Your beauty, which I lost sight of once
for a long time, is long,
not symmetrical, and wears

Once a woman went into the woods.
The birds were silent. Why? she said.
Thunder, they told her,

Those groans men use
passing a woman on the street
or on the steps of the subway

Slicked
    with a birther’s goo, it 
    gleams up green from the ground— 

Who would
                 cast your jaw, after it’s broken?

On stakes, on sticks, one rusted
                 bayonet,
left then right, like someone had

Aurelian,
                  who studies the emergence of butterflies
from chrysalides,

They love me.
Each morning they fill the strongbox
in my chest with grass
and salt pellets—I have good hallucinations.

You would have to go down
into black earth like my father
gold light against shadow

So many poems begin where they
should end, and never end.
Mine never end, they run on