In Which Things That Hurt Us Are Stored for Winter
Amaranth Borsuk

Take your picture? Here’s your little injury

bread box, decorative

prison of appropriated lowerings

where heart swallows acorn

after acorn, each one going down

like an open vowel.

 

What’s kept’s ycleped cuttage:

panem et circenses

for us the held-to helps yell out.

                                                Laid by, it points the ways.

Compass needle, sharp and

contraplex, what of heart’s own

coruscation? All inflate. Pleasure:

to echo ourselves in the antechamber,

 

never too busy to be impressed

by our own function—

Wow, wow, wow, oh wow, aha

doppler bubbles or rustling fabric—

this one looks cobalt, but when

light strikes, shines ruby!

                                                             

Yes, heart, dressed so you might

step out, if you’re blue and you

don’t know where to go to acorn’s

brazen buckle works. A slash

or a gasp in the backflap’s

grip: feeling’s supple

tackle, by which we are seemingly

caught and, later, released.

 

The hearts have it. Nothing lost

but trim and admonitions:

Catch up. Catch up. Catch up.