I peel garlic. I hate peeing in the dark like after our electrical fire, the brief life of the barefoot, when I thought I was brave. I’ll bear you flowers & vegetable broth. I use knuckles to eat slower in war. I’m trying to create a sincerity I can live with, which is not an obligation of the poem. Who trained you as anti-window? To look at me as though accused, as though I called you on it. To surround “for now” with a bereft arm. Or water.

                                                 *

We throw eggs from my balcony: if the instinct is the poem, if the human aggregation, if we sleep on the balcony, if detritus made luminous collects, if underneath the tablecloth canopy, if soap in your scalp, if I count 47 train cars, if reacquainted with objects, if brown bread & brown rice for summer, if operating through mood & loss, if we all fit in the bathtub, if an intricate pooling, if layered fractures of sense, if I lie on white carpets to speak on the phone, if the eggs reach the sea, if the threat,