Nights I sleep with a love charm
beneath my pillow

Thistles, nettles matting empty plains of my mind

Days I
feel the cotton candy of my medication
stoning me out of this world but

it’s only a mask. Underneath the mask

is the truth of thousands of bees
abuzz around me, never never never

My longing for you
is broken as strings, tongued as coins

The bees collect around the hive;
the whole night tilts toward the bottle tree,

the awful emptiness of a tree hung by glass

Nights I don’t really
sleep, just finger the owl mask

of my sex, particulate as feathers

while the world tilts further,
into its heart-shaped impossibility—