VI
WE FORGET WHAT DEVASTATION FEELS LIKE

M marks me haunted
as he calls me his girlfriend’s name.
Who is the ghost? The one who goes?
The dream like a mesh scarf.
The dream like your old dresser:
or the one who stays?
 
He’s often better as the symbol.
Better the bookended animal.
Gilded girl better than real sex.
Better than real pain on the mattress.
Better than it wasn’t about the body.
 
Of course it’s not the body--
the one that hides when the summer hits,
the one that gets sick in the bathroom
with the thought of him,
the one that can’t come out for fear
of too much light.
 
The truth where the woods we live in
are on fire. The woman I love sends her brother
to put it out. The woman I love sends her
mother to stomp it out. The woman I love
sends her heart in the mail
her heart over the telephone line
her heart across the internet.
 
Oh, lonely atrium, I hear you wheezing
into the lit canopy. A cicada cackles
along his spine. Is it his spine?
He is not who I imagined him as.
I am not as lonely as you walk me toward.
 
 
 



​


I'M SORRY YOU'RE SICK

The city [the girl says] is live.
You would like her.
Maybe because, like you, she is beautiful
and tired
and she drags her feet too often.
 
I don’t know if you know the story
of the man who went out for cigarettes
and never came back.
 
I don’t know if you know the story
about the woman who tried to reject her body
so the man could hold it, sack and all.
 
Slack and all. By the river, the dream
of walking by the lit-up windows
and not desiring to look in.