OX

That was our last unripe year, rib cages bald, bright
and evermore palpable. The county’s only faggot bar
had just swapped its signage from hand-painted
to Helvetica. We drank as though new policies had
activated, and we were too measly to grandfather.

The men inside covered in slobber and glitter, I felt
unreflective, so filthy, a pauper. Did someone
say poppers! would blurt Alexander, and his asshole
would begin to open wide. Outside, the rain arrived
as if on a curfew. And we had curfews too.

If I ever got a tattoo—I confessed, walking through
the dirty water, through the lightning’s penmanship—
across my ribs, a zebra mussel, inching imperceptibly
away. One good word half-hidden in the slime of its
meander, maybe EPILOGUE, maybe OCCIDENT.

Alexander protested, because everything I did was on
purpose. It filled my heart with helium. Occident, I
emphasized. Not Accident. Ox. His insufficient
moustache hairs had caught one drop of rain.
Crickets scraped songs off their bodies with their legs.

ALWAYS GREENER

There you are
he says and I say
that’s what I keep

telling myself. Imagine Laika
writing letters
to the runt

from her litter
about the colour
of the grass.

The envelope
burning up well before
the lithosphere.

When I awaken
my whereabouts are murky
but not a large concern.

When moths gnaw the toque
I crocheted it becomes
a come rag.

In outer space a dog
dies and later, in
Soviet Russia, another.

One saw twenty sunsets in a day.
Both saw their worlds
in black and white and grey.

WELLS-NEXT-THE-SEA

A challenge is a dare there’s
a better word for. Brother, you never
kept those ambitions at bay and now just
look, the sun is gone, the bats are making
love. Our bed was like a tantrum, warm

and so impossible to leave. There were
acres of it; their death cast
a musk across the squash. “It” being
orchard bark, abandoned.
An acre being a unit of measurement I

could never, ever fathom, even
today, with a summertime of farming
under my belt. Acorn, spaghetti, butternut:
I liked them best inedible and decorative.
For that matter, I liked this song more

when I thought the composer placed his
head in an oven. The song is called “Ghost.”
I have come around to the squash’s
taste, the wax and wane of its orange
which speaks of other, more enormous

oranges. It is the same rhetoric
every flammable autumn:
Get it done, move along, go to bed.
If I cannot do it, brother, I want you
to hollow me out.