surgery.

Leaves change color, a comforting ritual
accompanied by charcoal smears in artsy back rooms,
love across collarbones, woodsmoke sinuses,
dusty eyes. We do not join those groups that paint glory
before the bite of cold sets in.
My mouth itches with new teeth against the soft normalcy
of breakfast and paper applications. I am that bite of cold;
I am the sting of running from the ice.
I taste winter and antiseptics
and when you touch my arm
the metal fingers of the speculum pry open channels
of clotted blood. Blood that sets me hunting,
a wolf upon the snow that never falls. Blood
that digs into your back, a field of divots and valleys.
Blood that makes me eat my own children, their
porous, embryonic limbs bright bruises on my lips.

————-

(Done at the lit. mag meeting. We did a “first line auction” — I had everybody write down the first line to something and put it in the bucket, and then you would take down somebody elses’ and continue whatever they started. )

The force of nothingness, the waste of time
floods into every cavity of this skeleton -
its old bicycles rust between my shoulderblades.
The fluff of sodden, exploded feather elephants
tickle my sinuses and blunt my senses with that hysterical sting.

Minutes go first – overripe berries that burst,
not quite sweet, in meetings or zombie mornings
in the halls.
Hours smell thick and heavy, and days
open up marrow into filled garages,
spongy with the ebb of foundation water,
the open yawn of the lives of decay.
Years are worst. Do not swallow them;
they are bitter. Your joints will seize up
with their juices
and ooze lime when you bend low
to hug your children.

And time’s refuse can’t be kept out. It drips and drips,
rotting gently in the mouth-sinkholes we leave open,
the mind-gutters we keep closed.