Where were you when you first learned that
               you cannot lack the things that break you

most? I am only writing in red for the rest of the
               year and giggling at the frontlines.  As a teen-

ager in the shallow spurt of water, a man told me
               I can only move so long as I drown, which is

to say, so long as I lay in a bed of foaming spittle. If the
               house remains fed, the altar’s glimmer dulls.

I think I’ve lost the practiced falseness of what it means
               to be impossibly young. The fingernail moon

hangs over the welt on my goosepimpled thigh. Where
               does the world go when not inside me?

If anything, all things remain suggestive of
               desire in context. I’ve got the human

endeavor now, the shadow settled into stone,
               spliff waiting to be ladled into a mouth

too fictionalized to open. How often we stuttered
               those memories of teeth smacking against

watermelon, calling it love when all it was was a
               lack of imagination. I dream a dream and

 it has nothing to do with the god setting the gauntlet
               down between my legs. There’s a formality

to the gap in my bottom teeth. Look closer.
               See that? How it’s sometimes me, but mostly you?

Come here, little grace of mine. It seems the sunlight
               has begun to pare those thickets of skin the

likeness of cherries. I mean, let me see you whiling away.
               Let me see you good.