We’ve stopped talking again so the earth has no color. Everywhere the chlorophyll has paused, light burning over the day’s lessons as hunger burns the mouth I can’t make eat. A little rice? A little soup? I’d rather die reading the early texts you sent about my breasts. I wouldn’t take a picture— infidelity!— and so instead had conjured them with words, for which, with words, you gave me back a tongue we dragged across the skin of common thought. Such is our lot, our shared disease or gift. Like Bernini’s angels propped somewhere in Rome across a nave we fetishize remove, which keeps the ideal possible, the possible ideal. So why is life so dull without your veins? Today on Twelfth the drugstore glass reflects a woman braced against a private wind: the wind of her conscience, maybe, spinning on the mandrel of desire. Later, she opens mail. She shops for artichokes and squash, fingering their grooves for information from the flesh. The life I love cannot include you, she wants to say, but because we are not speaking she must say it into the poem, whose possibilities contract with every word. Watch it narrow even as it grows. This is the terror— granite, pixels, blighted grass— this is the terror choices make of lives.
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