Out the window, Alabama feels nothing
like home except the apartment

next door yells at the same woman
in the same man’s voice & I wonder how

many men will move through my body,
swear loveas wordas fist

as in I’m scared
not by how much I need,

but by how much I’m prepared
to wreck to make it

known – bright vacuum of stars,
the window, open, open.

Once, I became a house,

crawled inside through a man’s
bedroom; a stray

nail picked my stomach
&

when I told him, he lifted
my shirt, traced the sly

cut on my abdomen,
said, So it was you,

the blood on my sheets?
I would let him take me

to a valley filled with poppies
offering their thin necks

inside the shadow of a mountain.
& it’s true: I felt

destination when he pinned one
arm behind my back, the other

spinning, my body a compass, until
he wreathed the stems of my fingers

around his cock & I want
to say I am not ashamed

for loving the flowers
stuffed into my mouth

& the dirt,

that this is not another goddamn prayer
for the silences I carry,

or the woman, the air
between us cool & sweet

like six white apples,
or some chance of early rain,

the voice next door

I’ve come to fear as my own.