"I painted myself as the man you might have met in sleep" --Matthea Harvey

I have traced you out on the kitchen floor
oh dozens of times, in milk, faint wisps of white on
the tile older than your mother, in cardamom,
in sage. You will not leave me. I have
drawn your face but never seen it, tasted
your mouth but never kissed it. You are a loss.

In a dream I was a lioness and combed burrs
out of my own heaving, yellow silk. With
giant paws I tore up shrubs and saplings and wrenched
whole alligators apart, scale by scale.
Even there you danced on a whisker's end,
even there you splayed across my desires, raw and
bloody and fresh, trap for a hungry predator.