We open the door of a motherless city
Find the soil is bearable
Two lifetimes of extinctions swim into our mouths
The future—a figure of speech
We laugh ourselves into a bruise, a midday shadow
spills ruined copies of old cities at our feet
Lobs their printed heads
at the death-fetching sergeant
We meet in the procession on our way to something
blue and scorching
Do I sound the Atlantic’s long rage?
Octave a girl’s symbol of a god’s
hatching toward god-shaped
Invisible, this skip of a stone at night
toward a vision of the world tested
on saltwater though never earned
Dark cargo, long ago, bending today
where you could skip a stone on this light
The whole weak-eyed plan from dog
to woman, bicce fined to speak hourly
What should we make of them…
the knotted strands of that last frame?
New distance between nouns and consolation
Or symbols: mother, caretaker, wife, a certain
something threading doors, lines of salt
Calcine an armoured eyebrow: lift any weight
and I am unprepared for anything you ask
The roots and air
We live in the everything else
The lower harbour where the tide erases
itself as would a photograph
entombed in its chemical wash
We erase the paper that marks us present
because we are nowhere with Lucille Bogan
in the earbuds
And being nowhere I have no plans but to blink
all day, I wash my mind in this rust of stars
that makes the shore, the cosmic effluvia yawns
Besides, I’ve given us both my teeth
My aerosolized liver, my once-crushed spleen
I gave us both my teeth, do you remember?
Both of them decayed: