MOUTH TEETH EYE FIST STOMACH

A country lying wide open. A country oriented in the original way, 
toward God. It is like this: all of it, a prosthetic sadness. Wanting 
to say the thing with bare hands. Morning, held me in her teeth.
Morning, her mouth sown with light. Woman, I find myself 
recounting what I am owed. Woman, I find myself diving 
from other people’s mouths. August was rare & green. I grew
a knife & called it sweet. Consoled my new & freshly opened chest. 
I have grown familiar with reticence as a verb. It makes me weep.
It is concentric, the whole thing of it. I am leaking with grace, 
the whole heavy & metallic thing of it. Sweet & familiar & dying 
more authentically by the second. How the apparatus for sight 
has changed in our lifetime; become clean & wide & whistling 
with knowing. In lieu of things more permanent. At this altitude,
I am seated at the right hand of God’s oldest friend. I am seated
in a clearing of things mired with time. The bobbled heads of them. 
Their manmadeness, their particular ruin. Here, I choose to remember 
a logic in which I am bright to you. Inhaling fiction into my girlish lung; 
heavy lung. You say youth, & I go looking for July under bushes
& between clean teeth. Blue, as descent. As a lover without face. Blue, 
the neon girl. Blue as desert. I am having a quiet & very sorrowful decade. 
I am looking for forgiveness in the West. Forgive my Eastern heart.

Read more from Issue 20.2.