SACRIFICIAL

they’re all wrong
you’re not here
it’s ok

our first place
bound you to rest

and I liked rest
dissolved in
contained water

they wrote
rules on the air
and you followed me

I let you see
and you grew
taller

lamb lamb lamb

I remember fondly
like a father
at a barred window

I’m not sorry
I miss the locked
black box

bury it
bury it
lamb fed by a lamb

to lose you
I keep pure

unsummoned
by memory’s
network rot

make it out
and collapse

you made it out
you’re the only
who can tell

they’re saying
they’re saying
they’re saying I knew

look I
made this
cage for you

MIRRORLESS MIRRORLESS

whatever it was
truant from the wake

nervous system
barely literate

mirrorless mirrorless the air
stoic unblinking

in void a kind word
rationed on loop

I’m not afraid
of bleeding from my mouth

how you do one thing is
how you do all things

nothing happened to me
I happened

not unlike treading water
on a planet without land

blue blue gray green
and a floating patch of seaweed

choose something
to swim toward

DATA OR A FEELING

I am on the hunt for axioms.

My methods are flawed,
my reasoning motivated by the crowd
o fish nibbling my feet.

Give them something tangible, writes
my student, like data or a feeling.

Thick, dripping slabs of data.

I carry a ball of twine in my backpack,
I carry my backpack everywhere.

Flakes of fact turning in the light.

Like any mammal,
my professor encourages
the use of concrete examples.

At the end of the hall: a door. Behind it,
a bed someone’s already slept in.

The compound wound of the eye.
The nervous system, illiterate.

Maybe I’d recognize you on the train.

When the air inside my lungs equals
the air outside my body—
that’s how I’ll know it’s real.