Men kissing, men kissing men in a movie,
women kissing, kissing women in the next,
then men kissing women, then women, men,

panels        doors        niches        garlands        keystones
gargoyles        columns        cornices        turrets        trees
chimneys        palimpsests         lamp posts         lace         gates

Possibly a child is not damaged immediately
but only after some time has passed.
When the parent who sits on the edge

Andrew works in the kitchen He’s going
to get me out of here.

My boyfriend doesn’t believe me.

1. A mother’s lifelong rage. The slow burn
of a wire behind an old house wall, its paper
ornamental to the last, going

Not your ordinary ice cream, though the glaze
of these skeletal figures affects
the disposition of those grinning candies

In the painting by Guido Reni of Saint Sebastian
in the Palazzo Rosso, which reproduction makes available
to those who travel only on the page, the saint to be

The hulks lie on their sides amid the breakers,
the wrecks of mischance rot. I could lose myself
in riddled waves: sailors drown daily there.

He winds through the party like wind, one of the just
who live alone in black and white, bewildered

On the day of your scan I make a soup
to wean us from meat. Beans soak and blanch
an hour while I slit open the cell-