Allele

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I water the houseplants and tend to the cat, watching as your hips sway along to the song in my head.
 

A suitable proxy for cinema, where longing and libido intersect,
 

you, a hunter-gatherer, admiring the coupon clippings on the floor.

The fathers I know carry wallet-sized family photos

 

like butterflies pinned to a board,
 

while bachelors conceal condoms in their billfolds
 

like pets euthanized and fetishized,
 

a dribble of mucus or seared chicken skin stuck to the pan.
 

“When’s the first time you felt loneliness?” she asked.

It’s at six months, that a baby realizes that she's separate from her mother,

 

singular and bound in her own swaddled skin,

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an isolate, an entity, a story untold.
 

According to Roman myth, bees rise from slain oxen

 

so after the scavengers have eaten it away, I'll buzz around the bones, asking:
 

“Why me?” as I suffer, before lamenting
 

“why not me?” upon noting the good fortune of others.
 

“What’s it like to be you,” she asks, surveying the alphabetized DVDS along the mantle.
 

I'm a spreadsheet of moon phases, an attempt to control;
 

This dream is interesting only to me because it's mine, I say
 

before lamenting the godless satellites and their pristine imaging

 

even as I trace the coastline - a study in nudity, innards and anatomy.
 

And so, I prune the leaves, add Miracle Grow and peat moss,

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medicated and distant, my interior worn and thumbed through like a check-out-line tabloid;
 

it's Fallopian and phallus, a ritualized machination, I assert, as if all of this were a correspondence course.

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And so, I'll wind your red ribbon through the apiary, dancing, like stretchmarks and ballooning skin, watching as the river floods, coughing up its nutrient-rich sediment.

This ghostwriter, much maligned, evidenced and spotting,

 

fervent, frenzied and unclear:

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I could take you in

 

and brush your hair,

 

this aviary, all these songs, a music box for you.
 

I could take you in and once

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bound in my nest,

 

I could burn my secrets to keep you warm.

Alleles and innards and Darwinian deviations, I report, everything on a time delay, words not matching the mouth:

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VHS tracking and static, image destabilized.

Even so, my goddess, like the white powder lining the envelope,
 

I’ll admire your anthrax spores, celebrating the bacteria, so expertly refined

 

weaponized in aerosol, sprayed over the cities, a crop dusting plane:
 

choking, burning
 

just like the belligerent critic I am.

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