→

i got your hair and a spider stuck under the packing tape
on one of my boxes → guess i’m shipping you
fedex ground to everywhere i’ll learn to call

house or home. i’ve been feeding God to God daily.
she likes the taste and says so, as my skin
turns more and more translucent

with the starving. i started leaving life after life behind
years ago, to the crickets in that basement apartment
below sunset boulevard so they could swallow

and churn out songs, which hung ghostly

in the shadow-corners under dusty red brick.
that day in the kitchen, drinking chamomile
tea, you wrapped your left arm round my hips,

said, “did you know crickets eat plants — live or dead —
and meat?” → so i gave them me at 7 and 19,
and all the times i was a radish or rotting.

they never let me see them singing,

but still they came to the center of the wood floor
to die, legs up and ready. i hope to feed myself
to God that way, in the middle of things. → i’ll unpack

boxes taped shut with the spider legs i picked off
of the creature spinning traps in your skull
before either of us learned to love tapestries. i’ll ask

the barber to cut a maze all over my head. i’ll build a shrine
in the exact center of the floorboards. i’ll squeeze a lime
till the muscles of my hand atrophy. i’ll trust

them to release.