reflection;

Another day of stepping over this flowering inferno:

soaring through time anyway.

Another day of dropping an airless ball that doesn’t

respond to my intention: soaring through time anyway.

Another skull & soul session.

She has it far worse than I do—she’s life’s play toy.

The smart lovely one.

She has it far worse, but doesn’t squabble where squabbling’s

necessary or scream where screaming’s appropriate.

She just puts on a set of heels or flats or Veja sneakers,

bows her head, and becomes buried in another day

of sectioning out fronds, measuring tools, and

another anabasis of process with a long-waisted sunset

at the end of it.

She is parallel to a fruit basket, ripe for taking, and writes

of said fruit that she peels with umber-colored nails,

or the tenure of time she’s spent within the flesh of a pomegranate.

Each day she spits out the seeds and cleans her teeth.

She is a beautiful, hacked at, citron tree in a field of fire:

prepared, even when the reaping falls and turns to ash each harvest.

Listen to her as she tells you, “I am Haruspex

and I have a gripe with God,” and purveys a new camouflage.

I, with my imaginary cross and absent ministry,

perhaps ousted immunity and gave it to a bum kicking cans

off a garbage bin, engaging in a form of pop can Judo.

She’ll show & tell and hide & seek, even as illness cuts through

her immune system or she has a bone to pick with her skeleton.

Tall for appearances, but short in stature, she’ll beat you

to the moon and back in a foot race because she isn’t light opposition;

or she’ll assist in your self-redesign better than Jackie Kennedy

ever could to a White House back in ’63.

It kills me that I’ll only speak to her in a singular lifetime;

she is the dessert with molds and foams and geodesic domes,

a sweetness always prevailing—

like years and years of apricot.

Today she’ll coagulate,

tomorrow she’ll spit out more seeds.