David Sullivan

Too Far Gone

Oyster color of her eyes, the smell
of the sunrise moon. Hey who knew you?
Did you know yourself? We thought we did.
When you parted the trees bent down.
Could have been the wind.
Could have been the long fall
into knowledge. When sex dried up
we found the tug of something delicious
but we were too young
to know that kind of love was love.

Haiku
The smell of your wet wool sweater
drying, ghosts of steam rising. Rain taps
the window but we won’t let it in.

Because When I Asked She Answered

When I pull away strands
of loose black hair from the back
of her neck I find a tornado’s
twisting there, swirling
with otherworldly colors,
beneath tatted words: Good
vs Evil, and I know she’s been
dark places, survived dark places.
My fingertips are like seeds
planting future desires
in furrows of flesh, my lips
touch down on the vertebrae ladder
of her spine, descend past a woman
tightened by a box sketched
around her, and an older man
whom I recognize, so kissing lips
arrest themselves to shape words
he wrote: drink the wild air,
go where there’s no path
and leave a trail. And so I will,
anchoring all that could pass
between us in words I spill
across her flesh, into her ear,
and what is without words, rising
caws and calls that wild the air.