Ode to Phone Sex
after Ocean Vuong
because no one told us
we could pour
this decade-long night
into our stranded bodies
and call it
home
go ahead – call
an ache
into a name
answer absent
a body
to hold
take time
between two fingers
this now will live
until someone destroys
the evidence
now
come
forge a world
that can never hold us
together
the voice hums
a wave warm
and blood-close
a moment folds
under fences
crowded
with loneliness
listen: miles
are just blankets
for wet skin
The prison photographer makes his rounds,
walking from tiny table to tiny table, asking who wants a Polaroid to commemorate the visit. I buy a photo ticket in the waiting room vending machine to get a picture by this bunkie or friend. We keep fucking it up – a blink at the flash; a strand of hair in the mouth; a last-minute glance away from the insta-camera’s snap and its uneditableproof of err. How to cheat; to stretch a ticket into time. Time into time. How to spend more time holding each other and posing. Posing, holding.
Self on Psych Hold Imagines Future Self After Psych Hold
I will stop doing everything I don’t want to do
like sleeping in past eight or getting bored
in the drugstore self-checkout line.
Ants curling in synchronized task
don’t impress me anymore.
The full moon looks like a raspberry,
a five-year old declares, and this is my magic.
Nothing is not in conversation
with everything. Beneath the clouds
a mountain lion traces a body into a mind
afraid of dying. The pause between inhale
and exhale disintegrates in space, reassembles
as another gray hair. Get all the air out
to sing a little longer. An unwritten letter
teases an ache from the ether. The unopened
prison letter teases out letters for this poem.
Let me hold off transcendence
for another tomorrow. I don’t not want to die,
just not yet.
