I remember      the light was pressing me down toward myself

the trees were thick with insects

dark birds shadowed the street

I had been circling hungry red & narrow not

slogging through the mud

like the Magellan of any promised thing

He was leaving in arrows      he walked out

in a boldfaced lie      I said You need to consider me

Consider all that            considering the future

I had thrown into orbit

There was a truck piled neatly with boxes

He had a splintered voice that he hid from me

Is it giving up if you give what you have

& the universe still fucks you

Now I can’t picture his face anymore      only leaves

I remember I was desperate to speak

to expose the right language

Understand he kept driving back to me

& back to me      He said I didn’t always

love you        He said I didn’t want to tell you

to wait for me                  (But wait for me)

ELEGY WITH A SHIT-BROWN RIVER RUNNING THROUGH IT

Never have I ever let anyone skin me alive for my secrets. I grow true to seed. Unfamiliar with traditions of marksmanship. Whose grouse it is. Whose grouse I am after I fall. In this hayfield I say nothing at all to the hornets. I admire their mud huts. I think only in lists. The Time I Told You to Give Up Smoking. The Time I Believed You Would Live to Be Older Than Seventeen. When I think about all the ways there are to die. By falling ice. In a coat-check. With a gallon of ethanol stale in your gut. I am dizzy. I am missing your way of blinking at me in the sun. Bus tickets seep out of my pockets. By the river I drop a tree branch shaped like a tibia. In the center of my hand is a hole. I am used to it. Of course there is shouting. There is nothing I can get behind less than drunk huntsmen observing male rituals with gusto. I would rather look at the river through the burned-out circle of my hand. Somewhere in here is a fish with a hook in its mouth—I’m sure of it.

PHILADELPHIA

—city of hot pavement

addressed by hot pavement,

boiling puddles studded

with floating syringes, paper kites.

A bridge swung over the water

with direction, like a fist.

All the time he was trying to show me

how he was a stuck door

with an eyehole punched through

where I saw only

gashes of light.

Brute. He locked me out.

I walked 3rd Street

all the way north.

The day’s interminable heat.

Sweat tore up my thighs.

Cherry trees, I remember,

were blooming

shamefully.

It was a house I was always

walking back to.

I wasn’t delicate.

The door was blue.

So it was

that the palm of my hand

held a red bruise

shaped like a bird.

A lit crow. Flamed.

How sharp it is

to be wrong-fledged.