As Mourning Doves Persist

Her hands run down the hourglass of my back. Tracing the flare where burrowed absentee tension coagulates. Washboard. Bath water, Blackboard burdened with layers of letters and calculations never entirely erased. We share answers to questions only asked by strangers who after four visits will never see one another again. She strikes a lighter, sucking oxygen from small glass cups that I cannot see, and attaches them to my back hovering above my bruised ribcage. Fascia ripples, letting down like a lithely inhabited village where our grandmothers still live, agile in their afterlives. Her black hair is pulled back from her face. I really only know her voice now from a warm table in a narrow room where, face down on my stomach, my neck relinquishes to the kneading. The name she gives to the tight spring under my right arm just at the webbing of shoulder blade and first rib is wholly new to me. Swans, her therapeutic lyric. I try to swallow the minute fountain th...

Mixed media by Erin Curier In our house there are books on books on every table and bedside stand. Books about the Roman Republic, silhouette of a bronze wolf. Tablets of poems crafted in long pipes like periscopes that you tell me you don't follow. A copy of your own novel holds a permanent corner of the round table - city of Buffalo in the rain. Blue stick figure notes dissect a yellow pad placeholder. An entire lecture series beacons we sit up and take notice. Anxious underfed p opulations balance on the head of a pin,  hitchhikers. I eat fettucini with green clams while reading midday, flip through saucy paragraphs, thumbing paper like garlic skin that sticks to skin. Lemon pepper punctuation. Monsters and friends spill from the orange cover and spine as I press down cautiously for fear of leaving clues on fresh snow and in the gutter of glue. Dedication like a large horse of a dog in woodblock poised in the foreground of a black forest. Secondhand Baldwin catches...

for Bernard We are misfits. We fit. Two halves of separately shattered plates. We've risen from central and north and stalk our disappointments on intelligent wheels. Today we are smart alecks, flirtatious at best and mean at the wall.  Twin siblings of different smoke stacks.  When our houses burned down we ate rubble just to claim a righteous plank chair in the small holocaust arena.  You once wore your clunky metal halo screwed into your neck and thick head, ducked for signs. I polished mine when no one was looking and nailed it to the front door like a year-round wreath warning anyone who could not pray to not get too close.  All these crooked years later your deep voice is still tempered with mischief. I cock my ear to listen in symphony.