let’s finish this

I come into focus lacing my boot, stumbling

over how to tie a knot.

Your ears taste like poison.

I push the knife away.

Her Smoke (her trick)

A good waitress, I wait up for her

to come home, smoky

& exhausted, her feet

swollen, I wait in her bed. Purple shadows

cross the purple carpet, her television

makes Sherlock Holmes blue, he sees

evidence everywhere

of the man who last used this room, scrapes

mud from the floor into an envelope, rich

with lime, with ash fallen

from the factories in the east. I wait.

Doze. The tv turns to snow. Silently

she pulls off her black shoes, empties

her pockets. Next, her

genie trick, blowing smoke

into an empty juice glass,

cupping it with her palm until it slowly releases

up to the ceiling, the orange

tip of her cigarette a dying

ember. We

scatter her in the Atlantic, my brother & I, I

watch her sink, diffuse. I break off

another chunk of hash, impale it

on a common pin pushed up

through the cover of Abbey Road, set it on fire

under an upturned glass

& we take turns taking it in, our lips

to the tilted rim. Then we fall

back in our chairs, we never

talk about her, as if even her name

were ash

& might turn to paste in our throats.

Splenectomy

Hard after the spill to again

pick the motorcycle up, to go back into

the elephant grass, the air inside

green but for the oil, hard

to get up sometimes, even after

a year, each bone un-

centered, stricken sideways, airless

beside the fallen. Go, lay

the bike back in its broken slick,

wave the cars on, something hot

sparks your face, her cry off

left, there, like

sex, you’ve forgotten her

wrist, go toward it. Tall grass, hairpin,

adrenaline, what makes it so

fast, how hands end up inside you,

how this is supposed to save you?

Five Hundred Years

In

sleep our hands find each other. Outside,

the street, paved with bottlecaps—yesterday

a parked car glistened, now—a mere scatter

of green shattered glass. You murmur

from a dream, I feel

night press on my chest, like the earth

tamping the dead back into earth. If we had five

hundred years to work this out,

if after all that time

we remembered, if we still cared, if we

had fingers to dig, if there were shovels,

we could find each other, blood

compressed to rubies, lungs to slate,

fingers gone yellow, blue leaking

from your eyes, my shoes, side-

by-side beneath the window

as if I had simply

disintegrated out of them, yours,

toe-to-heel, as though you struggled.

Worthless

My fingers

cling to your shoulder blades now

until fucking becomes

an urging, a way to shake you, gently. How

can I tell you I don’t feel

safe, when inside

a man holds bars before his face

believing himself into a prison,