Mid-breath I think of her and whether she’d consider my mothering well done.
Mid-breath there’s a hitch and I debate crying, just to get rid of the hitch.
Mid-evening and—just to fuck with the mid-breath—I shove out a sigh.
It is still mid-evening’s deciding point: Google forms or dishes?
Mid-evening and sex is off the table: cramps and barbed synaptic fangs.
Everything is failure. Mid-poem and I know nothing.
Mid-poem and I think of breasts, mine mashed into a sports bra,
a friend’s replaced, another friend’s grazed with my lips for show, like the cigarette—
it’s all just an original wanting, isn’t it? The bleak midwinter is both the fore-
and background of wanting. Monday: snow on snow, and mid-pandemic I
leave the apartment with my bagged heart. A gift for a stranger, for anyone
who’ll take the gutted beating thing and pat it, saying,
there there, it’s not so bad.
