Wife

He was good to me in that he made me feel like my spirit
was tethered to some solid post in the middle of a field,
steeped in black fog,
broken like a feral thing with a cultivated heart, wanting warmth, having only known
the cold.
The mending 
is like surgery
of the spine, sewing up the center
of the body. The brutality 
of desire,
howling down the hallways
of my nervous system.
All the good I’d been saving turned to ashes,
cinders under water turn to mud.


[Poem from Part II: Fracture of Fracture]