iron rose

I butterfly it like trout. Slide my knife through the mountain ridge of little bones. Lay it flat. Turn it over and over. And yes, I cried cleaning what we had. Found that exhaustion is looking hard for the hesitation in your voice like it is biological specimen. Or evidence. Like you becoming another thing not loving me back is part of some terrible crime scene.

When someone dies, we go searching for poetry. When a new chapter of life starts or ends — graduations, weddings, inaugurations, funerals — we insist on poetry. The occasion for poetry is always a grand one, leaving us little people with our little lives bereft of elegies and love poems. But I want elegies while I’m still alive, I want rhapsodies though I’ve never seen Mount Olympus. I want ballads, I want ugly, grating sounds, I want repetition, I want white space, I want juxtaposition and metaphor and meditation and ALL CAPS and erasure and blank verse and sonnets and even center-aligned italicized poems that rhyme, and most of all — feelings.

quidquid calcaverit hic, rosa fiat.