I've been thinking a lot about how storm troopers die
When the Pharaoh's army drowned in the red sea, god asked my ancestors
How they could rejoice while his children died
I don't understand why blood never stains those white suits red.
Maybe death can be a sterile thing
Like chicken thighs pressed tight against saran wrap in the supermarket cold aisle.
I cannot make the perfect tiktok video
And this fact brings me grave agony
Because I wish to cram everything I am into 60 seconds
And then post it on the internet for strangers to see and approve of
When I broke up with my third partner
They accused me of being afraid of intimacy
But fear is only to approach the true feeling as I would I skittish animal
I would not lie down next to a restless horse and say
"Know me"
Every line of my third partner's fingers are etched into my memory
But if I say this on tiktok for each work I say about
Their knuckles and the dips between their veins
There are ten, a hundred more about the fingers of my second love (now broken up)
And my fourth and fifth (currently ongoing).
If only I could pull my self out of my skull like a sword out of a stone
And gradually grind it down
And sharpen it to
60 seconds and then I could five it back to my third love and say
"There! These people who have never met me
They know me and they love me"
And I lay down next to the skittish horse that is my fear of being known and
It stood up and walked on two legs and
I filmed it and edited it and put it on my tiktok and
The strangers, they liked that too.
Ode to Persphone
Today I taught the myth of Narcissus to eight eight year olds
Sixteen round eyes staring down at the daffodils unfolded on brown earth
Considering a similar fate:
To be so bewitched by yellow blossoms and sun gold flesh
That your roots dip into the ground and pull water from between rich, dark globules of soil
I did not tell those eight children and sixteen eyes and sixteen ears
About the daffodil that lies tattooed in ink against my right shoulder blade
In part, because I do not want them to know me with eight young brains so acutely
As one who has fallen in love with their own reflection
And sunk their own roots into the spring-wet ground for the sake of my own beauty
And in part because at that moment Nina spotted a fat gray toad
And it quickly became the most compelling thing any of us had ever seen.
The groves on the pavement on the side of I-90 whisper my name
Just accelerate around the tight turn of an on-ramp
Stepping on gas and leaning into the pull of your own body
Want to go forward, want to turn, desires pushing you, pulling you
What is gravity but all the built-up sexual tension of the universe?
Faster, against the odds
More, against all forces moving towards entropy
My orgasm is an act of defiance against the eventual heat death of the universe
When I drive into the sunset the world stops turning, just for me.
