When All the Words Were Grass

You can sip wine from a jelly jar.

You can sleep beneath an old flag.

The boyfriend will be shirtless

on the worn wool couch.

He might spit then say

something about the hermeneutic circle.

Some nights the air is so thick

all you want is to feel it

like hunger or pain or stone;

some nights the dog will race,

black body lowered to the grass

as she forgets the missing parts of herself.

Fish heads in the trash,

can of Crisco in the larder—

you ate the bodies

in heat so still it could never last

though it would never end. Sopped

circles on blue tin plates, fan doing nothing

to the yellowed stacks of paper.

When pain was a balm, his skin

bronzed stone—If what I felt was only

partly real that must have been

the point.