Dissection ONe

What's been written across our lips

in lines of ether

isn't to be whispered in hushed tones

as your fingers

leave maps across my hooded eyes.

Or in the heat of the blood

of wizened fruit

running think with the tumultuous

stillness of velvet.

Instead,

Slip into the creases

of my callused

corneas,

refracting

Faded color slides

into otherwise functioning

otherwise perfect

machinery

Cytokinesis

In this room right now

there are seventeen of us

last time I counted.

Out wrists and marrow

sinew and gelatinous parts

of our retinas,

splayed across the linoleum.

Getting from West 3^rd

to Central Park

in vapid wind, when your

cheeks chap rosy.

That’s what counting us

feels like.

Your fingertips are sticky

with Clementine

smudging the sides

of the glass Coke bottle.

Your mouth is addicted to curves

and the metallic

taste of ratifying yourself

over and over.

It bounces

from your lips off my brow-bone

and your right kneecap.

It’s resonates from all the

surfaces on which it lands.

The vowels.

They make my toes vibrate

and the hairs

on the backs of my knees salute you.

Textbook division

and raising

to the ninth you.

In this room there are

approximately seventeen of you

and me.

No telling which mouth

you’re talking from.

Isotonic Contraction

Muscles can:

1. retain their tone

and their tension even

as the muscle shortens and

lengthens over and over.

2. appear insoluble

water beading on the surface—

minute riptides

pulled by the immaculate

conception of necessitation.

3.dissapear so willingly.

I’ve found marauders

lost in the cavernous depths

of my hipbones.

3. fourteen times over

and the prod and the poke

and the prick

still result in a gasp

followed immediately

by bouts of hush.

4. move independently.

Try to move your big toe

without the second and third

swiftly pursuing.

Find how God’s a

liar.

5. define any connection

to you. Whether it be

completely independent

of the heat rising in tendrils

from your neutral knees

or whether it is in fact

that obsession.

Myxedema

For what it’s worth

I was always impressionable

in matters of the kinds of thoughts

that develop in the space between the iris

and the brain.

Somewhere between the inside of my eyelid,

right under where the eyelashes attach,

and where all the dendrites spark—

I’m flabbergasting women

all over the world with my inventions.

Dilation is concentrated catastrophe.

The result of too much

adoration, and obsession

of the mind that lives in the picturesque.

Seeing a coffee pot

and projecting the coffee pot

onto the lines of plot

criss crossing throughout the next several months

are the same in my authenticity.

All the reasons I’ve concocted

for my empty bed,

and the weight of heavy eyes

upon my tensing muscles,

pushing down onto my eardrums

hissing out one by one

in fits of hilarious solitude.

A fine example for those

who hate their empty brains

and wish they could be alone.

Adipose

In the process of pushing
your center to your edge
the act of inflation—
undertaken superfluously.

In the hope of becoming
a fortunately wonderful
sac, shaped like some
melon, like a grapefruit,
or a kumquat
specificity is lost in the borders.

Insulation dilated by
your hand on the small of my back—
a nudge forward into
the welcoming arms of
gold-finger Monday and
your mother.

We’ll roast the tips of our fingers
over iron skillets while you
swell indefinitely.
I can’t pick apart
your parts.