I’m tracing
her brown eyed gaze– softness
of bare flesh shoulders, ease
moist lips seek purchase, denied

her sweetness. 

1.

I wake up before you do
and watch the sunlight glide across your face.
I count the stubble at your jawline.
Yesterday the hair was four tenths of inch long.
Today it is five.

A teenager spends her days and nights
as the final girl in a slasher movie. Every summer,
she’s the only camp counselor who leaves the cabin
in one piece. On Halloween, the only babysitter left breathing.

Maybe each wind
is a whole lot of winds.
Maybe there’s a brotherhood of winds.

I venture the tip of my boot on to the grass,
push down and see the blades fold. When they
rise back up slowly like awakening vampires
I think, Not yet.

God, being the earliest known satirist, laughed at what the only star, constructed half for his amusement, half for light, so he could find his slippers by the bedside, had said.

These relics weren’t always disguised by sleet.
That letter resting between the envelope’s wheat-

thinned lips will sit unfinished, indelible
and shapeless as most evenings are. This man, unavailable,