it crept up on me slowly the way time does, he is eating pringles and the fox and the hound is drawling on on my aunt’s still-bowl-screened tv, the bed is stripped down because he just stopped rubbing caramel into the sheets & the widow loads up her fox kit into her puttery old car to take him to the game preserve for his own good, he is riveted, pringle after pringle crumbles on fat marker stained fingers, his long hair twisted into a toppled cone of uneven honey that oozes out its elastic on the very top of his head, a dirty orange waffle print shirt on his torso, and his bottom half naked directly on the foam underpad and i am crying the kind of tears that come without resistance as i watch him, perfect and holdable in his wholly inability to have any idea that his body will never again be as small as it is today and the very best, the very best i can hope for is that it grows out of me and into the winged tendrils of the world
with only sacred wounds, my heart its own bullet-shaped vessel as it becomes time glaciating the crow’s feet around my eyes and the glow of my youth is tempered with the necessary bitterness of a wiry rose readying for winter, all but this fat pink polyp of sugar she dangles on the vine with her very best hope that the seed may fall far enough away from her to survive.
