When buffeted and beaten by life’s storms,
When by the bitter cares of life oppressed,
I want no surer haven than your arms,
I want no sweeter heaven than your breast.

When over my life’s way there falls the blight
Of sunless days, and nights of starless skies;
Enough for me, the calm and steadfast light
That softly shines within your loving eyes.

The world, for me, and all the world can hold
Is circled by your arms; for me there lies,
Within the lights and shadows of your eyes,
The only beauty that is never old.

I’m watching an old movie in one corner
of my laptop and in another the shadows
nesting in your neck, the flickering frequencies
of your sweater, and remember the Jack Nicholson
tagline in that movie we almost watched then decided
against fearing the little taser of misogyny:
You make me want to be a better person. Sometimes
the only thing I want is to say marry me
even though we both think marriage is archaic and weird
or at least for us. It’s not marry me I want to say
but rather weld with me like a net we also sit in.
Oh FaceTime face and shadow neck and the almost synced
sound of our shared watching. You have a list of things
that are going to be the death of you,
and so do I, which we cover in our debriefings.
All of this is to say that distance makes my heart go farther
into the terrain of heartfelt and I love it: how ordinarily
classifiable it is like feeling literal figurative butterflies
in your stomach. The good being fundamental.
Surprising love can happen at any part of one’s life
like the pixels deciding when to flicker into bursts.

but love does not, Menelle Sebastien.
Of all the afflictions
& luck,
all the sums & paradoxes,
& gravitons that add up
to more minus
than plus,
I promise that love
is often as inconsiderate as it is just
because actual love,
I imagine,
is a wave function
that isn’t restricted
to being
in any one place
at one time.
No, love must
be a superposition
with a measurement problem,
but don’t worry,
I won’t get into alternative
realities & how a single judgement
from one can so easily
dissolve
whom,
or what,
she’s sizing up—                & yet,

                              when experts speak of capturing
vastness at such a small scale,
I can only see the passenger
pigeon
flitting into living
sequoia trees,
& every blue whale
sinking into the great
barrier
reef
& all the threats each are facing,
all these gigantic things
that beat
within the size
of a subatomic being
that is the proton,
which is not fundamental
as love
ought to be—

                            & maybe it does all
add up
to a single hush.
Like how we try to escape
what makes us human by trying
to make sense of what made us
human.
These days,
when I think on the proton,
I only observe love
as entanglement
in which we bias & sway & touch
over great,
great
distances.
But like I said,
I won’t get into it
like the quark’s fate
& all the possible quantum trickery
out there,
lying in wait.
I don’t believe hope dies
just because old measurements got it
wrong & there are no secret lives
between protons & muons
that cause the former to change
in size,
silencing all the music
that drives us
toward mystery
rather than discovery.
Maybe just thank
electronic hydrogen,
since, for now, there’s an answer,
even if it feels like a dead end—

                                                       because I’d bet everything,
                                                       that at least something began
                                                       over this:                         jounce,
                                                       butterfly & cower ::
                                                       over & oeuvre,
                                                       greedy, hunger,
                                                       & sour—

                 until aching
                 each other’s spoils,
                 stripping bare
                 their delicate
                 & deadly
                 creaking
                 coils—

I like being with you all night with closed eyes.
What luck—here you are
coming
along the stars!
I did a road trip
all over my mind and heart
and
there you were
kneeling by the roadside
with your little toolkit
fixing something.

Give me a world, you have taken the world I was.

I have a friend who measures desire

by stillness, who is most turned on

by the person in the room who meditates

without flinching. The librarian, too,

in the Manuscripts Division, handling

the patron who can’t seem to stay seated

warns: I will serve you the smallest items first

as a knit sweater slides off a chair’s back 

into a loose knot. All day we could have

watched clusters of blue bottle gentians

flexing their umbrellas open and shut

as bumblebees submerged head-first

into one bloom after another,

dizzy subspaces, partially open

paper dressing rooms, trying on things

till they’d wrapped themselves

in a good dusting of pollen. Everywhere

intimate containers seem to be in motion.

The raised bed full of squash flowers.

The black latex glove masking

the bare hand ladling bowls

of wedding soup for the lunch crowd.

