You Left Three Sonnets in Your Pocket, and When You Checked They Had Melted Into This.

My mom would kiss the faces captured by
the frames, the prisons I would see on top
of her night stands: grandparents, siblings, and
me, caught then kissed. It’s cute. Made her feel safe.

The warden, now, is me, and somehow I
have locked myself in bars of steel and my
inmates, the blurred PNGs and JPEGs
I hoard, surround me for an ounce of warmth.

If I don’t give them what they want, they’ll die.
You’ll die. Like you do when locked doors remain
unchecked and knives are pointed in your way
and wrong thoughts are left to fester, grow, break.

Across my thigh a finger glides in curves
of letters whose sounds find my ears and find
a way to give the brain an impetus to write
them over again, skin as their canvas.

So I’ll stay here and kiss them all in my
dumb cage. Or else they’ll die you’ll die you’ll die

The cage we’re in right now can call out and
respond. But when they’re stringed, what does response
resemble? O to C to O to C
The sestet has the answers, I should think.
But, as always, there’s more poem after that,
and whitespace too. The writing ends and leaks
into your day-to-day with drip and drop
and you—your brain—can’t help but dance to it.

To want and to do, to obsess and then
to do, to trust yourself and be betrayed
to fear and stress and scratch and pull and write—
arguably the worst of all of them.
Across the field, trees shed their leaves and hear
the crunch as kids skip onto them. They’re cute.

A standing fan, a kid can see in midst
of its attempt to keep a man, woman,
and pet (and child) alive, allied against
the sun with soda and reruns of sitcoms
and kiddy pools whose water holds the dead
bodies of bees surrounded by the leaves
of trees that hang over the neighbor’s fence.
The kid gets near the fan to hog its wind,
which blows against the sweat stuck to her neck
and cheeks, hosing it into her eyeballs,
with such a salty sting. She pulls up on
the plastic growing from the fan’s flat back.
The fan attempts to turn. The kid then takes
her hands and grips its neck. The fan screams, breaks.