if I wrote you a love poem : you would have pearls at your wrist and teeth at

your throat : wolves have suckled you : in my love poem your skeleton would be

soft as a pulse : wrapped in blue rain : fox skull socketed with yellow coneflowers

: in a house filled with black water I’d find you dead and suspend you from rafters

to drain all your blood : let your flesh dry like a rare shark your limbs packed

with ammonia : and write letter after letter to you over three days until you woke

: remind you how we corresponded for years from one city to another in code :

dawn chorus meaning marrow full of sorrow : but I refuse to write a love poem : I

refuse to make just another coffin for uneasy breaths : to bind you to a you that

is no more than you than I am the I : slender and breasted enough for men to

arrange in a cage of antlers : I refuse to make a place where friendship means

less than : where love has to mean I want to make a braid of the soft hairs at the 


nape of your neck : instead of saying I want to be gathered in my bones in your arms


like roses in the robe of the blue mother and cry until salt dissolves me I say let’s walk


the roadcuts looking for philodendrons because I refuse to make a house where

I 
would be forgotten : leaning ladder : and because to say raze every tender curve of


my skull is supposed to be too much for friendship : because I cannot handle the

choking gasp of drowning of being told it is not love if I do not want to cleave

body in two if saying love means nothing in this too-large house to you if I could

not say sun instead of fuck o you o yes :