Bipolar Elegy for the Fox on Fire

Our awkward half-child

bodies, sweat & brackish
water, damp & crammed

among algae
coated aquariums,

filed into the camp
Nature Shack. The instructor,

a college kid, summer job,
just old enough

to seem both knowing &
unknowing as God

named the inhabitants—

the Lined Seahorse, Carolina
Mudpuppy, Rotund Mystery

Snail—each snatched
from the river by

his discerning eye & careful hands,
each only a prelude to the thick

roiling mass of scales &
muscle untwining in the corner.

She, the very thing that made us
wary our way through brush.

She, what our counselors warned
against in diatribes—movies lie;

antivenom never arrives
in time—if you see a rattler,

disappear.

But they looked,
reverent, as we all did,

into the snake’s lapis eyes,

her tail’s bird-heart flicker.
I had not yet learned

what it means to be born dangerous,
but felt in that curious longing to

shatter glass, coax the rattler
toward her ruinous path

among our bare ankles,

resigned to the recognition,
its wild tightening.

I am never or, only
snake & cage,

reptile & warm birth,

the impossibility of living
with(out) a vein-quivering,

chemical chaos
& when my eyes met

their reflection in the glass,
I might as well have been

looking
at a fox on fire,

& not a snake at all,

every muscle a burning,
every flame

just as grateful
for being seen, known

only as alive.

||

Bipolar Elegy for My Self-Same Sister

sister lives in the wet
white hearth.

scatters her avian

body inside my body.
our back splits into
wing

until, like gulls, we teem
calamity,

  swallowed into blue.

our father searches, lanternless.

mother, arms
wavering on the shore,

curses our peculiar ankles

as they float skyward.
  but see how brilliant

our fish-rot throat.see how deep

   the bones flame  there?

who alone can bear
this unforgiving.

||

Bipolar Elegy for Premastication

I gnash smoke into ache,
a wet & wedged bolus

for your lipsticked nest.
Kiss-feeding, they say,

because what’s mine is always
yours: sleg of unwieldy

cornucopia, stillborn want
turned greater catastrophe.

The wretched love reopened
& refleshed to be wrecked

again, anew. With two wings
I carve my life. Foibled & finite

With two selves the narrative
breaks.
To be desired
by you is to live without desire,

in wait of the fierce annunciation,
needled lip of the spear that calls

itself divine providence.
Maybe the mouth was planned.

Maybe hunger. She who cannot
choose to starve chaos, let her

outfox death. Let the halves
within the whole make

& unmake their own.