Now is my turn to speak, if I
can claim it, tipping myself forward,
letting my tongue fall with a soft,
an inward, an almost inaudible click.

Catch! It’s a quarter, right? You got it? Good.
Now, pinch the flat between your first two fingers,
press hard against the milling with your thumb,

This is a city of bridges,
though the water has mostly fled;
a city of ambitious span

I am singing now of the splinter of wood
you got in your knee as a child and never
got out. Of the splinter that sank out of sight

My miracle cures left her of two minds. 
Pillowed in the bed, she would seem to be 
all acquiescence, even eagerness,

Tartarus’s footless offspring who spray fans of glyphosate
    mixed with Styx water over farmland regularly,
technicians of os agrotóxicos for cash, I am weaponless

A pity the selfsame vehicle that spirits me away from 
factories of tedium should likewise serve to drag 
me backwards into panic, or that panic should erect 

Maidenhair borders the upward trail,
trims the margin braided green
and lives here—thrives—in the dark
beneath these arches, in this

I will not give in. I will grow more strange.
I will wrap myself around your ghost till the ghost
itself wants letting go, till it shimmers free.

He jettisoned our aspersions with sailing gestures ,
sucking clean the invidious indifference,
spitting unethical sounds that pealed the spirit,