Sinking slowly, tenuous, down to a safer place…

I’m not perfect. Green is green.
There are entire silences. Country wide.
Here I am. What do you measure?
The man in the audience is weathered and handsome.
In a way that comes from not knowing your personal history.
Firey planet. Practical. Strange city.
Discreet minnows surfing the muddy bottom.
I’m building a new soul.
The world composed of many roses and worn.
Quick, give me your hand.
A wild angel changing the events of my life.
I can’t see you.
There are rocks who are born into being rocks.
Microcosm.
I stood with my heart tearing out all the pictures.
Being beneath the planet is enough.
Or beneath the shower head.
Like ecstasy without God.
A lot of possibilities and finally away forever.
The yellowing tips of my jade plant.
I tempt a shadow with a stick.
Held within myself is nothing but my birth.
Or I miss you and how you taught me a mile.
And how a mile can hold nothing if that’s what you allow.
Or how holding can lead to a lie.
How a lie can hold to wood and how wood burns.
Jeweled, climbing into my heart.
Sweet smelling fragrance. A loaf of bread.
Tending my garden with a noose.
My wheelbarrow is very small.
I can’t sit in it.
Old pond in the woods.
I’m a man who loves in three ways.
Kindness a mouth of locusts and honey.
Scared in my robe at your back door.

Rushing Pittman (he/him) is a transman from Alabama. His writing has appeared in Sundog Lit, jubilat, The Boiler, BOOTH, Hayden’s Ferry Review and other various journals. Work is forthcoming in The Heavy Feather Review and Annulet. He is the author of the chapbooks Mad Dances for Mad Kings (Factory Hollow Press, 2015) and There Is One Crow That Will Not Stop Cawing (Another New Calligraphy, 2016). He earned his MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is an editor for Biscuit Hill, an online poetry journal. More of his writing can be found at www.rushpittman.com.