Flower Moon (Milk)
Jesse Rice-Evans
Previously published in White Stag
The first time I lost you
to sea-scrim, I wailed once
then faded, bed-ghost, hands full
of myself.
Later, I learned to loosen,
peel, curl, speckle—
fog of things unknowable.
Drape your heels
in the road, read from my book
under Scorpio moon, wash of street lamp.
Think about the time they came overdressed to a party, leaned on the bookshelf and told
a story about graveyards; about unexpected gnaw of frost after a sunny afternoon; how
they were optimistic in just a sweater; about you, genderless in jeans, how wet you got from
brick walls, the way they stacked poems, smell of sun & lilac. Uncontainable flood all over
everything.
I was never taught to girl—even my name, scrubbed of gender, bound to celebrity,
reveals some lack, some shade. My twirl of hip and round shouldering shrug refuse
androgyny—too much flesh in soft/wrong places. In third-wave thinking, corpulence can
still do drag. But I cannot bring myself to stuff into blazers bursting with tit.
Cardinals’ trills, grasshopper-whistle, each leaf piling against rough evening breeze—it is
already May, but your collar is still high. You verb: neutralize, osmose, swish.
If memory is seasonal, you are summer
in a library, door ajar for first hot day,
lawn-sprawl on the last, dew soaking jeans.
Verbs move me—they twirl and melt as I tongue them around, each a slick candy mak-
ing nouns shiver with purpose—
I pulse my chair closer,
resist each heuristic impulse:
42
Cauldron Anthology