Mary Biddinger
Dear tongue, how can anyone call you a beginning? There’s only one way in. The birds of the trees remain countable. The fringe on a jacket can still hover midair. We put everything on stop, and then held it. Wherever I looked there were raspberries. I needed a new name for the sky. Tooth marks, not fruit. The sky was a tongue. No it wasn’t. The tongue began with you and ended some miles over my right shoulder. Your bed was a boat we didn’t mind boarding. Neither of us had to stay behind on the dock. You asked me what shape is this cloud, what sound is that you’re making. I dreamed about a suitcase, and when we woke the room was a spill of silver leaves. The first thing I searched for was your tongue, not the extinguisher. Another woman would fumble for her undergarments. The woman I never was would do nothing. In some other hemisphere, a bird lives exclusively on human sweat. I would perish within moments unless buried in the crease of your neck. Somewhere a man watches a newspaper slide into a lake. You will never have to be that man.