Aubade as Fuel

–Traci Brimhall

Your lip an abstraction of iris always arousing
the question of the bed. Which goodbye lasts?
Only yesterday my hands rich with dirt. I told you
Milkweed is my new salvation addiction. You know
I always need to save something, to control it.
I can make a pollen island, make your collarbone
a spiritual landscape, the air around us orange
and alive. The shape you left in the sheets
a Rorschach I read as a rattlesnake’s skeleton
in the silverware drawer, no, a fire in a cabin,
no, a cabin on fire, the absence it will make.
But look at me now, my heat signature a whole
bouquet of howling, straddling scarves of smoke.