Extinction
In your arms I open
like a wound,
slacken into
chemical grace.
Under the ramparts
of the peach trees,
we dismantle
our old words,
shake loose
wriggling morphemes
from the sheets
of the unspeakable,
lick the alphabet
from its bones.
Now, our shared language
is a gutted carcass
and memory is the invisible monster
cooing from the bottom of a deep well.
You beg for a light
beckoning from the void
of the throat,
a chord wrapped
in soft linen, and
were I warm-bellied,
I might rewrite the pupil
of your eye in a split
plum, thumb the silhouette
of your gentled body
from the frost-stippled window,
but the animal in me
only recognizes the kind of love
that is happiest with blood
in its teeth —
The hunter, giving
a name to the space
between the deer’s eyes.
An old jar filled
with new bullets,
blue violets,
borrowed molars.
A mouth, hiding
the guilty red
of another mouth.