All your little kindnesses
rake my skin like nails

and I can’t hear your voice
over the singing of his chainsaw.

I know someday the buzzards
will be the only ones to undress me

but I want my bones to
shine clean now.

I may be chanting
but not often

I may be bleeding
but not much

So you can go cango
down

there comic/strip lover,

and South I will also go
with my waxpaper heartwrapper.

                  And when you arrive
                  Count the almonds you blanch,
                  Count the things that kept you out,
                  Count me in.

(I look for you
and my eye opens your eardrum
and I find only soundless space)

And the coin on your tongue melts
And the skin on your palm peels off

For all the times I

cursed your pipe,
crashed your car,
stole your .45.

Since it’s for you
I drink neat,
drive backwards,
recite my rights,
lay low.

Like your boat
lays low between waves.

But waves beat the dust rising
under wheels on summer road trips.

I’m sorry about The Trips.

And I’m sorry mother
called you infidel.

Was I worth keeping?
Was she worth leaving?

Regardless, I’m sorry I was the one
who told her about your lover,

since I know now what it’s like
to climb up crumbing sandstone,
to love a vaulted door.

I can’t blame you
for refusing numb limbs,

since it’s from you I learned
to rub the blood back in.

The thing itself
                       is lambent eyes of animals
caught in mechanic lights,

a creature without a mother-tongue to plead
for life in the sharpened night—
                                                even this

an axe ring on heartwood
                       a chainsaw tear to bark blood
                                      a knife whisper to the wound

all order made with blades—

                       as we speak out of skins

cheap and blank as flank meat.

Kate Beles is an MFA student in Poetry at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she was awarded the first-year Creative Writing Fellowship and served as Associate Editor of Blackbird: an online journal of literature and the arts (www.blackbird.vcu.edu). She completed her MA at Western Washington University, where she served as a poetry editor for the Bellingham Review. Some of the journals that have published her work are Harpur Palate, Touchstone, Inside Kung-Fu Magazine and the Bellingham Review. She was recently nominated for a Ruth Lilly Fellowship and the AWP Intro Awards in Creative Nonfiction. She received an honorable mention for the VCU Graduate Creative Nonfiction Award and was a finalist for the Milton Kessler Memorial Prize in poetry.