Steph Bruzon

        1
(I do not wish, I ask) 
if ever there was a desert in your chest
that I could catch 
fast–
your
wind
-driven
sands
at my feet

wisdom, 
the texture of pulp
when you speak–

I pick at my teeth.

I don’t want to get involved.

we identify foreign species
and collect bark for the pocket of my overalls

we
mix our names 
we
mix our lives

my wild horses
rapture through 
meshes of golden light 
and
you stare at me
with all four eyes–

but all willingness eventually dies. 

I don’t want to get involved. 

there are no new things that we can
say or do—

we were born in
tailored,
cast-iron suits 
and
deemed carbon butterflies

bound to journey through 
bolted clouds. 

and

love 
is
a busy thing 
to
think
about.

its wire snare 
comes strip me bear
to my grief 
until
I stand above/beneath everything 
that ever was
and I must let it take me. 


I want to show you the place 
where poetry is made,


but you are preoccupied. 


               2
while in another part of the world, 
day is not day, but night—and my 
family is starved of food 
and light 

and lanterns are placed by 
a single bed sleeps three, 
bodies strapped to the mattress, 
packaged like sardines. 
and they prepare to tell each other just how long
they are allowed to sleep or dream 
to measure the 
pertinent now 
that 
sssssssssssslow 
touch 
the fan goes on and off
and I wake up 

at three in the morning 

to stuff jazz music into the cracks of the ceiling 
and light a cigarette on the steps to the room where I slept that stinks of death.

insects fill yesterday’s pants. 

I undress my hands, 
that they may dry–
still, impure.

My country is a river of blood that swallows the shore.

last night I kissed my father’s beard–
today I powdered his bones.


              3
and how did he slip past that spiral staircase with no railing? he couldn’t come back in time didn’t trust me to catch him fine, it’s raining but never enough to tear through the heat 
still I tear in two when I think of you. I think of you father think of you lover think of you mother 
think of a thought to keep me thinking outside of myself. 
because it could be worse
so it is never bad enough. 
trust makes me blush! and I never might trust 
you believe in time nor move through this life with anyone by my side and I want out already I want out
because you underestimate my aversions
because everything has happened and at the same time, nothing, and you have just arrived and are changing everything and I like my things in order, I dust that glass menagerie and listen to you tell me how one and two become three. 

and I want to get involved with a love that is now impossible.


             4 
and yet, you make such offers, 
like laps of waves,
I hear the silver ripple
ping,
ping. 

I want the white fence
no ring
my head in the oven 
preheating, 
preheating–
but you break in before I go Plath 
in our one bed, one bath—
am I here to 
remind you of the people that you loved before? 
to never leave ourselves, 
to never leave them, 
to never know 
who built the roads 
or 
what 
gets 
us 
through. 

you remind me 
(so blue)
that
what lies at my feet 
will someday lie me down, too.