landscape

my fingertips follow
the topography of muscle and veins
like mesas rising from the desert of your skin
sweeping down the valley
to the canyon bed of my sex

you portage across my hips
as I scale the precipice of your back
pausing to lick the limestone crevices
tasting traces of chalky fingerprints
left by other climbers

I pitch my tent
in the shelter of your gluteus medius
making camp against the elements
drinking coffee from blue tin cups
watching thunderheads roll in and away
to storm on other fronts

Settlement

From this day forward
our stories become mine alone.

Dusty dinner conversations
are packed away in brown paper.

Pride is cut and folded neatly into fat quarters,
stored in bottom drawers.

And humility is taken out, shaken out,
and draped across my shoulders like a shroud.

the very much of alone

the very much of alone
wears me like a coat
a vapor of fog surrounding
the surface area of myself

pushes past gravity
into the absence
of his height and breadth
the trunk of him in the center
of the forest of not here

now wraps in skeins of voids
pinning bows and arrows
between my arms at my sides
leaving only space for fingers
to caress quietly
keeping small company
in the interim

In the Used Bookstore

The Power of Feminist Art
spins across the ceiling
and I wonder why no one has ever thought
to equip a couch with seatbelts
for gravity cannot be trusted
and I’m drowning on the water in my throat

the stripes on the opposite easy chair converge
in a million vanishing points and I fall forward
into the center of all that sharpness

until
the book is on the shelf again
next to The World Guide to Antiquities
and the stripes are parallel once more
and I have to go to the bathroom which is surely
a symptom of a normally balanced brain