origin story
with flour up to my elbows
I seek false indigo
and the creeping fig
dodge desiccating winds
that leave only spine and hair
we are numbered
covered in fringe
and our universes
I may yet find
the asparagus flower
a peppermint scented geranium
you are my yoked bull
with bowls of corn and seed
your blood leaks silver
my heart becomes peyote
we will dig rivers with this glass plow
the city endures
wrecking ball pulses
through brick and shade
counting frailties
the backslide of man
in the sensorium
there is palpable menace
when will I learn
to interrogate desire
notice what emerges at low tide
what is waiting to rise
there is tar on the wall
genitals in chalk and concrete
a ceaseless obsolescence
so old
I’m almost in the trash
with large sunglasses
and mannequin hands
you might have your numbered flags
your banded hats and guns
but I have a fetish for novelty
minute particulars
in triangular spaces
where there is dimensionality
even in the dappling
so I will lurch out of subway cars
knock into tall women
newly minted
be happy just
to balance on heel bone
even as the boa constrictor
approaches the playpen
KMA Sullivan is the author of Necessary Fire, winner of the St Lawrence Book Award (Black Lawrence Press, 2015). Her poems have appeared in Boston Review, Southern Humanities Review, Forklift, Ohio, The Nervous Breakdown, Gertrude, diode, and elsewhere. She has been awarded residencies in creative nonfiction and poetry at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and Summer Literary Seminars and she is the co-editor in chief of Vinyl and the publisher at YesYes Books.