from PSALMS OF LAMENT FOR DIVINE IMPERATIVES by Jennifer Metsker

You’re a bluffing   a color-matching. 

Fingers on the breeders cup.

You’re the gentle way that oxen pull a carriage

through a needle while people movers move people

into the breach into the Paraguay swampland love

green love the reptiles and brushwork so pretty.

You’re the movement of a letter 

               from one side of a corridor to the other.

In the matchbox hour     cars cruise by and leave me.     I must

carry water carry paper carry my life in little packages

upstairs. Delivery is a method. Disguise is a method.

I place a bid on a haunted dresser emboldened strident.

               I just wanted someone to live with.  

If the wayfinding

if the great wall if the subway         if there are no safe

destinations then voices in my head are set to music

               and they run amok in the shadows naked.

There’s no use reckoning with the       irritable television.

Faces sit on necks and necks plummet into dresses.

The number on my chest breathes in horoscopes and

exhales a model train kit. But the formatting

isn’t quite right. Fix the fingers with a splint. 

Can you be ready in a minute?

               When I want to touch stars and  

there are no arms to catch me I arrive

by night carriage      and step down    all pageantry into

quintessential wide night sky.