Poetry

This is the year strangers
will say terrible things

about you 

There would have been chaos,
confetti mined from the cliffs
of Michoacán. 

We made a dance of all the ways

we’d hurt our bodies.

     His noiseless blooming in the callous earth. I followed
a dry-bone branch, spiderweb-cracked, off the Running Turkey. 

I chose it,
went willingly,
put in

the time
with the diocese
and my sponsor,

—a spectrum, an immeasurable gradient, during and after which

the places where you were can be tracked over a sprawling landscape

Be careful—I’m filled with glass.

I wanted to play Gabriel in a tinsel crown,
but was cast as the Little Drummer. I hoped
to carry the crucifix, to ferry the chalice
down the long corridor of St. Aloysius