Around here, a pause is always violet-coloured, mostly strung on necklaces and crumbling to sugar between teeth. The flowerbeds new I think, speaking to headlamps in their starred tartness. There’s a way light diffuses across this mess of one-way signs, the thick network of icing on the tarmac, that crumples my 18th birthday to some archive corner. I knew the scorched orbs of streetlights, I knew the waiting space of the estuary, and little else, and that’s okay. I have come to …

Dear poet of nooses of sharp okra & tired trams my bones are filled with wet tobacco & spent coffee grounds with the sound of ten thousand hammers hitting brass in unison your name hollows space in the soft-cavity of my mouth & I have no shape to make of your sound forgive me I have wagered everything on blowing spring cherries back into cigarettes that continually ghost us on soup-thick something I have once again forgotten to name out of a deep care for …

after Terrance Hayes Last spring, I hid you in a poem of greenery, described the distance as furious and never thought I would feel that way too. I wrote of sesame seeds spilling from our bagels onto the sheets, scraping my legs all night and all through the summer until you were back. Now I lock your love notes in a quart-sized Ziploc, let my memories slide off like egg yolk. I’ve made you both villain and victim here. The villain is reckless, kissing everyone at the party while I doze …

Time turns into the way. I’ve to sit, for blood pressure to stabilize. Having learned doing nothing, I navigate the nurse’s understanding, later the doctor’s need for answers, saying I drank three cups of coffee before the taxi delivered my trust here. Figures still before me, soundless after the year of uncertainty. Seated, I travel, with my eyes, across vulnerable rows, ideas of hope chaired. We hold our consent’s forms, signatures affixed to the universal promise. We share the better day …

When we met, you told me I had a voice that could pinch the corners of our Carolina town wrap its skin into a hand-held bundle and inflate it -- balloon, string-tied braiding infinities around pointer and thumb. You said the only other sound that could do this came from finches when dawn was nothing more than white noise though they moved like the needlework in nests. You were gripping Helium when the ground had been peeled and repurposed acrobatic pictures through a marble …

I put you in this box, like the heart of a bird in my human armpit. Pray every day, face the sun, finger the birch tree I stop at, dogs likely shit on, young people kiss near. Unfamiliar with what you were like at puberty, if you saw the hair come in and kept beat to the steady rhythm, like a chicken’s ascending clucks, or the offbeat clack of clipping nails. So much happens over a toilet. When you fold the paper do you anticipate the wipe or are you able to understand why we’re alive? …