Paper Boots

Part 1
It only took me
a bus ride through the week
in a city shrouded under
an arctic air mass.
They say it’s the coldest it’s
been in four decades.

When was this –
Where would you –
I only wish I was as I see –
I only wish I was walking on the end –
The other day was just
the edge of my glass
jawline cutting you.

Wear paper boots in the snow
and sew him
a pair from the outside
soles of your feet, smoothed in
recent weeks with coconut oil.

Tell him this:
they know how to run. they know how to carry  broken ankles and other broken p(art)s. you need them more than I do. they’re tougher than they look. you’re vulnerable to mercy. the stairs are dusty. music sifts your soul and it makes you uncomfy.
So yesterday, I actually existed for –
or like not priorities (f)or –

There are things that need to be (left) unsaid.

Part 2
Each petal in my winter rosebush unfurls
revealing bunches of bananas
This is my diet, I tell him.
Fruit? He asks.
Thorns, I say. Banana thorns.

All the bees are dying because
no one plants flowers properly anymore; maybe
they’d have sorted us out.

Two is a hollow number.
I only wish I had a conversation lying around.
I only wish I was really angry.
We are the same as usual:
fatigued
impressionistic

I made my bunny teeth whiter, I say.
With magic? He asks.
No, with peroxide whitening at the dentist’s. It hurt a lot – it’s technically temporary pulpitis but they’re called zingers because they feel like little lightning bolts in your teeth or someone taking a nail and very carefully hammering it quite utterly precisely through your jaw.

I don’t think our lifestyles are that compatible, he says, days later.

Part 3
From the perspective of following feelings
to their natural destinations,
all poetry is cemetery.

It’s a bunch of strangers
who happened to be,
in large part,
men.