Wisteria Strangles the Nearest Body
Hours after disembarking a body might still believe it is on the boat: a ferry & its circular windows like a mourning ring strung on a neck. Or the loop of hair we did not snip in your hospital rooms. It felt like a wash cycle when we slept on the waves. The boat growing around our glass O like a meant-to-say-sorry. A carousel of wooden sicknesses buffed to their brights. Though no apology for how we carried your cell wreckage & fasteners off as ash in the hand, forgot how to allow let alone let go on loop. I wished for the heaviest brass diving bell my head could carry. To be asked to shore up a cathedral from six meters deep. Every morning I discover your head on our front lawn being pilfered by birds. Then your hands & feet. What do you call the remorse of leaving someone on accident again? To be compulsive enough to tattoo your radiation constellation across my chest as if heirloom? If I rescue your bed from a sinking ICU. Float it to the forest encircled in life preservers. Drag it by teeth in a fit. I won’t tell you sleeping inside the forest means having your legs separated from your body as if safe keeping. The birds in focus in the foreground. Birds as holes in the wisteria wallpaper. The birds that tear our agency off as a tender loophole.