Humidity
i
Once we galloped against one another in the backseat of your father’s car humidity stuck to each as kiss, falling stars uncurled from the corner back window buttons separated, breasts awoke beneath the tremor of an unbuckled hope in the night we learned more of ourselves than all those drive-by starts charting mythology and rocket launches and we trapezed the fear and broke our lives toward the light, mountain, macadam, deer leaping in the ditch and our syllables as awkward as our fingers, every lit window dampened by our breath and how many of us, how many of our bodies caresses the moon with moonshine desire and goodyear losses
are you strong enough to light through the red dark
ask the bootlegger and the apples trees listening upon the holler
a god’s drunken smile burns and shelters like a sun, the woman said on the porch in Kentucky, white as wicked bone, as she recounted her pecan pie sitting on the window sill and all those boys that once wrecked their bodies and heads over a beautiful photograph of a beautiful woman but she sees right through them, and burned her love into them still rocking in a wicker chair, desire like a broken wall clock
“What did you want, to be bruised?” she asks
“I want nothing!”, I replied
ii
we lie
iii
I wanted
to be bruised by a god as we lay on the uneven floor
to be vacated by a god as we drifted in the ocean’s tides
to be words for the bereft as we became glass and firmament
to be language in the swaying of the dying grass
to become what I am not
