A Kind of Practice

You measure out everything that circles. Like pills without the aftertaste side-effects medical coverage. You decide you have practiced long enough. You decide your local news feed could benefit from something like this. You decide not to swallow yet. Instead, you hold all these circles on the tip of your tongue, some guerrilla themselves down your throat. You have been searching for the cleanest options, you’ve made too much of a mess these days. You slide the tiniest questions behind your fingernails for them to find. You masturbate one last time using only toes and elbows. You briefly wonder what they will say, how they will pretend they knew you. You trace the expected size of their teardrops on your thighs, look at the oxidized moon one last time and become consumed.

A Separation (or Dismembered in disHarmony)

After the divorce, they split everything in half: torso, curdled hazel, garden soil brown, knees, the scars you inherited, the scars you gave her, fourteen moles carefully severed, chapters forty-seven through fifty-two, books (you requested all the endings; she begged for the acknowledgments), the ghost of your uterus, the ghost of her sex drive, that time that time that time she gave you, that time that time that time you never got to, grid paper, the tags they used to tag the buildings they crawled inside, half a song (mostly chorus), cracked voice, swollen cartilage, library card, flint, James Baldwin, pile of uneaten hair, invisibility cloak (barely noticeable). They grew their arms long enough to carry, to carry. Walked six years in different directions. Dropped what they had when they could no longer speak footprints. And then, started over.

museum of meat and diets and unconfirmed deities

With every cut of skin,

a circus of blood–

 

drops trapezing off veins

juggling moles, sun blisters

 

elephant trunk disconnected

from its rest– an arm

 

abandoned bodies may also be called

museums, the kind that are abandoned too

 

and underneath, dancers dancing death

a glow-in-the-dark complaint letter