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back RODNEY GOMEZ
Cassowary
after you kissed a slurry of words into my needling mouth
I stumbled into a swatch of flightless crows,
scissored my way through a field of flightless crows
after the current raked my foreskin off, raked the old mouth off
& replaced it with chain mail,
your hips kited a path on my backbone
after you sanded & papered my heart, decided to petrify,
begin anew with a pin from the spine of a weathered house
& how in retrospect you winnowed my body down to a seedling,
winnowed one obedient layer after another to a seedling,
scraped my lungs out & grew them back in one ruthless tock
a cassowary parted the air with two black razors
pinned to a funeral barge on the black river,
stumbled into a field of flightless crows