LAZARUS JUST IN CASE
You know who gave you the flu.
True north, or absolute
zero.
Who waxed the apple,
the desk, the teacher,
the prefect.
As the world as
you know it
is.
Hostages traded
three-for-
one.
Your mirascope, isotope, zoe-
trope for my
fetoscope.
As when I found you teething
and named you
Lazarus.
Oh to have found and named
what you lust
after.
To begin to play
on an empty
stomach.
Empty, empty, empty except
for a bench under
sky.
JOINERY
The wallop impressed me.
What I hear is a bit of give
built into the sill.
I must be asleep
at the wheel.
Alchemy says
I’ll find gold if I stir.
Nun fortune and misfortune,
translates the nun.
The boy thinks, not none,
sister, surely some.
Though you’ll explain your return
upon your return,
the boy will say, not none,
mother, surely one.
AREOLA
A knot’s shadow
forms a cartouche.
As sun eggshells the sun.
See the red roots everywhere
your eyes are full of?
It’s easy
to spot a tsunami. The seabed
mud silvers, I hear someone
call a twin name.
Seismograph, polygraph: hairs
thinner than a toy axle,
wean the bootlicker
off boot polish.
Without cresting a hill.
Cresting the hill,
your hands first were sails,
fingers minarets next.
Hell was a domino
run of fives nulled by the flash
of a wall rising.
A crust of clay
washed off the rims of my ears
the further I sank. Voices after me
oval’d, the sun
areola’d into cyan. And the sun
remembered the mosquito
ambered by a drip. See the moon
caught in the plume of sky
in the window? Stand there,
feel up cleanness
in the gap between two.