night told me to bite or burn
my ass was a cat call, my face a baby, my hips
a handle—my body’s object turned skin to ash
when i was a girl i was
a pearl gathering itself from dust
a wordsong waiting in a shell
how can i tell you that your eyes are commas
in my obituary where every cathedral is a stranger
that every time you argue my grammar
after tracing my breasts from moon into tit
or citing the manual of singulars and plurals
my spirit folds its syntax into a choke
dear silence
wingmuscle pulls down the air’s stars
opening each throat in the meadow
dear silence
windsong releases the throats of the dying
until each silence is a resting place for gods
dear silence
we burn too brightly for the boundaries of nouns
most days we’d give it all up to be a fire
from Poetry Northwest 12.1 Summer & Fall 2017More by JM Miller from the library
Copyright © JM Miller
Used with the permission of the author
on behalf of Poetry Northwest.