But then again, I have big hands.
So I go for the little things,
so I can love a lot of things.

& isn't that the trouble with boys
like us we keep our love trapped in
our mouths everything was full
to bursting your left hand my right
hand blissfully glutted with lambs

the floors of memory are glass, which means
the medicine isn’t working, which means
i am back on the floor, which means
it is july, which means
the cherries are in bloom

in Yorùbá, a father is a name &
the left hand is taboo. one cannot offer

water with the left hand or sleep
facing upward. at night, a witch

will sit on your chest. a knife tearing
into a knife.

still I could swear I sensed his tide
tugging elsewhere I suppose he felt
a need to offer me some swaying
of water so he showed me the lagoon

The distant night opens     like a pearl / fan, a skirt,     a heart,
a drop of salt.     The peasants who picked the beans
are / sleeping—     they will turn into a billion sunflower
seeds

not all milkmen can know how the wretched can live off spoilage.
Ask me where to find need. I am ringmaster of my own sinkings.

                                                                     The sand in my hair, 
the sand in my shoes     near the satin-coco lining—     a dolphin washed ashore, 
your mouth     the memory of a rooster on top a hanging silence…

Revenge is one

of the first stories
my grandmother

read to me
when she warned my mother

I was a magnet for
impurities.

I learned to cleave through the whirlwinds on his back
                                                                                      —unclaimed lacerations,
bullet holes gaping
                                  on forsaken walls. Mercy

There’s a heart in a bag      (face it)      throw it over              the
edge           that  thing  pumping  like  fury  like  fire  inside           
you never belonged to him

I’ve just had the happiest thought
Nieve says, the ice of her hair melting rapidly

at these speeds—A girl falling is the same as flying
downward.

I believe in the conservation
of birdwings, in tiny packages of light

& their insistence on shining
in the resurrection of dying things.

I’ve been curious. I have a secret that sounds like pieces
of silver earrings jangling against earlobes, or the highest
tiny pinky key on the baby piano

but the bottles were misplaced
            they were shelved     until a forensic scientist
unpinned them from legend

I am missing you something fierce in these
greenfields & oil fields & fields of scary love I do not like.

I remember what you are—scab, totem,
juniper on the side of this house. do you make me

kind? would you like to reach between my doors—
lurid as a milksnake?

I catch coldness here, I hold the glitter. can we agree
to forget this? forget last night with my cocktail, my
caring so much for so little in my hand? today, I awaken

I gasp in utter horror at my freckles/mistake them for unspecific bugs/just ignore the data usage warnings