one night my friend pointed out

a darkened shopfront

with a disembodied pelvis

perched on a kitchen stool

one thing followed another

and i thought, “i am in love with her”

it was western oregon’s most doomed thought

from 2016 to 2018, for which it received

a bouquet of pink ranunculus

two casks of nitroglycerine

and a hand-stitched sash

the sense it made

was tectonic in scale

how could i not bury it deeper

than even my fear of extinction?

hobbled with secrecy, i scrawled

profanities on notebook paper

and fed them to a campfire

people thought i was trying to be funny

but i was trying to perform surgery

the neighbor’s parrot screamed all night

from the fact of being alive

or perhaps he had a dilemma like mine

a lone black wing beating

auroras out of the air

i named him ambulance dave

i burned my fingers

on the horns of my hips

and prayed for escape