Alix Perry

GUM WOUNDS

The prickle on my shins tells me the sun is setting
as sky dulls behind webbed branches.

Slipping into ink— is it the pen or the night in which I am captured?
From the outside, I’m guessing it looks the same.

Three years ago I read aloud a poem populated by
severed body parts. The setting: our apartment.

Today, I hold diamonds in my mouth
and wait for him to come searching.

As long as I don’t talk, their edges won’t cut.
There is no obedience as radiant as silence.

My body wheels on a continual swivel,
awaiting that familiar unsettling of his return.

Twist right. There’s blood in a lover’s kiss.
And everything he could say to me now.

Twist left. There’s blood in the lover’s kiss.
My nostalgia drops by our apartment.

Twist right. There’s blood in my lover’s kiss.
Delivering comfort like sunset’s lasting song.

Before it all, this was nothing but woeful theory,
voyeuristic intrigue. The tragedy that could

happen to me, but never would. Never, I learned,
is a strange word for an unknowable future.

Tomorrow, as I again barricade into twilight’s fade,
a fly enters through the closed window.

I inhale, and it lands in my lungs.
Like it thinks I can’t swat it there.

It doesn't know that these days I am more than
an author of temporary death.

It doesn’t know the language of
this unruly body.

My gums accept their wounds with these words.
I gulp down every bloody breath.