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Between the Plumage We Were Everything

In the impossible, we bring home to roost
a discordant feeling—widow buttons in all black

still with our funeral rings. My lovers, all buried,
twisted in the soil, can never fathom

the wing that will bite me back, but you touch me
where my grin shines brightest in a noxious guilt.

Kissed up plumes of your body, not like mine,
stir and stir within one opening, learning its way

to human vacancy. It’s so simple. I do not think
of death but a happy coop that we rock within

many fowl words passing between us
cluck soft into a silence of spurs. Let us take

our religion in due time, the cock and the not-cock,
each a disturbance my toughest organ claims

with bite and blood and flesh endures.
Everywhere a flock of feathers come to cover us.