Two Poems

I swear I was once authentic

      with skin

                so thin

                                          it prunes from inside

                              cracks and splits

I pour cuts in all my smoke

                                      and spend all night

                                          sending out

                                                           impertinent pleas—

                                              when we get sunk

                               and spectral

                                             in some firehazard

basement

              all light and buried

                                           like a piety

                              you are fearless

in a fit of engineering

                                 this was striking

              but I always lose track of you just before the beginning



Swooners

Draw breath, cover us in noise,
make it loud and worship,
as if the sound could carry us across our hematoma—
              constellations scattered along our bodies,
                                         to navigate by.

We are patterned
in dynamic
pink and yellow, green,

our lives forever until we’ve had enough,
until the game starts to dwindle across our punctuated timeline and we fall through
the ground and sprout flowers,
bursting out,
buried in ecstatic descent.

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