What’s dumbly felt about

our imagined forever
as your nesting clause closes
in parenthetically?

The mask of object permanence?

How the walk to the parking structure is long
enough to change my future’s shape?

Perforated & aquatic,
lowness comes
to rest in the lungs.

Nodding off to the refrigerator’s song

I avoid our conversation’s mark,
like red x’s smeared above the doorway

I clean myself through
bleached & hollow,
claim my space.

In the place we try to let love enter
I make a list of everything larger than myself, then wait

Ants eat cheese from a sheep’s head.

Years turn
my tongue thick
from floating.

I become what I have been waiting to happen.

Grapes the size of fingers:
their leaves brined,
a sour rake across the eyes.

The natural world is myth brushed against self.

This is not a grasp
this grasping at having enough
magic at last.

I consider passion as a decollation of myth.

The tasteless excess of changing face
and acknowledging the act.

The way a thing called honey was made
I am told and in
truth was there to see