Patrick Redmond

WERE YOU SHOWING ME SOMETHING

As you turned away from the black mold in the air
holding taffeta against your body
like ancients held up fish in hues of burned bone?

I have only seen out these north & south windows
all spring.

I have only felt the drink in my palms
& the waves through the self-inflicted-bruises

in my temples.
I’m concerned with everything domesticated.

In our tongues pressed like gull wings, dusted with cinder.
In the aesthetics of a mantle desiring fire.

In the slapping of clapboard torn from the wall
for the hormonal importance of making sound.

Is there more than the anxiety of this room?
I’ve yet to clean up the teeth that fell out in a dream.

On the screen pigs un-flayed arrange themselves
pleasing adorable slaughter

While I begin to draw my body
without reflection.

I’ve assumed an amorphous jagged form,
warming your spine as it walks the rooms
burning sage. I’m nervous.

I never enter without inhibition. I never enter
without inhibition. You fold a credit approval into a mirror.

In red ink beneath 18% interest
my body resembles bones seeing fruit.

I need to dust the carbon off
the last animal that made it inside.

The fabric sways beneath you, covering the pleasure of knowing
you’d feed me to memory if my skin smelled of soil.