By Dalton Day
I have crawled around your teeth,
smelling the calm of jasmine,
the backs of the sea’s hands and engine-howl hymns
looking for a place to sleep.
But sometimes, you bite down.
You do not mean to bite down,
it is simply the habit of churches to do that.
To keep me awake at night.
I too have bitten down.
I climbed the rough necks of trees
all the way up to the moon, that ghost among ghosts
and with my own set of wolf teeth
I wolf-bit down,
wanting only to know
how the skin of something so colossally strange
and beautiful and silent tasted.
I broke my jaw on the moon.
And I tried to learn how to talk again,
holding all the words
the sounds
the songs
that quivering music nestled in my mandible.
But the only thing that came out
was the sound of your body next to mine.
Clutching at Straws 