Lizzy Burnam 🐞

Men have no taste for chaos, she says. 
How mishandled are the weapons in their hands. 
So tight the grip, as if one could 
bend the bullet! she says. 
Grim, you are the bullet—stunned and raging 
toward an a-ha you didn’t ask for. 
Yes, I know that look, she says. 
The one like a roach in the aftermath. 
Sickly-still. Spiritually ashen, 
un-inflamed, she says. Risen just to find 
your Mary didn’t wait. Tsk, tsk, tsk. 
Apokaluptein, she says. The top is blown. 
Yet even the greatest of men still try 
to pry apart the gates of time. 
The same stone to every shoulder, I guess. 
I remember my own affair with the bottom, she says. 
Making love to the hanged man 
on the burning tower, dying enthusiastically slow.
Winteritis spread first to the amygdala, 
then the bones. Look, she says, 
I play heaven and hell with equal sincerity. 
Give it to me, then—your unconsummated dream. 
Give me your trampled heart, she says, 
and the acorn that grew from its rot. 
I’ll return them to the child that you forgot. 
Decimatum, she says. A kitten gives 
his tenth life to god—that’s the secret. 
Now, wash your mouth of that egocentric sin. 
A broken mirror never reflects again.