Hear Me Out

1. I am pretending to be a god in the bathroom mirror.
   Dim blue Christmas lights blend with a single pale
   yellow bulb, the same dangling light from the stories.
   Atop my head is a puddle of green. I used to have
   better words. You’d give me your hearts and I’d say,
   fire lamb, my love. But that was before, and I’m not
   supposed to adore you.

2. I want dessert for dinner. I sit on my hands to keep
   my reach from your wrist. Watch out the corner of
   my eye as you slice into a filet whose center is bright
   and fiery as an ember, you can change your heart’s
   shape and I’m lost in daydreams of summers gathering
   seasoning, mint leaves with aphids, I had a thing for
   toffee, held my breath as we walked side-by-side
   through the radish patches.

3. In the dictionary of flowers, I doodle your initials. You
   haunt the way I hold my pen; you tell me to stop but I
   can’t help myself, I’m not as into the weather as I could
   be, would you save me, or should we toss liking into fire?

4. Moon tattoo on your thumb, the day in which I pay the
   price, how you care more for jaws and violet roses, you give
   up on my alphabet, there is apple blossom and ash, trumpet
   flower fit for a mouth, bells then shells, I’m doing that thing
   you hate where I offer catchfly snare as answer.

5. I could try a little more truth if you wanted me to. Corn straw
   cress, the crown imperial, and your father’s fir. Then it’s days,
   flowering reed, iris and sprig, the juniper in jars, Larkspur then
   lavender are you still going to love me when I’m moss?

6. Know your breathing. I’d sacrifice birds, too. It’s time to ask
   the father how to build the altar. Oranges, split lip from a fall
   off the pew, broke a cherub statue’s arm, I’m forgetting how
   to explain myself, just saying I have a crush because of robes
   and the bucket of ashes, do you think the priest knows our lungs
   do you think he sings when he drives the thin edge of dusk.

Sam Moe is the first-place winner of Invisible City’s Blurred Genres contest in 2022, and the 2021 recipient of an Author Fellowship from Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. Her first chapbook, “Heart Weeds,” is out from Alien Buddha Press and her second chapbook, “Grief Birds,” is forthcoming from Bullshit Lit in April 2023. You can find them on Twitter and Instagram as @SamAnneMoe.