Clint had no way of knowing about the cyanide in his fig newtons.
He threw the unopened package into his garden.
Imagine mourning a butchered bougainvillea.
Why not hang framed twigs on the wall?
Call the rooms of your house by name.
Undress next to the fire pit.
Fuel everything with bamboo and pumpkin ale.
Clint steals prickly pears that no one else was going to eat otherwise.
He leaves a note.
This note is the first installation in what would become
a scavenger hunt but no one is hunting.
No one is hunting, and Clint is stirring soup in a cauldron.
Clint is stirring soup, but it is not soup, it is a vegetable surprise
and it is burnt.
When the weather changes, his nose bleeds for hours at a time—
thick, warm, iron blood.
This is a periscope into the body.
Sometimes he worries, mostly he doesn’t.
He is not a legend for all men.
A microbiologist inspects your stomach
and finds colonies living there. He isn’t surprised,
but I am. He prescribes kimchi and three types of yogurt.
You tell me the universe looks like a hurricane.
The milky way slips counter clockwise around an eye
of gravity. The whole operation
is expanding faster than our calculators
can calculate. Still we turn the radiator to low
and examine figures 1-17 in search
of an appropriate rate of change.
Outside looks like it always does.
You bite into a tomato like you would
an apple. It’s all juice and seeds. They sow
themselves between the fibers of your shirt.
In springtime I’ll eat a garden from your arms.
Caroline Cabrera is an MFA candidate in poetry at UMass Amherst from Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. She is a preschool teacher, an avid culinarian and a clumsy but spirited water sports enthusiast. She lives with her boyfriend and their cat, Yossarian.