You rise like new fire sprung, unleashed upon the twilight.
A rolling pin spinning her torso round, you tug the covers,
make the lotus bloom from scratch.

Deep corners prop our memories, old canes leaned against the darkness.
The polyester takes on ghostly shapes, robes hung high, things turning slowly in the light.

The radiator clicks in time,
there’s a cricket throwing his legs up in the night,
a pebble stepping down a staircase,
music box plinging in the rhythm of our grinding jawbones and cold feet.

Nothing will come of this. Nothing awaits nor is set to leap, I would think.
The future, it’s the robin, a robin
that has abandoned the Spring. I recall the moment
when I first met myself in the bedroom.

The nakedness. The heat. The knock
of my head, and the scratch of my pen, and the creak
of your foot, and the cracks and quakes.

The curtains would swell and lash, being wrung by the open window. Being hit and struck
by the visions that eeked through my ribs like smoke from an ivory censer.

Scents, and movements
make this supple, isolated space, misting the forests of our hair,
shading the ivy and hemlock that is growing there;

we stretch far and wild without the rays of the sun.
This room, this holy grotto, it is a lightning rod for god.

First published on Poet’s Corner September 5th, 2016