Incantation

We mix animal fat with calendula
for Mother's milk-slick tea

My hands flow over with seeds
Your mouth flows over with petals

This will unbind us you say
Everything could change

Skin this rabbit
Entrails pool

I wish for a garden of grass
and a wooden swing set

With yellowing fingers
you drain the thick stems

Golden Shovel After John Donne's Holy Sonnet XIX

I fill a jar with lady bugs, those
sick-tasting charms, apple-round. You are
beside me, peeling leaves from the rose bush, my
brother, tormentor. I love you best
like this: sun in your hair, a heavy daze
of pollen on your eyelids. You ask me when
mother will be home. She is gone, I
want to say, we are alone this spring. Instead I shake
the jar of insects into the soil. I cover one with 
dirt. I long to say, We have nothing to fear.

Heloise to Astrolabe

“The child’s strange name, which Abelard says she chose, remains unexplained.”
-From a footnote to The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, trans. Betty Radice

The disk of an astrolabe is called the mater.
The spheres move upon this surface.

I loved your father in a cathedral
under the hot gaze of God,

shut my eyes and let desire turn me heretic.
The mater rests in the instrument’s womb.

When you were born onto this tired planet,
what use could you have had for me?

With eyes twin novas, mouth of earth
and shadow, you were already

a self-contained Creation.
I left you to chart the universe alone.