Call the book by its right name, just this once– promise.
Say the wooden casket is not cherry, nor oak,
but hermetic-sealed steel, the silver poison
I shave off your fake tooth, put the lead dust in my mouth.
Saleswoman sits naked by the red window.
I fall two stories, wonder if I should be selling something, too.
To hang a clay pot with vines, you punch a head-size
hole in the ceiling, send fiberglass bits like vermillion
walking along an indoor wind. Ask if I can please catch some
with my eyelashes, cry ‘em out later with the storm.
Red desert bears a family annihilator of two or three.
I am continually shocked at who marries who.
You are not a special kind of fuck, genuflecting
in the direction of white water, hoping a long cylindrical rock
could love like a mother– though she loved you plenty.
Gave you those hands which love, fairly, to grab.
First baby pictures in a red wool cap like the devil.
I think sloth is born from those unaccustomed to a Southern wind.
Saliva is a sometimes-food, like the moonshine Pappy gifted
from Novokuznetsk. Warned about the steel-plant fists
that bound the bottle, contaminated and kissed by tracks.
I know that spire is appealing. Come outside and see the love.
Hot red ember like an old fire poker between the legs.
I keep saying, women have not changed much in the last thousand years.
You write from an old Soviet border– I have never missed Florida
like I do now. Ask for a grain of white Gulf sand to swallow
or suck, fossilize in the rotten hole of your tooth, that black
cavern you compare to the first cave.
Cervical inflammation, the red flare of cancer shot to the sky.
I know someone who insisted on fucking three days post-birth.
Entrance is a crime, is a liberty, is a prostration, is the one way
you’ve learned to cheat clean. And I want you clean.
White-washed, coated thick with talc, so slow-moving
anyone could outrun you. Anyone but me.