up my throat, my face. Mi caracol. They think

brown people fuck better when we are sad.

Like horses. Or coyotes. All hoof or howl. All

mouth clamped down in the hair, on the neck,

slicked with latherin. You ask, Who is they?

even though you know. You want me to name

names. Shoot, we are named after them. You think

my Creator had heard of the word Natalie? Ha!

When he first made me he called me Snake—

then promised the afterlife would be reversed,

south turned north, full with tight bright melons.

Pluck one melon and another melon grows

in its place. But it’s hard, isn’t it? Not to perform

what they say about our sadness, when we are

always so sad. It is real work to not perform

a fable. Ask the turtle. Ask the hare. Remind

yourself and your friends: Sometimes I feel fast.

Sometimes I am so slow. Sometimes I get put down

in the street. Forever I win the wound they hang

on my chest. Remind yourself, your friends.

They are only light because we are dark.

If we didn’t exist, it wouldn’t be long before

they had to invent us. Like the light switch.

Yes, our Creator says Kingdom and we come.

Remind our friends. We fuck like we church—

best. And full of God, and joy, and sins, and

sweet upside-down cake. And when they ask me,

What’s in your love’s eyes? I tell them. Wild sugar-

melons, green-on-green, on green. She and I,

we eat the melons, starting at their thick-syruped

hearts, hold the beady seeds in our mouths

like new eyes, wait for them to leap open

and see us first.

Wolf OR-7

When he left his pack to find a mate, Oregon’s seventh

collared wolf, named OR-7 by state biologists, became

the first wolf in California since 1927, when the last one

was killed for government bounty.

On a digital map, OR-7’s trek is charted—by a GPS

tracking collar and numerous trail cameras—a trembling blue line,

south, west, south again,

twelve hundred miles from Oregon to California

to find Her: gray wolf, Canis lupus, Loba, Beloved.

In the tourmaline dusk I go a same wilding path,

pulled by night’s map into the forests and dunes of your hips,

divining from you rivers, then crossing them—

proving the long thirst I’d wander to be sated by you.

I confuse instinct for desire—isn’t bite also touch?

Some things cannot be charted—

the middle-night cosmography of your moving hands,

the constellation holding the gods

of your jaw and ear.

You tell me you take wolf naps, and I turn lupanar.

A female gray wolf’s shoulders are narrower than a male’s,

but our mythos of shoulders began before I knew that,

when I broke open my mouth upon yours

as we pressed against the glass doors of the cliff house

looking out into the bay’s shadows hammering

the bronzed bell of the super moon.

My mind climbed the rise, fall, rise of your bared back.