Consumed

–after “What Weighs” by Elaine Terranova

Angler–
or football fish,
inky opaque.
Vein to vein, they hold on.

The male, a swimming syringe. She,
wooed by the barbed mouth,
the dissolving head.
Joined by a point of melted flesh.

But, oh, to be taken so completely.
To be scorched to a single
organ. Joining.

One kiss, oblivion.
My eyes melting through
the soft torso to the womb
as they go blind.
But nothing is so fully spent
as the undigested flesh.

Once joined, his sperm
chambered and waiting,
she feeds the piece of him
remaining with her blood.

When she’s ready
their spawn is a soft sheet
of translucent eggs, two
feet wide
and thirty feet long.

untitled poem requiring much revision

I get these little wounds that I don’t remember taking,
I’ve found them on my chest, a short slash
and the pink swelling edges. But mostly
I get them on my legs. One bled into my sock
and dried before I noticed. I like the way
blood turns hard like lava out of the hot,
weightless core of the Earth.

All bodies have gravity. If we were falling
in perfect emptiness forever, one day,
we’d notice how much closer we’d become
and then we’d have to make decisions.

Like the Earth, I have a core warmer than the rest of me.
But let’s stop there; bleeding doesn’t make new
islands for my body or even my soul (at least,
these quiet little rips and punctures don’t). They
aren’t the kinds of wounds that cool
in the salt-bath of time, leaving a small
rich-soil perch where my mind’s little raft
washes up on the sand.

Let’s stop at the place where the body
is like a planet, and as I find these
tiny wounds, my mind is on that raft,
watching the little sparks dance like
fireflies at the mouth of that crater
just over there on the mainland.

Noticing the Body

The same way a friend’s hand
laid with fresh instinct on my arm
roots like pollen down to the seed
from which my heart grows—
the pressure of my foot
against the strange terrain
of my floor, awakens me
to the wild fleshy novelty
of being some kind of a
living human thing.