affection
My better
Angels,
I have restocked the travel kit
with extracts and suspensions:
calamine, for
Like sumac, ivy, and oak,
sometimes in a grove,
up a wall, to the canopy
I’ve crawled just to feed the birds
yet left you burning in my wake.
drawing salve, for
The aftermath of the blow I struck
splintering my own makeshift raft
to pieces, to bits
using the first sharp heavy stone
I found after my waves
crashed us into that shore.
eugenol, for
Your broken tooth.
When we met, I never should have
punched you in the mouth. You
never mocked me,
nor tugged at the braces
on my ankles, my vestigial toes,
nor placed them there to begin with.
witch hazel on a branch, for
Whatever purpose you see fit.
coarse dirt, for
Scrubbing away the dumb graffiti
now that I’ve covered most of my walls,
your soft shell, your goosedown wings.
I was too fucking lazy
to open a damn dictionary,
or to run the gotforsaken
spell check feature that’s
built into the system, for
Fucks’ sake. I lost any
sense of relative bearing that way,
as always, letting up,
getting sloppy when I should be
triple-proofing the charts.
lanolin in a square tin, one
fine-tined silver comb, pure
hot lye soap, strike
anywhere matches, placed
on a dish besides several curls of
fragrant birch bark.
Ephemeral waterways boil today,
but walk with me still,
let’s go as far as we can,
see when we reach water
and I can wash my hands or,
if we walk far enough then,
maybe, for us,
You can
at least at last
call in the tide.