The Year of the Sheep

The Year of the Sheep
began the Year of Instability.

Stale dreams in
viridian green
and watercolor
ease day to day
waiting for apologies
by whom and how and new and old and graceless.

I lost a gray glove in the back of a cab.
The shadow of my hand rides
through the black panoramic city—like
a portrait of a quiet woman, unfinished.

Invisible arrangements swing
like a string of lights above
my head in the navy night,
when I breathe the gutted wind—and think it could be fine.

The sky promises to rain
money bags and emoji.
Be peaceful now,
paint a subject you know well.

The Length of Leningrad

When K said he no longer felt my skin,
and the Scandinavian snow had lost its
mind, touching here and there, the sky
sank a colorless bruise, and abandoning
kindness, I turned inward, the only warm
place to go; the wind sprayed and scattered
winter dust, and whether it was fresh
or old and lifting like a laundered sheet,
we did not care. It seemed like solace.

And then when I no longer felt my skin,
the world seemed scopic, spans between
snowflakes the length of Leningrad,
strangled silence in the white cathedral;
there was no other season, no different year,
past or sometime still to come, no current
time in Osaka, no time but this time in the
cracked glitter, paw imprints in new dustings,
effigies of our old breath, frozen in the air.