for the earth is filled with violence

      —Gen VI. 13

but not the fist fight you witnessed in Venom
behind those oscillating bars of red Kolkata lights

and not your hand bashed like a ping ball
at Dr. Pong’s table in that Berlin dive

and certainly not the sign covered in plastic
and taped to the plane tree in memoriam

Mary Clare et Elizabeth from their families
in Ireland and their friends here in Rome

no explanation for implied brutality,
crash? mugging? though you imagine

the girls were tourists like yourself,
no, not that kind of damage, anonymous,

but the small acts of malice, that smooth email
from a friend, you thought a friend,

that lists your faults and flailings one by one–
all unintended, all unimagined–

in the maim of love.

Camera Obscura

Sometimes after we have made love
I am left lying on my belly

beneath the camera obscura,
a world outside–

the streets of our little town
which we could follow

all the way to the White Mountains
that run between my shoulder blades

and down the valley of my spine
to my hips which seem to be floating on out

to that great sea
from whence we came.

Hangnail Sun

That glimpse
of hot tissue

at the base of
purple-fingered

dawn, the spike
at the quick

before
it closes,

the slick wound
waiting

to open some-
where on.