Blue on white.
Blue on green.
Blue on blue.
The colors of you
Mother.
Crooked branch,
frozen thigh,
I just barely see you with my eye.
Drive by one yellow tree
in a huddle of March
green firs.

How you confer
your muddled shapes
your muted grays
in a veil.

Many times I’ve come to your chair.
Today I notice the seams in
your ocean wall,
the line down and through
the dolphin’s tail.

Black-striped
diamond
drill-bit
saws
at my tooth.
I smell the burn fetid burn,
swallow blood, bits of bone
the sucker missed.

I had to surrender to the
needle’s rape of me:
the plum violation
in my jaw — red , raw, plunged
yellow grip — needless to say
I felt more
than the tip.

I’m gonna get you numb.

That’s what we tell our Mother
when the winter comes.

The icicles demand
their stake in my mouth.

Bite down hard.