Light slips through my fingers: bone-white, unrecognizably clean.

The moon wanes in cycles.

I wake and it’s night again.

A wet sponge against my neck

slipping under a chained arm

a crease of leg.

How much dirt can settle in a day?

Wind shifts the land in the Fall – and nothing else.

My lips part for bread – dirt, your fingertips – cleansed and tasting of everything I’ve loved

lonely

aimless

into twilight.

Thunderstorm-purple nights.

Holy fires in the grass.

The rope breaks – freedom: a word I don’t yet know.

The discovery is a click of the tongue: a parent’s disappointment, a curse under your breath.

I stay at your feet, my every movement memorialized, cloistered, yours.

You wrap the rope around your wrist and taillights dye the roaming fields red.

Morning sun streaks the valley, rainbow halos drawn on your squinting face.

Brown against your white shirt, rubbed into the blue of your jeans.

You speak to me: your rental car, your coworker, and everything you hate.

Nothing-words so sweet they are possessed by the ghost of meaning.

A chain sears my wrist.

Deliverance.

It feels like yesterday.

Stars and ticks waddle in the moonlight –

fat and shining droves

leave in the same smears.

Cherry-pine rectangles,

an erected pillar for the tally of my heart:

at the center of it, my chain.

The shell of an altar.

Retribution is a hammer.

Conciliation, the nail.

My body rolls to lay the floorboards.

You press your mouth to the red of my wrists and hover like the sun.

To see you, a change in form is all it takes.

The rope again: temporary comforts.

Blood-rush ritual

the husk of self - blown in the harsh wind.

Who knew nails could be so white?

You fill every space you create.

The ceiling bleeds your scent.

Glass to let the sun in, shades to dim the burn.

An entire life in the press of four walls.

Through the window, a mouse is hawk-swept:

this flailing, tiny scene

from the safety of behind the cool pane

sails into smallness.

Centipede, shooed out of its home - from the heat of body,

the sanctity of their sole companion:

a shared, wild heart.

Where, I ask?

Out. Bugs go out.

Your tongue in my mouth, searching.

What has become of that little mouse, I wonder?

Perhaps a home, just like this?