honeysuckle

You create space out of claustrophobia and overfilled stomachs.

I wait and watch your restful eyes and restless fingers

trace the curvature of the globe and blackholes.

When stars die does their dust recollect in your retinas?

I sing the hymn my God taught me under my breath

when you wrestle string to fret.

Do I taste of peaches and desperation? Do I taste of anything at all?

I am translucent in the right lighting like a thinly-fleshed fish in a salt water tank.

Did you pray last night?

I thought I heard angels rising from the tips of your canines while I slept.

Did you pray for a garden?

For I awoke with lilies sprouting from my toes and marigolds braided into my hair.

Did you pray last night?

Or did you stand under a waterfall just to cleanse me?

I’d like to curl up where the fireplace never was,

under the spot that should hold a mantle.

But every time you strike a match, I am dismantled.

I try to breathe to your rhythm but end up gasping aimlessly at nitrogen.

How many gulps until my head begins to spin and my belt comes undone like a washed-up whale?

I am beached

and I swallow starlight like my death-row dinner still hot from the paper bags my masters have unraveled.

I tried once to befriend the mice and ended up with rabies

but I still caress their taxadermied flesh when I finish my bedtime story.

I still taste the glue of all the envelopes I’ve ever tried to shove myself into.

See, I was never more than a misplaced footing on the ladder.

I was never more than an attempt to ascend disrouted by time and place.

But you cracked the sky and pulled down God’s rays to illuminate my cheekbones.

You make me thunder.

You make me telephone wires.

I feel the lightning erupt from me

and the quakes shake the space in my ribs that I used to try to fill with cereal and milk on Saturday mornings before the rivers and the whiskers and the rotary phones settled in.

I think there’s an inch or two of me that could create something lovely.

There’s a shadow in my brain that I know won’t lift or even shift as the day goes on.

I am made of the place the light cannot hit.

I am the silhouette of Joan of Arc.

I am the child born of Hesphaestus’s seed and the soil beneath Athena.

I can’t taste the rainbow, only the hail.

When I shroud myself in sun flowers, it’s to concoct the illusion of pulchritude.

Of delicacy.

Of decency.

But we can be reborn under the Japanese honeysuckle in the back corner of the recess field.

The blood of our unflossed gums tinting the infantile petals

that fade to the hue of screaming sunshine between our twelve-year-old molars.

We were once born;

merely petals,

dripping to this day with our mothers’ nectar.

I suck ambrosia from the elementary shrub

and feel your fingers tiptoe through my esophagus,

anointing me.

And under the glow of the spring equinox,

you lift your winter solstice eyes and press them to mine.

Your breath is holy water and I try to be as blessed as thou whenever I genuflect.

I try to keep my prayers concise and tight to my chest.

But sometimes I sit with heavy silence on my shoulders

grasping and begging you to christen me again.

We could be resurrected lying in the grass of your childhood backyard,

trying to find faces in the swirls of the wooden fence.

You could lace up my skates and teach me to color inside the lines

on the frozen pond between your house and the wood.

You turn cities into oases and crush the chaos to serenity.

And when the jagged bits of me bounce against each other with all the rapidity of electrons,

you crawl inside my mind and rend the particles apart.