JENN HABEL

When All the Words Were Grass

You can sip wine from a jelly jar.
You can sleep beneath an old flag.
The boyfriend will be shirtless
on the worn wool couch.
He might spit then say
something about the hermeneutic circle.  
Some nights the air is so thick
all you want is to feel it
like hunger or pain or stone;
some nights the dog will race, 
black body lowered to the grass
as she forgets the missing parts of herself.
Fish heads in the trash,
can of Crisco in the larder—      
you ate the bodies
in heat so still it could never last
though it would never end. Sopped
circles on blue tin plates, fan doing nothing
to the yellowed stacks of paper.
When pain was a balm, his skin
bronzed stone—If what I felt was only
partly real that must have been
the point.