from NER 41.1 (2020)
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Imagine a desert and call it yearning.
For years, nothing but sand

in your teeth: The viper skulls
you mistook for cherries, their

crunch, dry-heave sobs, beating
your chest, you could’ve opened

the cage of your ribs like a prayer
book. Remember how you praised

every misplaced grace of water
how the collected drops shot

through you with diseases. Every
fresh-found fruit a hallucination

each scavenged seed a swallowed
nail, until one day you look up

from your feet, a hawk condescends
from the sky, its cry saws the air

and there suddenly against your face
an entire forest.

you should have seen it cleaved
between the sand and the sky

like a sheet, coming with its dark
its greens so deep they’re purple

as the veins of your leg, so purple
you could unthread them each

and gum the grapes off. The trees
offer you everything.

At home, your lover bends against
so much scrutiny. He wonders

into becoming anything other
than a forest, and you made it

this far, but linger at the edge
as if you could enter.