My acre forgets to breathe

now that you are back.

It is rigid. A linoleum-lined

dusty thing beating an expired

love potion in the cage. I don’t

know how to sow anything

else on it. I want to poke it

so new movement can sprout

from the inside. So it can belch

back my tears, merely unsustainable

maggots colonizing the riverbed.

I need you to take the switchblade,

topple medical literature, unsee

the history of my tissues. Pick

up browning mint leaves

baked in the sand. You’ll

find the truth and bottle it.

Maybe you’ll sell that. But

you won’t distinguish relief.

I lie on the hospital bed and

pray for my next batch of

tomatoes to be ripe and

not overbaked. I needed you

to remember you had the

timer on. I speak to nothing.

The air, polluted with the

disdain you exhale. I still smell

you through the Tylenol. I

punch the flesh of this

unanswered acre so it

can spill into your blurring

field of vision. So the pictures

of us hanging in its manor

will descend to a projection

of shards. So you can tell

the auction I had no chance

anyway. My thoughts echo

in the laboratory, and no one

is there to record them. I am

coughing up the realization

as you pack up your things

and sublimate into the frost.

Even when the farmer crosses

his bridge, his crops do not stop

wanting. Blueness bleeds in my

puckering cytoplasm. The cage

and its offspring fall with the

tide. I am rendered into an

illustration of the grip of your

fist when you told me I wasn’t

what you paid for. That I

was bruised, all miscolored and

seeping with pesticides. I

drown my open form with

the blazing antiseptic. A

cry I manage from my throat.

It echoes enough to be remembered.