Fall turns finally cold and my apples streak with red, fatten
with sugar. The drowsy yellowjackets watch as I fill
bag after bag. I am making plans for these apples the way
I once imagined Jesus made plans for my one life—
Jesus with a million blueprints rolled up under his arms,
some spilling onto the floor in a brutalist building
made of thunderclouds. As for the apples, some will live on
as compote, some as cider. Some as pie filling I’ll freeze
for the holidays. It’s another year I don’t go home
to Florida but instead stay here, my new home, where the trees
are turning the color of maps in library basements.
The path forward is brittle and impossible to read
so I will live my one life like these yellowjackets,
whom winter will kill. Full of sweetness sleeping in the apples.

  For Lucia

In Florida, in hard rain, I listen to thunder, and you
tell me about the snow in Denver, how the new tulips
and dandelions are hidden by an anachronism
of white. It's May, the month of both our births. Still May for me
feels like a thinning of the veil—how if I looked for it
I could find the place where some spirit became me, became you.
Love I admit I find this distance more believable
than days when we wake up in the same house, in the same life.
That though we find ourselves wanting, we found each other
in the wanting. How when I cut your hair I find pieces
of your hair on my shirt, on my fingers, little threads
I want to press against the walls in proof of something
though we are the proof—my voice trying to be a fire
against the cold, your voice the roof against the drowning rain.

be honest with God, he who presumably already knows?
Better to be honest with your postal worker or cashier—
someone who can't call your bluff and therefore the honesty
means something. Honest to Sarah who scans my shopper's card.
Honest to Joe who delivers my bills, which is another
accountability. Yesterday the three half-wild mutts
that always get loose got loose, ran havoc through the neighborhood,
chased the mail truck down the cul-de-sac like archeologists
after the ark. I didn't remember God giving
Moses specific measurements for building it, but he did.
And what was the point of all that gold just to fill the ark
with dust? Honest to God I can only imagine
I would have been one of those at the foot of the mountain,
such little faith—worshipping the calf, then drinking its ashes.

when wearing the glasses I am required to wear by law
in order to drive. It says as much on my license.
It also says my eyes are green (simplified from hazel),
lists my date of birth. May is my favorite month because,
depending on where you are, summer should have arrived
or be around the bend. There is a little heart
on my license indicating, in the event of my death,
as much as can be salvaged from my body should be salvaged
from my body and given to whoever needs it most. My eyes
will not be recycled, and so will go into the earth
with me, or into the fire. Here in the future we have various
options including, in Colorado, human composting.
I suppose I’d rather feed flowers than be a corpse
surrounded by them, a blind man becoming a bed of irises.

Though I try not to look at it, I know the brown-white lump
on the road is a struck cat who will never go home.
How it clumps against the asphalt like thrown-away clothes.
It makes me need desperately to see my own living cat
when I open the door to my house. She turns away
as if uninterested but shaking her long-furred tail,
which I’ve been taught understand as approval
if not love proper. I choose to translate it as love
which is of course projection. Cats have been known to eat
the recently deceased bodies of their owners. I don't
hold this possibility against her, my cat who sleeps
on my lap only if there's a box between us. She maintains
her boundaries. And what's to say that isn't a love,
leaving even your body behind as one's inheritance?

After all the gators at the gator park died of some disease Animal Control couldn’t figure out, the land was sold off for luxury apartments. This meant filling in the pools where the gators once lay placid as torpedoes in the Florida sun, snapping thrown chicken carcasses right out of the air. Children had gathered and gawked there at monsters that, Hector knew, realistically already lived in the sloughs and ponds of their subdivisions. So gravel took the gators’ place. The meat wasn’t safe to sell, even as animal feed, so all day Hector drove his dump truck full of alligators to the landfill. He thought of staring into the island of a gator’s black iris as a child, at that very same park. Gators live long enough, Hector knew, that it was possible he was hauling away that same animal in the reeking pile behind his driver’s seat, that same eye shrinking in the pond of its socket, flies the only spectators now. He thought about the landfill, how there were plans, once it was full, to convert it into another of Florida’s ubiquitous golf courses. He thought of bored bankers drinking cheap sweating beer and lining up their shots on the back of a giant alligator. Who was not dead, only sleeping. They’ll outlast us, Hector said to the nothing that was his wingman, the nothing who like an apprentice to life followed him everywhere those days, putting its nothing hand out the window in the blistering fetid heat, tapping out a little nothing song on the truck door. Nothing that watched always just below the surface, not even its yellow eyes showing.