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Will my bear paws
be enough to hold
the wire, the quiver
whip unlaced to make
an orb. See how it
twines where fabric
waists wither
into threadless
needles. Chiffon
sunset or caned
cords tethering
fur to feather.

O, my teeth--
I fear I will use them.

Webs

I didn't mean
to do it: satin
mast where
there should
be rain, baby
winters in thin
rows seeding
the fringe, oracle
of closed things
chiming when
it shouldn't sing.
Yet your pointer

ticks in stained
mocking: hand
spread as a blade
without its bone.

afterthought

where the good was something
you could saw in two
as if the sky could
saw itself in two.

I pulled a string
and remembered the mending
knot, the place where two
braids became unknown.

A barn where floss
in known as mirror, where hay
pulls blood to its mouth
and ovens flood.

Bridle, mistress: no gold
leaf save for that you make
from meat, from vertabrae
unbound --

February

Where two girls make a seam
A yellow war unzips.
Or where two ducks on a brown
Pond become two dogs
Cast in bronze, galloping
Beneath the halo of a yellow lamp.

Where a hole in the wall
Revealed the doll house
Occupied by lost parents.
Where the feathered headdress
Is worn to hear the ash
Describe its former life.

There is no winter there, only
An unloaded shallow.
No glass barrel where
Scissors snipped and wooed
The barren into lumber—
A million knots and hollows
Opened up --

sugar

it was winter, or we
imagined it was. water
made of ice, lit leaves
and salt smell, dirt.
incisors shaped
slowly by frail
spines, commas
held and bowed
the way we bring
two bones together.
Vane and afterfeather
stroking gold, unwired
hutches -- a history
of emptied ribs, cotton
spun to white ecstasy.

classwork

i ate a stone. the winter
began while the worms
were still in bloom. I
entered a hat and tried
to mock the feathers
that sprang up around
the eclipsing orb where
two beaks forged a filament;
wire waist where the fins
twinned themselves, mirror
over pond over machines
planted to waste hours.
a disk sunk in pink folds --
the hurting window
where roofs unwrite
and mending curtains bow.