Humidity

 

i

 

Once we galloped against one another in the backseat of your father’s car 


humidity stuck to each of us as a kiss when falling stars uncurled from the corner's back window, black buttons separated wool from flesh one breath at a time and breasts awoke beneath the tremor of an unbuckled hope caught along fingertips in the night, we learned more 

about fingers and selves more than all those drive-by starts, chokes, and hisses charting mythology and rocket launch as we trapezed fear and teenage grammar of broken lives sparrowing toward light, mountain, macadam and creatures, a deer leaping in the ditch as syllables awkward as our nubby fingers lit every branch shadow past windows dampened by heave and breath awakened from the fog, how many of us

how many bodies caressed the moon with moonshine desire and goodyear losses ranckled down the black curve of State roads and country counters done up, just right

 

are you strong enough to luminate through the red dark

ask the bootlegger and the apples trees listening way younder upon the holler

 a god’s drunken smile burns and shelters like a sun


the old woman preached from the pulpit of a rocker on the dim porch of a B&B in Kentucky we had escaped to following your father's post prom growlss, white as wicker bone our cheeks, her hail and the hound panting at her angles as she reforked her pecan pie sitting on the window sill and all those boys sitting in her lap who once wrecked their bodies to get to know some lost belief, a bellwater she knew heads over beautiful photos of a more beautiful woman but she, she saw right through them pernicious boys, ghosts and tallboys of tin really, loquacious as the creeks and the cicadas, the Earth burned love into them as their shoulders burned in the Sun, lipped 


at the corner of the damp polaroid, some grainy loss locked up inside and creeking the phantoms, the unsettled breeze rocking in a orphan wicker as desire clicked on its own heels in tempo like a broken wall clock flirting with the sway of the Elms


“What did you want, to be bruised?” she asks

 

“I want nothing!” he replied

 

ii

 

we lied 

 

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