Circuits

I could write you an electronic letter,
filled with the wild current of time.
I could write your sonorous voice and say,
Why do you do me in?
I could write the ghosts fluttering around me,
at home in their cool, tin ache.
Then bound by wire, slip into your night,
slip into your home, a digital mistress.

I could speak to you and watch letters dive
like starlings from my mouth:
“Could you come to my graveyard?
Could you see what I’ve seen?
Feel ten-thousand pinpoints of the big, sad nothing?”
Every prick. Another prick.

I carve words in an apple and roll it toward you.
You stand in the alley and pulse and howl.
I touch my tongue to my upper lip,
think about your neck and the word Someday.
Then I make a bed and never dream of you–
I’m down by the river where I grew up feral,
pulling roots of dry weeds and thinking about the word Someday.

Everything comes around again,
a baby spine, a hungry moon.
Everything is born electric,
your blue teeth, pinwheel eyes.
Pick up the rotary phone and remember:
we laughed and your smile imprinted on my wrist.

I could write you a digital letter and say,
“I’m here today because I loved you”
and then radiate into the light.

Before graduate school, Brandy St. John worked as a wardrobe stylist in Los Angeles for artists such as Jack White, Beck, Trent Reznor, and Karen O. In addition to writing fiction and poetry, Brandy records goth folk music under the name The Long Wives.