In a world of loss

     gratitude is what 

          I demand for keeping 

     precious catch

within my reach.

     No one despises 

          the shepherd for

     collecting his flock. 

No one accuses 

     the watchman of 

          making a captive 

     of his charge.

I’m like a holster, 

     or sheath, all function 

          and no fury. Don’t 

     you worry as I 

swallow you whole. Those 

     ulcers in my gut 

          are only windows,

     the stoma punched 

in my throat is just 

     a keyhole. Don’t be shy.

          Hand me the rattle 

     of your aching heart

 and I’ll cradle you, 

     bird with broken wing. 

          Let me love you. I

     will hold your brittle 

bones together. I’ll 

     unclasp your beak

         so you can sing.

     It’s a world of always 

leaving but here

     you can always stay.

Wouldbelove, do not think of me as a whetstone

until you hear the whole story:

In it, I’m not the hero, but I’m not the villain either

so let’s say, in the story, I was human

and made of human-things: fear

and hands, underbelly and blade. Let me

say it plain: I loved someone

and I failed at it. Let me say it

another way: I like to call myself wound

but I will answer to knife. Sometimes

I think we have the same name, Notquitelove. I want

to be soft, to say here is my underbelly and I want you

to hold the knife, but I don’t know what I want you to do:

plunge or mercy. I deserve both. I want to hold and be held.  

Let me say it again, Possiblelove: I’m not sure

you should. The truth is: If you don’t, I won’t

die of want or lonely, just time. And not now, not even

soon. But that’s how every story ends eventually.

Here is how one might start: Before. The truth?

I’m not a liar but I close my eyes a lot, Couldbelove.

Before, I let a blade slide itself sharp against me. Look

at where I once bloomed red and pulsing. A keloid

history. I have not forgotten the knife or that I loved

it or what it was like before: my unscarred body

visits me in dreams and photographs. Maybelove,

I barely recognize it without the armor of its scars.

I am trying to tell the truth: the dreams are how

I haunt myself. Maybe I’m not telling the whole story:

I loved someone and now I don’t. I can’t promise

to leave you unscarred. The truth: I am a map

of every blade I ever held. This is not a dream.

Look at us now: all grit and density. What, Wouldbelove

do you know of knives? Do you think you are a soft thing?

I don’t. Maybe the truth is: Both. Blade and guard.

My truth is: blade. My hands

on the blade; my hands, the blade; my hands

carving and re-carving every overzealous fibrous

memory. The truth is: I want to hold your hands

because they are like mine. Holding a knife

by the blade and sharpening it. In your dreams, how much invitation

to pierce are you? Perhapslove, the truth is: I am afraid

we are both knives, both stones, both scarred. Or we will be.

The truth is: I have made fire

before: stone against stone. Mightbelove, I have sharpened

this knife before: blade against blade. I have hurt and hungered

before: flesh

against flesh. I won’t make a dull promise.

10. Here on my knees I look for the single animal: you left

                                                   ravaged at the edge of a meadow

9. Is everything accounted for? The fingers dipped

                                     beneath the torso—to keep this body bright

8. Every breath we are desperate to take

                             sounds as if a war lost against a country of promise

7. Discarded halos: the light you remember

                   in your head—you feed on what is crushed between the teeth

6. America declares these dreams I have every night be re-

                                                      dreamed & pressed into names

5. Upended petals of qém’es

                                 abandoned like torn butterfly wings—we’é I pray

4. I pray that nobody

                  ever hears us

3. An eye gone

           bloodshot: I tear through the crisp apple of your throat & find—

2. myself: this—a boy beside a boy. An eyelash

                            fallen at the base of a valley, our dark bones bursting in-

1. to bloom. I stare into your beloved face & enter: yes,

                 yes, this nation, under god, its black sky we lay our nightmares to

0. where I am your animal: my Lamb—now eat

            me alive.

The air is close by the sea and the glow from the pink moon

drapes low over a tamarind tree.

We hold hands, walk across a road rushing with traffic 

to an abandoned building site on the bay, look out across the dark marina.

Sea cows sleep by the side of a splintered dock, a cluster of them 

under the shallow water,

their wide backs covered in algae like mounds of bleached coral.

Every few minutes one floats up for air, 

then drifts back down to the bottom, 

without fully waking.  

They will do this for hours, and for a while we try to match 

our breath to theirs, and with each other’s.

In the morning, sitting in the garden beneath thatch palms, 

we drink black coffee from white ceramic cups.

Lizards killed by feral cats are scattered on the footpath.

I sweep them into a pile with the ones from the night before.   

Waves of heat rise from the asphalt, 

and we sense a transparent gray fuzz lightly covering everything 

as if there were no such thing as empty space, 

that even a jar void of substance holds emptiness as if it were full.