This poem is another woman

I read your face, swept in lines you believe will be meant for you:
       The girl was an ocean of jellies,
       a spiral of stars left in her wake;
       galaxies bloom her hidden currents

The moment hangs weightless, tip-toed off cilia and leviathan bones, 
storms that split the afternoon sky, rains that once were oceans 
                        that once were rains 
                                                 that once were

A tetra radial stare soothes the world to sleep, each of us medusa, 
coiled around our sting— taste our salted hands, our bitter mouth,
                                              the lingering ache of our shared belly 


another sustenance

Wasps nesting in my paper throat, a swarm of whispers, yellow, black; 
they drown in the thirsty earth of my chest, swallow and sacrifice
to the green fig of my heart, labyrinth the cold echoes of my veins

I don’t look to leave, but everywhere lies evidence of not being here; 
oil coats the page— a residue on the corners folded into memory,
smudge of ink on fingertips, dark nebulae brushed across the heavens


another universe

Light you once traced across our history, the long red decay 
shifting, accelerating against this constant expanse, the horizon
a death that is only realized generations after the burial

You long for a movement in your nearest star, a transit, a lensing,
a rocky place I could rest my head, and in some other orbit,
look back across the years to you: a sixth star of Cassiopeia

But ours are worlds stretched thin, lungs collapsing
against the weight of gravity, until, for a time, we breathe: 
a low lamps’ susurration after the cadence flickers, 
                                                                                  falters, 
                                                                 f a d e s 		       a w a y,
into / out of / into
                                 another

Previously published online in wildscape. Literary Journal