I watch you lie on your stomach with your legs stuck up

        in the air, crossed at the ankles, bare feet tar black

              from the asphalt. You’ve got your shirt on backwards

 

and a bumblebee behind your ear and you’re staring

        at me with fistfuls of your cheeks in your hands reciting

              spells you learned under your breath to grow your hair out long,

 

long enough to chop off and still have some to tousle.

        And I’m watching you do it; growing and growing

               and bathing in blood the way the Cotswold ducks did

 

in puddles leaking down from the marketplace—red

         and runny like streaks of ketchup. Tomato-pasted

              sherbet-bellied bills that said It’s you and me up against

 

the wall, baby—or in the pond or beneath the wooden bridge

        that smelled like iron and caramel kettle corn. I hear you

              talking on the phone to Philadelphia honeybee, and damnit

 

I feel lucky you’re mine. That you’re the (one I get to spend my time

        with, you) pack of powdered donuts that went down with a thunk

              when I shook the vending machine— I, the all too eager grabber

 

who nearly crushed them all in the yanking out process.

        You put your terracotta corduroys in my laundry

              and now I’m tinted pink, thinking of you, listening to you

 

tell the other eight nine ten hour away people over a half-buttered

        English muffin that you are eight nine ten hours away, how sorry

               you are you can’t make it and with this, you nudge me

 

and put your life in the backseat, the trunk, my coffee-ringed cupholder.

        I bet those ducks became bloodthirsty, waddling across the cobblestone

               with Kool-Aid stained tail feathers, a birdbath of bloodlust.

 

If there were geese, (which I bet there were) they would have looked

       like pomegranates, like me and you, in and out of adoration under Mars.

               I think Mars would like the look of that, too.