You sift through hours
of tongues you find a ring

to echo and binding
an eye strewn on your wrist

is enough to reconcile the weight
of the catastrophe. If you counted

fingernails I would comb rotting
charcoal to pulse cinematic

shades within your stare.
The frostbitten imprints of a horse

fulfill the melancholy of a woven
heart. Let me spend this knowledge

make facsimiles from the affection
you extol in waves of mountains.

Winter is coming and my feet
react so tender. The coolness

saps down from the peaks
you are bleeding frozen rot.

If you were a surgeon
I would still wound the ground

with ashes cradle your doors
in golden waste. But I cannot trickle

thick propensity from the revenant
embers. Without your glaze

I am mulling hard. I truckle elegantly
quiver. Call me your perspicacious candle trap

months in your teeth. O cyclical
tormentor! Your weaves of angels

become my cadavered existence!

A native of Iowa City, Josh Fomon is an MFA candidate at the University of Montana and serves as Editor-in-Chief for CutBank. He has poems appearing or forthcoming in Caketrain, iO: A Journal of New American Poetry and Ilk. He contributes poetry book reviews for Read This Awesome Book.

"Alex" by Meredith Steele