Your Wolf Heart
~after a line in Jack Gilbertโs โHow to Love the Deadโ
The teeth bow out like waves hitting the shore.
I have an inside voice, tongueless and mute.
A wildflower forest : A century of weeds.
When we had no money, we broke the bank my mom
had given me and ate tacos for a week. The sun
after a storm gentles grease into rainbows.
I had no issue with the birds. The birds had no issue
and the neighborhood stopped singing. Science says
we can eat whatever we want, just not too much.
Me, too. You, too, the remains of our meal
stumbling out your mouth. Outside the walls, a storm
of voices like conglomerate rock, just a weight
threatening avalanche. Love, your sharp mouth, a razor.
The Genealogy of Sand
I tell the gnats I am not a whale and they
are not krill, though my wide, white teeth
strain the air of their struggling
bodies. A tree can be mostly dead, bark
tattering at a touch, green leaves protesting
high above. Which is to say I donโt know Iโm sick
until a professional confirms it. A cancer blossom
unfurling into the outline of a body. A blood clot
waiting in the wings. All life has died
or will die. I can only make my time
a pretty thing to pass, a landscaped rest stop.
I am not the car, but the grill-bedded insect.
Year by year, mile by mile, the edges of my DNA
are roughed away until I am new again, displayed
on the inventorโs table. From every angle,
a crisp, new dis-ease, waiting for its name.
Dead, She Was Not Mourned By Any of Them
On that morning, no mourning. The air was wilted lettuce
on the skin, and no one wants that misery.
What good, giving our tears to the dead? Salt is expensive
and water ever more polluted and, so, precious.
Back to the clay from whence you came! Compost, plant food,
birthplace for worms, flies, & bees.
Who killed you? The question acknowledges the cost of coffins
and the innocence of corpses, all living unlived.
Let us mourners mourn the mourners and the mourning.
She was a poet and, so, unyielding to our grief.
Every word of hers an epitaph. All beliefs expressed
a black hole of doubt.
Andrew Kozmaโs poems appear inย Rogue Agent,ย Redactions, andย Contemporary Verse 2, while his fiction appears inย Apex,ย ergot, andย Seize the Press. His first book of poems,ย City of Regret, won the Zone 3 First Book Award, and his second book,ย Orphanotrophia, was published in 2021 by Cobalt Press.
