What’s Left

How often now, raging weeping for the days love gives then takes away, takes from you the slightly chapped hand laid on the one you’re pointing at a tree, and the voice that breathes coffeeberry bush into your mouth. The finger that taps and feathers your ear but the giggle’s gone before you turn around. The sandalwood scent hanging in the room, the auburn strand like a flaw in the porcelain, the off-course nail clipping in the carpet. The days eat into your stomach, knife you with longing for relief from love that you cannot leave or leave alone, from its rings of fire where you won’t burn down to ash or be transformed. You become them, and they keep burning and have a coffeeberry voice. Listen how their rhymes sing the little deaths you live.