All My Motherly Duty
I could have died on this road alone
but for the fever of your touch.
You pull crusts off my loneliness
and your hand on my wrist
lessens this wake I drag
behind me like a stillborn.
Your transmuted voice whispers
my secrets hidden in a bucket of eels
where you mock their twice mirrored mouths
I wrap my prayer shawl of grief
around the boney circumference
of your sloped shoulders.
I don’t die with longing,
I don’t even die for your lips
to press like poppies
onto my white waxen face.
I have saved all my motherly duty for you
singer of hymns and roman candle
endings splashing over my awe.
If you call me precious
don’t then graze my cheeks
with the intent of robbing
my benign forgiveness.
We carry nothing but concrete
and skinned knees down to the river
bruised and broken we do not fall,
we have become a cascade of descending numbers
filling the morning sky with a million ways
to skip over each calculation.
We drift alone and circle the sun with our purpose
each time we are burned,
singed wings drop us like holy stones
on to one another’s stage.
Leave me here on the edge of this knife
not knowing whose cold blood I’ll draw.
A heart cradled once sings anthems
of recognition upon awakening,
a heart trapped twice merely stops dead.