Alethia (with Image by Theoni Tambaki)

peeled away thin, your skeleton
(in the desert bone-yellow as loosestrife)

as in

the ghost-air between
tangled lovers

wearing
no memory more embedded
than that of carnality past

in the imploded skull,
explosion of sperm


when all you’ve sucked in through siphon,
little spills of spoil--I lapped

& wanted more


fucked, absolute,
sucked-up

in the dusted willow
of my hair

you let settle your water fowl,
tempestuously, so upon me--

did you hope it would flee or settle itself before me a shadow of vireo or,
perhaps, a shadow of you, amorphous in the dew that drenched my body?

unsettled geometries

all clustered about our breasts
you, Zephyrus on the cusp, embracer

like Eros

how

I

wanted your Greek--Anemoi--
to untangle me from his gristle

or, in darkness, his vile insides
spilling out-------

gush of upheaval
purpling the skin

& what was matrimonially
laid before it:
memento mori ----




only such
in each of us

mortality
is not easily
forgotten