Tape Song
by Cynthia Clifford
Art: “Humber Estuary”
By Edward Baranosky
What makes you think
someone would extract ribs and lock them inside
another again,
This was supposed to be the compromise.
he said in Paris.
At one point, it was my first time, though I can’t remember how my tongue punctured a strawberry’s flesh. Did it surprise me?
Both of us pink and raw in the face.
We should all take turns being possessed by another.
It doesn’t need to be phantoms or secondhand bitterness. Though, you would like to start with those who forgot you. Whispering to a new partner how they can’t retrieve your name.
They should know you after those nights spent tilting in toward each other over the roof’s ledge,
right beside the packed ashtray.
The non-dead version of you jumps
into where the water meadow shakes the rainbow. Without greyscale you are just someone looking for someone else, an offramp towards
—then you are the wide field of daffodils, to dwell and dwell and dwell.
When you smoke, you smoke them. Chemical this, chemical that.
the burning star, a marker along the path
All splits make sense to me. There are parts of us that only spring up for others.