there are more ways to show devotion 

than we can ever know in this lifetime

once you traced a finger along the traffic

of webs in the distance stitched along

the top right corner of the window frame troubling

 the sun its beams breaking apart at the web’s

center a single open eye flicking light along our open hands

– Hanif Abdurraqib

In the midst of a new panic, I write myself in fear. There

seems more of a world-weight than before: short breaths are

all that come in these moments in their bigness I want more 

from what I have, more forms to write in, more ways 

to exist without all this pain that comes sharp and alone, to 

explain a prone body without speaking of death. I show 

you this, this insufficient faith, and you tell me of devotion 

but I know that one, I know of your palms larger than 

these little fears of mine of an enduring we 

through these knifelike winds and these dry trees and can

the world truly sway like this or is what we are just an ever 

present other, stock-still as the sticks move and clarify. Know

that I have tried to swing along, desperate for a collective, for an in

to allow something as harsh as my want to endure this 

movement, this ice-fracturing. All I have is this lifetime

and I want it I want to be here in this cold and I want what once

was told to me was a weathering rather than a breaking I want you 

to hurt too. I want this to be shared. I want this burning to be traced 

into the moles on your spine, sparking into freckled blazes like a 

cigarette ashed into fresh snow. White becomes so when dirtied, a finger 

pointed towards clouds and whales as if this contrast was along 

with what he wanted anyway when he said let there be the 

light even if we cannot see it now. Now, there is this traffic 

this trade of love for materials of much less worth, of 

lips and tongues somehow for sale, caught in this dark web

of desire as lust instead of what it is: hunger for knowledge in 

alternative speech, in seeing and smelling and tasting the 

soft trills of winter suns rising above the ridge in the distance 

unseen by you who have known it all before, by a you now a we stitched

together, sutures blue and bloody, slices of red meat along 

other sources of sustenance like what we found in the 

woods: dead deer and squirrel and skunk, a stink so top

heavy there must’ve been a festering of the flesh, in its right 

to mature with a time that finds us even in life’s musky corner.

There are no pasts here, only failing memories finding themselves of 

a new world where heart-clench doesn’t require bitterness, only the

sweet sweet morning movements finally enacted through a window

peering into new still life, charming enough to be sketched in frame 

and preserved for a personal viewing. I like this picture, this troubling 

of old marginal pains through new secular faiths in us and the 

belief that we are inventing something, yes, we are, and it is the sun 

almost, or another star we aren’t close enough to but we feel its 

presence anyway even through these ice sheets, heat beams

melting, melting these joint-stiff adorations to the point of breaking

like a womb, like the calving of the deer when the fawn splits apart

the doe, snout and front legs first, just born and ready to run at

what kills but in this world no one dies and the young ones are the

true executors of what can only be spoken of in the future tense, at the web’s 

edges where the light catches and little colored prisms form a center 

where I can speak and say I am a difficult woman I know this I am a

woman who asks too much of a stingy god but really all I want is a single 

confirmation that this we is true that when I take psychedelics they open

me into a rawness where the poems I write to you mean something to your eye 

I want you to be critical. I want this complication. I want to jolt awake to a flicking 

sense of prophetic sight: I need to be told what love is and whether that blinking light 

holds true if we focus on it not with our eyes but with our hands, along

with all that we believe in to exist in this tangibility, this grasping of our

still-pulsating necks to turn so we can see anyway, into this open 

world we call empty. I’d like to end there. On our hands.