I. raindrops ripple potholes, neon rain- boots splash, but she splits chapped lips to sip monsoons; her liquid tongue becomes catacombic, crypt- ic; a limestone tooth lined language tomb. Her sun-bleached bones stow silent marrow; decay: a water-logged language corpse; decay: growing up knowing bones. Evaporation fractures water into lime- stone & rain, saline drips ocean-veined; so, concrete shores a fresh Atlantic lapping into potholes? tidal pools? like a pulse in a vein; like venom from a cottonmouth Atlantic coffin mouths slip like gold —fool’s gold— through America’s melting pot tidal pools; above, rain entombs streetlight; a litany of little amber catacombs from that barrel of a raincloud; II. to plunge a forked tongue into brimming potholes, to sip, & scoop sand like pyrite is to pierce supple flesh with gilded bullets; to adopt them, to cradle them to sleep, & abandon them in bassinet flesh; fish for the magazine poised like prison bars, fill the wound its barrel blasted; an exit wound: cavernous mouth cradle, limp tongue vessel anchored with frenulum rope fishing line electron teeth chewed in two. so, her tongue sloshes, liquidizes like a corpse; becomes catacombic, crypt- ic; becomes a limestone tooth lined— tombs become tombs when gold slips slick like hourglass silt between a broken tongue’s silent halves when they house bullets foreclose words as children’s rooms; Growing up: bullet holes blown through bassinettes; Growing up: HOME’s O as the exit wound