My quick pedal revved by the world.

not back, let’s not come back, let’s go by the speed of 
queer zest & stay up 
there & get ourselves a little 
moon cottage (so pretty), then start a moon garden 

with lots of moon veggies (so healthy), i mean 
i was already moonlighting 
as an online moonologist 
most weekends, so this is the immensely 

logical next step, are you 
packing your bags yet, don’t forget your 
sailor moon jean jacket, let’s wear 
our sailor moon jean jackets while twirling in that lighter, 

queerer moon gravity, let’s love each other 
(so good) on the moon, let’s love 
the moon        
on the moon

Blues to You. I have folded
my sorrows like fitted
bedsheets: fraying elastic, the faint
scent of an ex-lover’s
detergent and my palms
holding the creases
against my skin, a way to live
into them. I have
folded. My sorrows don’t ask
for any precision
other than my hands
against their hands
mountains—
of holding
a mountain of folds smoothed out for the moon and
the impossible season Mars makes of it. Have I folded
my sorrows well enough into
               the weather of the darkest
               corner of a fading
               restaurant and the small
               talk caught in its walls? I have
folded my sorrows. I have. I have
forded the shallows dragging
my sheets
and their sweet un
-foldings into
another in
-tractable
year

Easy light storms in through the window, soft
            edges of the world, smudged by mist, a squirrel’s 

            nest rigged high in the maple. I’ve got a bone 
to pick with whomever is in charge. All year, 

I’ve said, You know what’s funny? and then,
            Nothing, nothing is funny. Which makes me laugh

            in an oblivion-is-coming sort of way. A friend
writes the word lover in a note and I am strangely

excited for the word lover to come back. Come back
            lover, come back to the five and dime. I could 

            squeal with the idea of blissful release, oh lover,
what a word, what a world, this gray waiting. In me,

a need to nestle deep into the safe-keeping of sky.
            I am too used to nostalgia now, a sweet escape

            of age. Centuries of pleasure before us and after
us, still right now, a softness like the worn fabric of a nightshirt

and what I do not say is, I trust the world to come back.
            Return like a word, long forgotten and maligned 

            for all its gross tenderness, a joke told in a sun beam,
the world walking in, ready to be ravaged, open for business.

I once made a diorama from a shoebox
for a man I loved. I was never a crafty person,

but found tiny items at an art store and did my best
to display the beginning bud of our little love,

a scene recreating our first kiss in his basement
apartment, origin story of an eight-year marriage.

In the dollhouse section, I bought a small ceiling fan.
Recreated his black leather couch, even found miniscule

soda cans for the cardboard counters that I cut and glued.
People get weird about divorce. Think it’s contagious.

Think it dirty. I don’t need to make it holy, but it purifies—
It’s clear. Sometimes the science is simple. Sometimes

people love each other but don’t need each other
anymore. Though, I think the tenderness can stay

(if you want it too). I forgive and keep forgiving,
mostly myself. People still ask, what happened?

I know you want a reason, a caution to avoid, but
life rarely tumbles out a cheat sheet. Sometimes

nobody is the monster. I keep seeing him for the first
time at the restaurant off of West End where we met

and worked and giggled at the micros. I keep seeing
his crooked smile and open server book fanned with cash

before we would discover and enter another world
and come back barreling to this one, astronauts

for the better and for the worse, but still spectacular
as we burned back inside this atmosphere to live

separate lives inside other shadow boxes we cannot see.
I remember I said I hate you once when we were driving

back to Nashville, our last long distance. I didn’t mean it.
I said it to hurt him, and it did. I regret that I was capable

of causing pain. I think it’s important to implicate
the self. The knife shouldn’t exit the cake clean.

There is still some residue, some proof of puncture,
some scars you graze to remember the risk.

                                  it  used  to  be  that  i  would  write  to  enact  a
                                  desire  for  isolation.  it  was  a  way  to  say.   i
                                  want  to  be  left  alone.  to  my  thoughts.  with
                                  my words.  i  want you to leave me alone.  cant
                                  you see  that im trying.  im trying  to write.  im
                                  thirsty. im  writing  these  words to quench my
                                  thirst.  i  write alone in the hopes  that i  would
                                  write  myself into exhaustion.  into sleep.  i did
                                  just that. and that  was  when  you came to me.
                                  carrying   water   in   your  mouth.  you  leaned
                                  into.   you  passed  it   along   from   mouth   to
                                  mouth.  our  lips  did not touch. this was not  a
                                  kiss.  a kiss would not  have led me  here.  you
                                  woke  me  from  sleep by  quenching my  thirst.
                                  this  lasted  but  a  minute.  i  am  thirsty  again.
                                  today  im  writing.  its  usually to someone.  im
                                  writing  something. i  want  to hear it read  out
                                  loud.   i  want to see it on a page,   in a book.   i
                                  want to see you inside  these words.  where are
                                  you. i am thirsty. how are you.

^{a variant of Pablo Neruda’s Sonnet XVII}

I don’t love you as if you were penicillin, 
insulin, or chemotherapy drugs that treat cancer,
I love you as one loves the sickest patient:
terminally, between the diagnosis and the death. 

