He wanted no money,
had nothing to sell,
didn’t boast or brag or bitch

Let her renounce sight and be unseen. Let her
cough ground coral in the shedding of a pewter
moon, that she, of all the innocents, should live.

Nowhere to go back to—they say—but there is somewhere to go.

That you made love
on an office desk
on the seventeenth floor

Stretch our hearts ample as a yawn,
so we might accommodate the double-
wide trailer of our neighbors’ grief

Had the king of Uruk never wrestled Enkidu,
the wild man of the steppe, and just barely defeated him
on points, he never would have fallen in love with him

A melody played on the piano with five black keys. I heard it, walking across
packed snow and ice with microspikes under my shoes.

Today we’re going to get to work on the details

At night, he ordered his own sun, which was
Supposedly arriving soon, they said

he saw my mother in the scar-city—
brown hair and yellow dusted-down dress
with lips too cracked to hold down a language