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.