wake/burn

wake to your tongue having turned tectonic, drily scraping itself against your rumbling, violent throat like a velvet-antlered hart rubbing his horns on a tree; it's cold here. things are too still at the edges, too active in the center. if only your legs could run like your pulse; if only you could scatter your body and live in a thousand scenarios at once, like your mind. but there are only your fingers curled around blankets, only a sleep-warm throat pregnant with a sickness that bears you deeper into stasis. 


not even london rained this much. it hangs down over indiana when you fall asleep; half-conscious, you imagine this is what the slow sprinkling of dirt on a coffin would sound like from the inside, or this is the sound of ____'s movement in the bedsheets slowed down a thousand times. it is a drowning rain, only. no thunder, no lightning, no chance of fire. where did the thunderstorms go? what happened to the nights when you ran in the rain with _____ until three in the morning, dancing next to the cracking snarl of a storm until your clothes steamed and skin and clothes melted into one with the water, became one burning light in pooled streetlamp halos. 


there is comfort in burning. healing. there is comfort knowing that there is paper yet to be burned, that people still write letters that end as the smell of smoke in someone's hair. 











The Libraries Didn't Burn
by Elaine Equi

despite books kindled in electronic flames.

The locket of bookish love
still opens and shuts.

But its words have migrated
to a luminous elsewhere.

Neither completely oral nor written —
a somewhere in between.

Then will oak, willow,
birch, and olive poets return
to their digital tribes —

trees wander back to the forest?