If I were to draw it: structured opposition—
mind, foot, earth, firmament, what they did

to me, on the X-ray the nails long as tines.
If one were to rewrite what happened,

the first unit of signification would be
the childhood journey through the dark pines,

the final humiliation gathered from the natural world,
which is to say ankle as hymen, body as thing broken

on words. I thought, “I am falling,”
and diagrammatically it was such. In such a story

content is inconsequential, the strawberry moon
languishing in the patriarchal night

neither here nor there, the subject dragging the object
through the empty streets. Like the first time

I fucked someone, how he rode me home
on the back of his bike, the vast sky all around us,

the fireflies fireflies.