Evaporative Losses
Breath travels. Our mouths are broken-open places—a house where only wind lives, searching the cupboards and closets. I replace your missing mouths with those of jars, mines, graves. What is gathered and dissipated by mouth? Once alternately filled and emptied, the cloistered breath swallows itself—Dies irae, desire drawn back in along a taut, slender rope.
When my late father was a child, he helped as a seasonal farmhand on an arid ranch near the Old Man On His Back Plateau. Lent out to extended family for manual labour, he carried a deep scarring love
