Three Poems

Birds

Every night I smoke a little bit of THC
out of a vape pen I bought over Christmas
a few years ago in Massachusetts at this
place near Water Wizz. I take two or three

hits spaced out by a few minutes so I can see
if I’m getting too stoned — there is an abyss
I try to avoid, an infrastructure beneath which
the faces of birds emerge from the properties

of the furniture in my room. I’m afraid of
when this happens — I listen to an old playlist

and hope instead for the familiar glove
that comes to uncrush my chest’s paper. Assist

me, benevolent hand. Make me the dove
that disappears. Astonish them. Open your fist.





The Dentist

I begin to believe in a secret beneath what the tube
snaking out of my lips whispers as it removes

blood from my mouth, as I will my gums’ stinging
to be like an abstract impression of light clinging

painlessly to the dark field of my mouth: some fireflies
darken in the fragrant shrubs that used to lie

beside the road’s lip where we would run from
each other playing with flashlights in the dark. One

night we went down to the beach and dug out
a space to hide beneath an upturned boat.

Where does it go? The sand, the sky’s stars? Your shirt
was black with silkscreened white flowers. It hurts

for you to be in my head, blossoming in the dull air,
disappearing out of a tube. Where does it go? Where?





Flight

I was delayed for twelve hours in the airport
looking at the dazed airplanes skim around
the little amount of earth they had found
to be stuck against — they fumble for a short

time before one accelerates, manically, to contort
itself into regaining flight. I let my bag down
at a gate with open chairs, to drown
on the information in peoples’ voices and sort

of fall asleep. I never understood how to fly
was a dream out of the passengers’ heads, town
then nothing, then town below us like past lives
lit up with their little dots — love, drama, gown

of mist, veil: how you afford us our forgetting.
I arrive and forget. Then I keep forgetting.