I knew a man
that specialized in the phases of the moon
-- knew that, in a ventimous amount,
wolves grow with the
lunar waxing;
he fell in love with the beauty of it all,
found that
all this time
had passed
to turn him as well
into the version
venti himself.

The constellations
keep secret messages
for me,
stolen away in their red giants;
they’ve told me that
my heart-beats
dwell deep inside your
palmar lines,
where they await
the day when they get read,
but, until then,
are kept
alongside
the Venus, Ring, and Intuition
where our hands meet
at
dawn.

I once knew a boy who built a ladder to the moon
-- drafted rays,
atmosphere,
stars,
into the rungs he climbed;
he fell in love with her beauty:
the way she lit the night,
the way she orbited him,
and became everything he ever cared about.
So he made it his mission
to capture the moon
for the girl that became it for him.

There is this place
that dwells inside the center
of a sphere:
it sells wolves, confined to
threads and linens
captured, but free;
it contains rarities and b-sides,
full of dreams
and their captives.
It is Indigenous and
full of folk tales
from old times
to be deciphered and listened to
by those who have, all this time,
been searching for themselves.

My capillaries believe that the frost is coming for them
-- my spine aching for the warmth
it has come accustomed to,
rather than the boreal brittleness underneath
that the cutlass attached to my feet
glided around in spheres.
It reminded me of the
moon’s orbit,
the shape of the planets
the ellipses of the galaxies
-- suddenly swirling,
breaking and reforming
the stars within them,
which I then noticed to be
the warmth of your
carpals and metacarpals
between mine,
filling up all the Thenar Space.

The moon tells me stories about you, darling
– sends me lines in the form of constellations and planets,
while I see visions of you in my sleep,
and can feel the warmth of your capillaries
around my bones
making alive again my pulse
and wakening my corneas,
and all I want when my pupils begin to see
those rods and cones
are yours
looking right back at me
taking me in small doses;
while I’ll take you all at once.

I want to kiss you
with quantitated breath
so that none of the vocabulary,
dictionary definitions,
mathematic formulas,
and scientific inquiries
you memorized
will any longer
find place in your mind.