I love you as one loves new vaccines frozen 
within the lab, poised to stimulate our antibodies,
and thanks to your love, the immunity that protects 
me from disease will respond strongly in my cells.

I love you without knowing how or when this pandemic 
will end. I love you carefully, with double masking. 
I love you like this because we can’t quarantine 

forever in the shelter of social distancing, 
so close that your viral load is mine,
so close that your curve rises with my cough.

Even in California
all of my friends require touch    

to get through winter.                
It’s true, I am waiting to be in love          

in front of the people I love.       
He says, I’m glad you’re here                       

& I want to cover his mouth
to warm my hands.        

Of course I understand              
how one would mistake

that earthquake for a passing train
but what do we do with the stillness                    

when after great change             
nothing moves, but his hand      

sliding a glass of wine
across the table

instructing me to drink              
with a single nod.

I bring the glass to my face                     
but don’t let a drop pass my lips.

Beside him, I am almost somewhere        
I’d like to be for a while.

To make him smile        
I tell him I am bad at sex.

To make him kiss me
I tell him when I’m happy

I go looking for things
I haven’t lost yet.

Like the Japanese cherry blossoms wedded to the soil’s palm
planted in front of the train station; or the yellow-black dance
of the tiger swallowtail’s wings as it flees; or the echoes that follow
after I thunder loud against the kitchen cabinets; or the summer fire
hitched to the air we breathe—the chuckle of ash sneaking into our lungs;
or the way your eyes elope when you’ve had enough of my
tit-for-tat-I’m-right-your-wrong song; or wind—always, there is wind—
that kicks the kink of the whine and wail of the German shepherd left behind;
or the night’s bat wing splashed against the living room window
as I sleep on the couch; or the final five-hundred pairs of northern spotted owls
married to the asylum of pine and bark and nest and play in the State we claim,
the owls now near-threatened with their thirteen hoots and barks and whistles,
with their shabby dresses and dark-in-love stares, their piece of the American pie—
don’t they, too, deserve the kickshaws of what this handsome planet
has to offer, don’t we? . . . Don’t leave me. We may not be a pair of owls
nested in the forest of Douglas firs trying to make muss a home
humans made of this land, timber harvestings and land conversions.
I may have farmed a muck of our land, too,
but Babe, no matter the season of fresh lavender and children playing
in the hallway, no matter the bowls of leftover ramen mean with age,
no matter the abysmal cycle of lists I conjure in this poem, no matter
if every last owl has escaped—Lord, let them escape—the foul-fowl lust
of humankind, no matter the huff I hang on your every word,
I love you. You are where I belong.

Harder, he pants into the scruff of my neck, our labored breath
condensing as my lover pulls my hips into wolfish grind.
From a distance, we are two curs fogging a parked Chrysler,
though this, only half-accurate. In our nest, we transcend sex
-ed things, white-hot spangles like dead gods, the glow of us
pulsing brighter & brighter in turn. I have never shouted before,
but this is how he wets my nose—open, like a howl, a deafening
unhinging of worship—from the back—this, the way he whines—
throwing his head in praise. It is ancient composition, how we fever
the dark’s bones, convince the night to do our bidding.
We collapse into each other. The moon of him eclipsing
the fullness of me, the rift of us unfolding unto new darkness
& what are we but ravenous? Here, we devour dusk, suckle
sides of cosmic gristle, mouths brimming, tearing the sky, Black.

The moon assumes her voyeuristic perch
to find the rut of me, releashed from sense,
devoid of focus ’cept by your design.
I never thought restraint would be my thing.
Then you: the hole from which my logic seeps,
who bucks my mind’s incessant swallowsong
& pins the speaker’s squirming lyric down
with ease. You coax a measured flood, decide
the scatter of my breath & know your place—
astride the August heat, your knuckles tight
around a bratty vers, a fuschia gag:
you quiet my neurotic ass, can still
the loudness murmuring beneath my skull.
Be done. There’s nothing more to say.

I’ll say it—the most remarkable way a man 
has touched me is when he didn’t intend to, found
the heat of me on accident. I’m saying his hand
punctured the gap between our backs, rooted around

for the blanket we shared and swept my rib-ridged side.
In movies, that touch is the domino
that starts the chain, but his bed did not abide
by rules of fantasy. He touched me and, oh,

I held my breath. Waited for the regret
he never felt. My God, he touched me then slid
closer beneath the duvet, our spines close-set
arches that joined in the dark, kissing. I did

not know it then, but his fingers flexed with want
into the night. His heart at my back. Desire out front.