sid branca - poem for april 5
notes from this long late winter:
The great something to be said for the presence of hands, the letting out of blood, the weighing of voices, dried, the ever inlet of the body, the night.
Their eyes wet like late-night small-town duck ponds, smoke curling upwards, bodies pulsing in quieted machines, all bathed in grocery store moonlight.
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Let us speak in the bodies of code: one listing sigh, two pulsing wrists, one blossoming eye.
Let us speak in the rhythms of time– your breath, my ballooning ribcage, faltering and stiff, the membranes of my thoughts of you that cover me.
Slowly tease the teeth from my mouth, play oracle, be kind and deft and murderous in your dispensation of truth.
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All my letter-writing could not do what your canine tooth accomplished in one aching moment.
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Let your long blond hair wrap itself around my teeth, shake the sugar castles in our midst with all our quaking limbs. Turn to me on the end of a bridge and say, “Look, the life that we once clung to, slowly slugging its way downstream. And here, we, above the river, gleaming, are.”
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I held all her steaming sentiment inside my mouth, the wolf I kept there keening. The littlest of girl smiles like a hunter’s horn. I am drooling for a bloodletting, and so the words seep from out my lips, and I don’t know about the changing of the guard but I know a high wall I could throw you over.