By Daniel Edward Moore
If an aspirin cascading down your throat
means the next world to fall could be yours,
means your heart never wanted beauty as bad
as the screen’s flashing song of asystole,
those are my hands asleep on your chest
waiting for breath’s last parade, for children
to close their mouths as fear rains candy
from poisonous clouds.
A beastly vascularity compressed
your lungs to violate the silence, you,
my sky of barely there, my blinking brittle stars.
Scorch my tongue with repeat. Again.
Scrubbing underwear made for the holy
When faith was told it could sleep in my bed,
a presence that asked not to be named
unfurled like a question inside me, like a
shepherd’s cane parting a field of fists
not burdened by bread needing broken.
When light lost control of the body’s flame,
as mouths of ice swallowed you whole,
veins cracked like roads near polygamy town,
as strong hairy men with no salt in their lakes
watched praise fall like snow on women’s hands
scrubbing underwear made for the holy.
Daniel Edward Moore lives in Washington on Whidbey Island. His work is forthcoming in I-70 Review, Passengers Journal, Watershed Review, Flint Hills Review, Sugar House Review, The Main Street Rag Magazine, South Florida Poetry Journal, Action, Spectacle Magazine, The Meadow, and Exist Otherwise. His book, Waxing the Dents, is from Brick Road Poetry Press.