I.

Come, Lord, let us welcome you home,

Let us be shy when you take off your shoes,

Let us pull you into our hearts, arms

Open and eyes tiny and wondrous.

 

We sleep under our tiger mothers,

Cradling our violins. We sleep with

Small heartbeats and a loud conscience;

We sleep after discarding our enamel

Flats and our hidden native tongues.

 

What have you come looking for?

How can we complete your radiance?

Is it the way we reach for the check

At the restaurant; is it our strangest

Fetishized pornography? Is it the tongue-twister

names of my relatives? Or is it that old

Narrative, the one where you

Love me and I love you back and you leave me

And I continue to love you anyway and

I live out the rest of my days in shock and

Mourning?

 

Morning, darling, I hope you’ve rested well.

Lord, I hope your blue eyes have turned

Even bluer, and that you’ve found some sort of

Enlightenment.

 

II.

She holds a blade to her eyelid.

Enchanted,

At the way surgeons do it.

They create lives out of stitches,

Have you heard?

 

Permanence,

Like silicon breasts or a broken heart.

 

She holds a blade to her eyelid.

Painless, probably, quips her flat but

Tolerable nose.

 

She will keep her eyes, in the end.

Not because she loves them

But because she hates to lose.