baptizing saturn
by Taylor P. Miller
—our rebirth
i.
mossed-over bones settled into a bouquet
of marigold, swollen with curdled cider.
your touch stretched over me, illuminating my fingers to the soggy sand beneath,
teaching me that boxes crafted from mahogany
and walnut
are outdated.
where we are going, the sun is not superior;
no, it’s the fifty-three revolving eyes blindly watching.
resting atop your lips, we baptized the ground
with the fallen limbs of the marigolds
and then you taught me not to deny gravity
but to sweep away space with my tongue,
though you never mentioned that afterward, I’d be tongue-
tied,
looped around your empty dialogue and bands.
and our errors are paralleled, collapsing, capsizing us
into remembering that neither of us
is more than the smoke we exhale.
ii.
coughing up the dust that tore through our lashes,
we stumbled into sockets of gas.
our radii competed to find the trains heading east,
regurgitating the liters of old pictures we swallowed
cutting off the noes that swing off my orbital range,
you slipped into the grains of virgo’s trail.
we left behind broken marigolds in our wake,
in desperation to find our way back to our skeletons.
the hymn you crafted from honey
sapped my waning warmth,
disconnecting me from pink nebulae.
cross out the paths we used to roam, please,
so that we might forget the ice that melted our alibis
and stripped our tendons of their white.
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