Dear __________quito,
Mother urine-waters our garden father fences in. On their behalf I phone credit card companies a good umpteen times to dispute the charges. However the birds have not yet slept and twitter as will we, repeatedly sure of what keeps disappearing. Even the rubberbands, exhausted by the tension snap eventually. Yesterday father (almost seventy) beat (almost to death) a young man who tried to rob him at fingerpoint. Though father brings home an egg-sized welt, the young man’s blood—a form of goodbye—shimmers on the end of a nail-ridden stick.
Yours,
__________quito
Armed
I seize the butter knife;
you the metal tripod.
Like the guilty we
laugh with affliction.
You swear on the grave of
your still living
mother you are not
the culprit. Your naive back,
welcoming as infection, faces
the open door. Barricade
us in, I say. We lock out the
world, double check the
windows—we’re left with
ourselves in a
feral predicament.
Believing Seidel
(Rooster moves away, kept falling
hard.
My blood-red tea separating
into uneasy sectors.
This sequel fierce, unforgiven.
You want to be of use.
Weirdos want my number
and don’t see I’m the weirdo.)
O horseshoe, semi-circular piece
of metal, I’d like to belong
like that to a body.
Green
While starspotting you
point up and up only.
What turns me on
about the predicament: the knife’s
throat against the hog’s or peacock
feathers soon-to-be
aligning a tiger’s mouth.
(Our hearts grew too
green and back into themselves.)
Or a riveting
kind of accounting when we
tally up condoms deflated and
twinkling across the dark
hood of vans.
You I loved until the
apples turned
imperfect. Below
their hanging, our mouths
glittery-open, savagelike.
