On the Abolishment of Marriage
for Barry

Welcome wheel, may we commit to be
happy axles --flat as gantry-- for the president
and his pontiffs to ride.

May we be in sight of one another and
celebrate the slow trickle of apartment homes
from your vagina, casters for the kitchen.

The planets, like our friends, move
in quadrilles. The lonely constellations
shoot arrows into nothing. Darling,

I’ve secured you like a bond. We have
an agreement: to remain hearth-side,
headed where we’re driven.























Letter to an Old Love

Your menstrual stains are mixed with paint,
Our sheets have become my drop cloths.
She loves the feeling of the cashmere you bought.
She borrows my sweaters constantly.
Candles cannot outlast the circles I make on her.
Her tongue speaks Russian and twitches
into my mouth like a snake’s tail,
pressing me up against a peeling door.

I think of you sometimes-- down the street,
moving across the hardwood floors. You enter
my memories as a corpse would, with skin cold as water.
Biting on a pillow’s end, I do not think of you.