head and look around,

you can see the chaos,

you can choose to work toward some small justice.

I look at my life, Chaim, and I see us,

that taste we had for each other, and the peace

of telling each other the truth.

And we earned the peace

in the hard crib of the hospice bed, I would

climb up into it and cram myself next to you, we would murmur and sleep.

I like how we looked, cotyledon

fit into itself in the steel cradle like a

capsule sent out into space, to start over.

Before the Electric Traps Arrived

In the morning, there was gore on the bathroom floor,

sexagon of grout archil

red—when I looked it up I thought it was

Achilles red, like Aethelred,

as if there had been a sword fight on the tile—

gore particulate as cudbear,

the sign of a murder, there,

the trap upside down, right to left like a sturdy Hebrew letter.

So many drops of plasma the color of hematite,

the mineral form of iron oxide—

Fe₂O₃—rust,

and something between Vermilion, and Madder, and Dragon’s Blood.

In the book, arkil red is near archaic smile,

mouse is near serpent’s mound in Ohio—500 feet long—

and orkil is near Orchidopexy,

Surg., fixation of a movable testicle. I knelt to the calligraph,

I was thinking who am I less unlike, Hypatia,

executed by means of being scraped with mussel and oyster shells,

for being good at math,

or the musculus—the Muscle Mouse—

vole m., harvest m., pocket m., jumping m.

There was nothing left in the plastic jaws

but one long toenail like the bone the children held out through the

cage-holes for the witch to finger,

and splashes of lenticular disks on the white porcelain of the toilet base,

each shallow saucer of dried maroon fluid like a platelet.

I kneeled in my black kimono and washed the bolt cap,

and the siphon like a snake or a kink intestine, I

bent over the liquid heavens of the underworld,

printing my knee with thistle-bait, canoe-shape, hard rodent turds, I

could not tell my slat from my lap, my oven from my haven,

I was a member of no congregation, I have been mass-killing the

congregation—

no golden déjà, no vu,

no cartoon mammals named Fatso, Gusto, and Strong Mind.

Three times in my life have I felt in my heart that I had value,

three little fish, one now a 50-year-old mother,

one a man a little younger,

the third our baby who could not make it, in the dark, past the first three months.

When I go underground, I will hold him,

nose to tail-tip three inches, in the palm of my right hand.

Isolation Liverwurst

After a quarantine month in the woods,

no meat, no fish or eggs, just nuts,

and grains, no butter, no mayonnaise—

illness and death everywhere in the world, and me without mayonnaise.

Then there it was, on an online shelf, and hours

later on my back porch. And I began