SO YOU ARE NOT LOVED Ancient Rome would have married you to a glamorous boy, but England, Cromwell scowling at its heart, mows you down, thinning out your kind, forbidding you to fall in love. So you are not loved, reeking of lust and shame at the abyss of a long descent. SO EASY TO MISS THE BODY IN A CORNER heatbeat stronger than bed and walls, mind counting other bodies, imagining how skin catches light, a parchment on which to write a life. Even the largest canvas is smaller than the hours in a spool of film, which reads all the values of blue. ENVOI One night you thirsted like a lion, too thin to stoop at a drying-up pool in the Serengeti on fire. You had lost your kingdom, old king, staggering like a wraith, palsied limbs shaking, mind ruminating when the flames would end. Boils, settling on you, your mouth dry with curiosity burned into it like sand. Your body’s fireworks aren’t literary, yet amid all the dryness a thirst for creativity. How sweet the brain works beyond medicine, everything rising in fire, rising, cresting, how much fire in summer, how much glory in grass, butterflies and fluttering flowers consumed in light of an ordinary world calling to birds.