Fifteen Ways of Saying Hunger

The birds have flown south. Gardenias blooming in the sky.

The city roars in my palm with its leafless branches.

Wounds stitched into the synapses of our mouth

the camouflage of hunger as an outsourced emptiness

water quenching our ruined kingdom of wilderness,

air suspended into nooses. A brackish aftertaste.

Somewhere a murmur, an adhesive of joint fingerprints

a collation of dead fish salting under the winter sun.

The husk of earth shears flesh in an unbound static.

A measure for rain that hems into exsiccated corners.

Trees are taxidermists for the way they store sap.

A flinch of blood. Sky turning into more sky.

Our foreheads turn into nautiluses in the blue hour.

Grief fasting into thickening blood. A sabbath for rain.