Penny for Your Thoughts by Grant Tarbard

During the long midnight her roaming hair,
full of telephones, rings with coffee spoons.
You bright tender thing, cherished like a curse,
demanding the landscape of my sleep like
a spire. Tiredness brings her roses, a half
dozen dresses dirty in the downpour.
She sculpts flowerbeds of blue cadavers
packed tight in shadows bundled on the shelves
that form slit-throat butchers in the long night.
I, pot bellied as a bag of pennies,
bearded as a crow, kill my fingertips
with scratches counting syllables thumb to
forefinger, prizing agitations out
of the architecture of her rib cage.

Grant Tarbard is internationally published. His collection As I Was Pulled Under the Earth, published by Lapwing Publications, is available now.