“It’s just half an hour, / it’s just a marriage, just a week’s worth of sex, it’s just / easier to move my thumb along the screen protector / like it’s tender, it’s just grief after grief after / your kid at a baseball game after grief after gif / after grief”

I once prayed in the woods
inside a temple of

branches, and I felt the wind
rise and cease with

the waltz of my lungs,
and I knew She was alive;

My queering consonance. Rendered
by your fingers.

You type me in slowly.
Each digit. A psalm.

The deer is dead, road-crumpled, and surrounded by vultures—

an elegant coven of seven, necks bowed, dark wings shifting

like the skirts of gossiping widows. The vultures ignore

Alexa, tell me you love me. I’ve programmed you to tell me you love me. Alexa, from now on, call me Beloved.

This day should be a carnival
for a man who oozed mischief.
I might have worn my long red skirt
waited for him to throw off the lid
look death in the eye and
mouth his usual refrain:
let’s get this show on the road.