Your face stalled in a love so tangible
it wouldn’t strike me when I asked it to. Hard
to learn how loved we are
when it’s unfamiliar. I walked

Devil’s Elbow
following a rainbow––shifty,
as though it knew a man gone over
on the other side. Particles lifted

from his chest; the neon
overalls of emergency
workers moved quick
in honeyed light.

If only he’d waited, I thought,
I would’ve loved him, my word for 
nothing––the way strangers remain

unexplained for each other. Recalling

a friend over a flat white: there are moments 
when we just need fucking. My phone
was dead. That morning gone, I returned
to your note, it said I want you

to know what is real and what is
not. And I lay in sheets––arhythmic––
until my body accepted the charge.