poem || Laura Carter

A Man Loves Anchors

& pale anchorites—

falls into a fire—

eats from his own hands

& hunts into a body for answers—a culture or

                                                            this reason zig-zagging

                       

                                    into logic’s

                                    dream of a world

                                    as a picture of

                                    a technological obeisance

homo-erotic

                                                thicket of knife & ambiguity, scarf of red

a day you turned twenty-one, a day you took a drink from water of totem,

a

preclusion of a vote or a temple, metonymy’s silk

slowing in world’s body—

your body dying between branches, making difficile from exigency

in crimson & wound (a wound is a fault, a line, a limit) & in each moon a begin

that is known as a waking in cultures such—

            death of Thebes

                                    you develop for free—

                                                            lambs study comets & gymnastics—

you say:

a secret is not you’re sweating & your visceral body

is a heritage of marriage & mouse—

                        a deck of nines a table of one

                        & you are leaning across miniature horizons & you

procedure out into a decade of nineteen & Thumbelina’s temples—

in this radiant alum of night your early teeth will fall from your mouth

remainder a womb

but not without its price—

you wear sixteen with opera in my feet & slump into thick

arising to turn lust to life—