When Dylan wrote to Cat, he misspelled
Indiana and I misspell when I’m in love,
misspell men for me, misspell room
for roam. My letters tell another story,
they cry of a slow hang
and not a slow hand.
When I translate sex as a string of firecrackers,
there is always one position I can’t pronounce.
Sometimes I dot my i’s with mascara.
Sometimes I don’t see myself as y’s.
I am the handwriting of a car crash,
bent metal and adrenalin-filled.
I walk away from the accident,
say:
We could have been.
A buzzard circles the freeway
and his call is similar to a cat’s.
The bird writes love letters to the injured
driver in the other car.
When I insist on walking home,
the letters I write are my footprints,
the fig leaves I tear from the tree.
There’s an empty envelope
outside my home, a broken pen
on the doorstep.
I’m not in love
with the mail carrier,
I’m in love with what he holds.
Once I wrote a letter to a lover
in black widow bites: My bug,
sometimes venom is only words.