by Delaney Nolan
I.
Bury me in the coal-ash tree.
By thread and gristle he unfold,
twice, my knee. Flat as a
thigh on a zinc table. Slept.
For all the girls in all the world,
He kisses leaves lipstick on
your hips, yours, your ribs yours,
Your lovely beautiful wonderful
neckbone, mudbird.
I'd like to be kept down here with you. See
the walls are wet, but
we like clay. And sweet things,
and any name you can give us that isn't yours,
mute and hulking, feathered in doorways. 0 chariot,
your misery sung me, your tongue unfold me, sugary,
I kept you, Death, snug as a plum
toward me: my devil,
my only heart, plumply
(says we all bruised as lungs)
as purple Arkansas dawn. To friend: one night,
we camped by the lake and you went swimming and I
didn't and, in the morning,
everyone's still alive.
II.
Call it an attack. Asylumed we
don't find the door under the bermudagrass.
So I eat potato chips while
my best friend unfolds the tent, saying,
"Everything you missed in the last two years
you are still going to be missing for the next
two years," and she recites the list
of everyone she ever regrets touching,
shaking her lion hair.
We're still camped,
still Arkansas, but at the bottom
of the shiny foil bag I find
salt and the plum, beating wetly,
the one that follows me everywhere,
and shiver&cry from his damp grasping: I say,
"He wants to pull me under!"
so she quick tells me the story about the boy
who took off his face and underneath there was
another face and still
the boy and
I have to tell her that the tent's on fire.
"The tent's on fire," in cocoon of night,
And mosquitos at our necks.
III.
it's still by lake with moon rowing through it you
draw water throw roots into his dark mouth we
sleep three to a tent, flushed to caving, swanned
as a glacier you whisper black as rice, sweetly,
"you can sleep now." surely night rushed onwards.
death do not come indoors, no. only she and
myself guard the cloth gate. little southern crucifer
frogs cry&cry. no room for others: no room for
his black mouth: only she and myself and
to the third, bearing torches, we said, get out,
get out,
get out