Domestic Violence

Morning dragonflies tricked by the sliding glass

door, scattered on the porch like cigarettes torn in half,

& a horse in watercolor, its joints light blue circles.

Golf carts zoom over the green breasts

of the hills. I slept on my hands,

flat pillows filled with a puzzle of tiny bones. Loneliness’s

gray blanket, last night’s mascara, loneliness—

a dragonfly hovers like spit in slow motion near the glass,

promises to fill the pane with itself like his hand,

my face reflecting back at him. Half

the world is still asleep, my breasts

alive & waking from my shirt. Wind in circles

through grass, horses tip in its direction. Saturated circles,

faces, move the muted TV screen, broadcast more loneliness:

buy this property, try this exercise. A woman with hard breasts

isn’t convincing. When I shift in myself, glass

breaks inside me, a sky losing over half

its stars, desperate dark hands

finding something else to fill it. Like hands,

birds clap their wings in desperation’s applause, circling

as if their species is dying out. My throat, half

gastrolith, half swollen tequila, it’s not loneliness

we flying things try to avoid, but in glass

a painful logic, one you learn like the breast’s.

A rainbow interrupts the white cloud breasts,

like mine, where once his hands

lived, then destroyed. My breath against silence’s smooth glass,

longing for the wisdom of a tree’s hollow, sex circle,

how it endures loneliness

by invitations to other survivors of this world from half

its violence, all its love.