Marcus Myers

Love in the Time of Dame’s Rocket

I think I’m in love.
But I don’t know if with flowers or time,
Sex or death. In lust

Here where sunlight catches green
And locks up my head and hands—
Always I’m a bad bad puritan—
Imprismed in this phlox. The lung-

Ful of half-shaded air
I breathe wrapped within this light

Blouse: A loose bee compartment. Yet a fit
Snug as coffin text when I clip and hold them

Fingerbones to rib, as if I’d embarked
On a year-long trek
To rejoin this instance of sun, thick air,

Color. It keeps me coming
And going like a day, leaving
The hilltop garden burning     Up

And down the twenty-three steps,
Where I can long to see the rockets lit again
Over my left shoulder

While looking back. Here, it bends me
Where I stand, has me stock-still
On my return, taking our selfies.
I don’t care if nosegay, cheap as weeds,

I’ll always cut and splay us here,
Where we begin our count to identify, eye

To cluster, the shape
Into which my I uproots
And dissolves into a garden lifting toward the sky.
When purple burns and fades

To blue-orange, the carbon love remains
Above, agape, in shades of gold and brown,
Expecting nothing, receiving all we have.

Marcus Myers is an educator who lives in Kansas City and serves as a co-founding editor of Bear Review. His poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from The Common, The Cortland Review, The Florida Review, Hunger Mountain, Just Place, The Laurel Review, Mid-American Review, The National Poetry Review, Poetry South, RHINO, Salt Hill, Sink Review, Tar River Poetry, TYPO, Windfall Room and elsewhere.