Petroleum Jelly

Yesterday, I

painted my nails bright red,

braided my unkempt strands of copper-colored hair,

dipped my pale fingers

into that tub of petroleum

and felt how moist and warm

the jelly was.

Lingered for a few seconds,

got lost in the dampness for a moment,

made small circles around the Vaseline

and finally

dab a little of it

into my parched lips.

Parted them both

for a tinge of my magenta lipstick.

In front of the mirror,

I saw

two folds of flesh in the dark,

glistening as one.

4 points

from Break

He thrust without guilt, going deep on the first lunge, severing, severe, within, underneath, reaching those little, fragile places I knew existed but was uncertain as to where until his first cut, deeper, hurting like healing would never come, irrevocably destroyed, I struggled to hold on to anything intact, shifting on hard surfaces, wooden drawers, metal knob, the length of his back while he goes deeper, piercing through, slicing me from below, before withdrawing—

suddenly a gap, an absence—

then back again, a plunge, a pain never quite complete, ebbing farther, fragments of me scattered inside, fragments I could never reclaim again once he is gone, once the rupture and rapture become hazy, cerebral, regressing as ideas, afterthoughts, along with the endless tastes of our bodies, clay, copper, earth, iron, musk, salt, smoke, along with knots, tangles, moans, aliases, repositions, throbs, shoves, friction, sweat, euphoria, along with my sudden death. There was heaven. I looked up, and the light exploded.

North to Smoked Stories

I will write about trains and how their wrecks
turn into flecks of bronze between your eyelids
When we found each other in shades of disorder
And tangled arms and tangled legs
Roped themselves towards a common end


I will write about how once, the travesas
Turned into your backbone, pliant and arched
And how our mouths let off steam, careening
To unknown regions, North to smoked stories
Telling us that May should have died, and us along with it
Southern, where we burned the maps that told us
Where to stop our abandonment


But mostly, I will write about how we passed several lifetimes
before this, of grasslands that blurred on such short a course
and that side by side, we become oblivious to rushing
without fear, And each other
even when the earth intrudes our stares


This morning, the day called to us
Slipping underneath our feet
Lost to schedules, visions of passage


We have missed it long before it left