This is madness she says & we should go camping in it. He traces the outline of her bra strap as if it were a map. Let’s go anywhere lonely & suffering & green, which is a simple coordinate for her & he knows it. He knows she’s never loved anything this red before. Not the red inside always mistaking itself for white, but a harvest she circles her teeth around. There is no white or wrong. Not in this nonsense. He is just a jungle cat slinking through the curtains saying How about we take out a mortgage & sleep in the same room for the rest of our lives. To which she’s only a ball of yarn that moans January January January.

Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 18, Issue 1.

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There is danger. There is the orange tea stain of his old vest, a day of missiles loaded & shed. A thousand creeds dropping over the tar sands. His body memory alive in the sleeves of his sleeveless shirts. A forearm ready with a Semper Fi crest. It won’t matter what my body does with his body, he will hold. His hands know rifle, mortar shell, newborn. His hands can fold five points into the corners of our bed better than my mother. As night comes, we can allow it to come. Let it deal us into its deck of fatal cards. He is not luck, but trade. Self-made & exact. Yes, his body is surrounded in bootcamp. Yes, he shouts in his sleep & flings his heft from bed, answering his own throat’s trumpet. But he returns & returns. He remembers the evenings he walked home through a Japanese field swarming with batlife—none of the other Marines knowing what to call the night that touches back. His shoulder flecked with the penumbra of wing, or my nimble lips in sleep. He touches back. Oh, how he is tender & bread. How he shows me I forget kindness. If there is danger it is not from him. It is mine. It is mine. It is mine.

Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 17, Issue 4.

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