Apocalypse resolved to daily drama: guttural cries
pearled wing to wing on electricity’s black lyric, sun’s
pink cotton in tangles of imperial ribbon, the neighbor who
keeps asking do you speak English because I don’t greet
her warmly enough. I close the browser on fishes, sorrow-
blind, wreathing the reefs’ white windows. The wars,
fine-print specific, repeat themselves; their mongers
indistinguishable as one holy man from another. Who
doesn’t now feel the perpetual heartbreak of clouds: all
that view and only vanishing to look forward to? I can barely
hold the language of my hands: ghosts and grasses co-
splaying as husband, dictator, a mother’s thousand exiles.
Even swaggering with opposition, I carried the bricks. Let
me in, I prayed in secret, and I will be good. But like all
the world’s endings, every girl who’s been left undefended,
I could not afford to be good. Asked instead for love, when
the Irish rains parted and the pleated body I had come for
emerged, rock-blue, waisted by the Atlantic, dotted with shaking
fists of Queen Anne’s lace. And love did come, lightning
through the iron grid of digitized doom and moneyed
detachments masquerading as art – though late… because
LA traffic! I remember everything we exchanged, the riches
I took for me, not the poem to which, I have, in the past,
surrendered the best of my life because a poet I admired once
said the poem was more important than my life. I can tell you,
love asked me how to pronounce my given name, and if
my given name were my true name, which is to say, we are
not what we have been made to bear. I have been so slow
to it, the discipline of answering with no other face, no heart
but my own, so let me practice now, taking you in my mouth,
putting your hand here, and here, then here, again, because
here is good. Here is the name we’ve given each other, in
my petrified girl-tongue: loud, crimson in the age of extinctions.
Artwork by Candice Evers
