1. cypremort/sip her more: thirst
The spears, the spires I aspired to be as reaching because what
did you know about tapers. When I told her I wanted to inhabit
I was thinking about the cypress trees we spiral, I was thinking
about how we spiral, how I was thinking about the spine—it’s called
its column. It’s culled and the vertebral residue afterward
is afterward and holes like basins.
Home to bald wood bone, they call them knees
but that was before we didn’t know if they breathed.
2. sudden, oak ache
Bark and canker, the open sore leaking a forestry
now when it’s too late for dieback. Now it’s too late
to clear the thrush, bleeding floor flush with the ground
because we can never stop touching, a filling
the hollows with our hands or caulk or anything.
Everything here is mortal and modal like
the motel dying a northwest death.
3. spike moss/maws, revival
Her body opened like herb
curled as a stoneflower. False
rose in desert, desiccated, she doesn’t
die, she doesn’t
know thirst. She’s wet and swells a root
cure so I try to
refuse her I try
to infuse her extract
she’s exactly
fern and foreign
and most
she’s moss.
