Tomorrow, No, Tomorrower

From up here in the leaves’ no-kidding goldishness

you’d guess everyone was already in lovely w/ each

others’ cheekbones. Infinity scarves

& vanilla coffee, mint tea, warm whatever.

Cozy becoming the coming-at-the-seams, a couplet

of verbs mid-bodily inexperience.

That man doing cartwheels is not wearing a shirt

& in any other life I’d want to be the double dare

fanfaring a future so totally astonished

by his nipples. This is what I mean

when I say things like catastrophe.

Okay, fine. Just one more winter.

Nothing can compare anymore to us anymore.

You big good oak limb. I’m in such cute like w/ you today.

In one diary of my have-beens, my mother

named me Elizabeth after one of her

mothers. You god particle. You matrilineage.

I’ve never lived anywhere more

or less this haunted. She named my sister

Elizabeth. You boy

genius. You midsummer pinky promise ring.

There’s this person I know I’m not in love w/ but wears

a dress patterned like a postcard from the state my grandma

died in. Imagine waking up

a whole frame away from your bedsheets. Imagine

waking up & being anything as yellow

as a dress. You treeline. You root song. What’s an amount

of time equal

to you? You kindling ring finger. You unchewable bark

but the headache’s gone. Pardon me, dandelions,

have you seen my ghost, six foot nothing,

has an interstate for a mother but also a mother? Adjust

your spurs, honeybunch. This time I’m writing all of us

in pink ink. Let’s huckle-buckle off into the leafiest

of all possible genderings. You know how the rain

starts right after you get home & the country song

your friend slow-danced w/ her big love to, the one

your mom would play real quiet on her moonbeam

highway streak back to Pensacola, is somehow

already at the chorus & you forget there are words like joy?

Or when someone whispers Imagine you never met them

back at the bum, grinning stars? You remember.

It’s like that.

Or, is that. The difference between salt & salt. A someday

of matching sweaters.

Told you it’s cute. O sweaters. O little knit

bundles of vegetable-spit. It’s always sunsetting.

You golden hour. You soap-soft seasonal.

Once my mom found me

sitting in a circle of candles, touching each rosebud

& sat w/ me until we were wax musuems

of our secrets. Look—

the sky’s a toenail & the moon’s a chesthair. All the shirtless

boys have tired themself out, spread-eagled

& slapping the sun off their shoulder blades. My body is a line

heading for my body. You crushed-grass

sex smell. You dirt-inverted comma. Someone w/ bleached

hair is biking home to restud their denim.

I rediscovered kissing foreheads & it is so yes again.

Hurry up & sunspot, daylilies!

The cops aren’t going to awe themselves

to death & we have

a dictionary to laugh across.

The light’s seltzer, bubbles.

I said My lord. I thought

My god. O moonstruck. O gladracket. Barring

gravity, our knees could be forevering each other.

Barring leather, love is a world I’m praying

all my mothers’ joy back toward.

Elizabeth was my name. I’m writing this on all the trees like a wish.

I’m kissing every hem in sight.

We’re all hysterical & going nowhere together.

C’mon rapture. Let’s go bedazzling.

Nothing gets futured without its own spitshine

& I’m already not not not not not not miraculous.