18

you rub the just-picked poppy     petal between your thumb and     first finger until orange
is your prisoner just like     squeezing yourself between one     politic act and the next

leaving just trace color hard     even to recognize as     an adaptation you once
thought would breed safety     a compressed petal isn’t     pretty why is pressure your

preoccupation kept as     companion mechanism     you have sex under tight sheets
just to feel how skin is such     a thin containment for what’s     dispossessed inside you as

the sheets too so easily give   way orphaned in air sometimes you   close your eyes spit over
the side of the world any   world and the moisture on your   husband’s face that you find
      weeks

later not tears but finer     in texture the way steam is     a mirror of what bodies
are just heat and surrender     you are excess but won’t know     even as you feel yourself

turn into pure static but     sweetly pungent as heated     tar

 

 

19

hear news anchors then the bank     clerks adopt this accent the      next popular speech tactic
arrives inarguable       now it’s personally yours       power penetrates bodies

says Foucault to govern from       inside mostly soundlessly        you will soon hear us all used
as history’s peculiar       alliance built simply of      its passage plus some friction

caused by the indefinite     articles that any new       deception drags with it did
you think words were a way to     police yourself syllables     could be tamed with your
       counting

thought you’d tempt what Keats left “light-       winged” in “some melodious       
       plot” to befriend your failure
to be more than fugitive      in the “shadows numberless”       you can’t just form subversive

songbirds harmonically       transmitting “thou wast not born      for death” along the latest
fiber optics to voice an      instantaneousness that’d       kin you to others in this

brokenness to write what you      don’t know as if lyric hears     it