Blue Heart Baby
–Joy Priest

Everyone wanna put hands on a piece of your life.
Look at it: how it sags in the eigengrau,

like the yellow belly of a bitch heavy with litter.
No better than that meddlin-ass moon, full

as your own breast, hanging low between buildings.
People hang from the chords your heart has let down.

The chaos of stars feel up the dead air. Tiny blue flames
in the eye bone of the young-old junkie girl

follow you around the floor of your humming days. &
have you seen yourself? I think I am weak & without purpose,

your father texts you from the kitchen, sauced up,
after he rolls his heavy body over the loaded pistol

he laid on your bed. Get use to life. Every piece
of advice is one the giver followed to his own

bitterness. You roll the heavy body of the car you loot
from your failed fiancé down the highway. Even

the wheel, wobbling with fury, insists on hanging on,
you must make it to each new mourning alive. Beyond

your silent mouth, what can you use to protect yourself?
The deceitful company of crowds will fail you, have you

out here with your young body, in the cold, a house
dress, barefoot on some other woman’s back porch

where no one knows the address. Let it be,
if this moment is of use to your life. & how long

is a moment in time, indistinguishable as speed—
peep the ant-sized airplane creeping across the crescent.

How to wake up the next day & the next & not simply
after a decade? After 13 blue moons? Stretched belly &

empty veins? The gas of constellations run out. Heart weighted
low in the sky. Your chances scattered across the dead years.

Photo by William Daigneault on Unsplash