for Jericho, with thanks to Carl Phillips

I like men who are cruel to me;

men who know how I will end;

men who, when they touch me,

fasten their shadows to my neck

then get out my face when certain

they haven’t much use for being seen.

I like men to be cruel to me.

Any men who build their bodies into

widths of doors I only walk through

once will do. There’s a difference

between entrances and exits I don’t

have much use for now. I’ve seen

what’s left behind after a hawk

has seized a smaller bird midair.

The feathers lay circled in prattle

with rotting crab apples, grasses passing

between the entrances and exits

of clover. The raptor, somewhere

over it, over it. Cruelty where?

The hell would grief go in a goshawk?

It’s enough to risk the open field,

its rotten crab apples, grasses passing

out like lock-kneed mourners in sun.

There I was, scoping, scavenging

the damage to drag mystery out of

a simple read: two animals wanted

life enough to risk the open field

and one of them took what it hunted.

Each one tells me he wants me

vulnerable. I already wrote that book.

The body text cleaved to the spine,

simple to read as two animals wanting

to see inside each other and one

pulling back a wing to offer—See?

Here—the fastest way in or out

and you knew how it would end.

You cleaved the body text to the spine

cause you read closely. You clock damage.

It was a door you walked through once

before pivoting toward a newer image of risk.