

The Brazilian woman confessed: she wanted a divorce. The reporter called it vagina homicide. Another commentator declared death by vagina. The article came out last week in a UK newspaper although the event took place in São Paulo.

No one ever gets the upper hand, and my palms swapped flesh for granite and the hard bark of a tree that’s so old it hurts to carve your name in the leaves.

What she didn’t say: Is I. I am not your hand which I know, as it checks for water, pats your seat once, then twice. I am not what you ask for when you look for what you need: something with palms open or head hung.

The fence that hems the empty garden leans heavy downward, posts crooked like fish hooks in the wind, some driven so far into the soil they’ve hit clay and now sink lower into the dirt when it rains.

in your absence      is the screech of swine as      the shower comes on and in the steam that fills      this cell there is a kind of hell      you love being born in the red muck      a jade blooms in only the most precise      winter light a cross- section of the kalanchoe      reveals kalanchoe the wild is the garden work of mourning      a woman

Most of all, it is you I miss, you, and owls,

This morning, Kentucky spat out vultures.

Promise is always talking about the time I left her in the woods. The way she describes it, you’d think I left her for dead. You’d think it was some kind of child abuse scenario, the way she plays it up. Really, though, she was older than I was, and tougher, too.