n/a

Imagine the featherless, glass,
the turquoise advance of tiny
star maps. I could drink this
in a cup & still live I could
eat my life from an emerald

spoon over the Atlantic, taste
your prescribed miracle but
whose life would it bring back &
what of this limp, the ransom
I never paid, the last flower

I pressed on a memory
that wouldn't float up?
Once I learned the genetic code
of Orion. A story like that could rival
any unkempt history. But I was told

to sink stray syllables of years dug up
from sooty banks along the Nile,
that pinpoint souls can be traced
along any psychic map. So now
my life, another preoccupation

with the poorly transcribed. I was
safer back in prison. It was always
someone else's mountain I thought of,
how the journey there led to the palpable,
the minutiae of love, crime utterly lived.