Radium
        —for Ashley

My head is all knobs and wheels—
a spinning, drifting out from my skull
like antlers—the feeling of becoming
tinder at the edges of my skin. The webbed
regard between thumb and index finger
melts and melds to envelop the warmth
around another's hand, the quiet pomp
of a French manicure, the sense
of lightening I'd been looking for.
To detach from everyone, discarded
like dental floss dropped in a bin, a pair
of false eyelashes that didn't fool anyone,
so much dish water down a drain, the skin
shed into the bed sheets overnight—
this is how I will begin over.
How many years had I gone about it
all wrong? Believing checks and balances
were about the bark on the tree and not
the xylem and phloem coursing underneath.
To burn, to smolder into, and ash
and ignite again and again, until finally
everything begins, faintly at first, to glow.

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Copyright © 2021 Timothy Geiger All rights reserved
from Weatherbox
Cloudbank Books
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission