Kevin Riel 🔈

After reading, I wanted to write
About young love

But could not recall your old face
But

The gray, eyeless cast
Of an Allosaurus

The Museum of Natural History
Was postcard marketing

And the trickster house cleaner
Mom / Memory

Placed on my messy desk
Over your heartsy scratch paper

Invitation to a pool party
On the sharp cliff

That tasted it. In my Cretaceous era
Each hour’s packaging

Was tossed without care, as insatiable
As a storm drain

Summer’s unschooled playing
Big boys and girls to the fang.

Someone’s aunt’s wine coolers
Bathing fruit.

In the afternoon’s showroom glare
The ogling mouths

Of sunglasses cut us into them
Like pizza or chewable Adderall,

The serration is like the request to glaze
Your back with sunscreen.

No one forgets the first time
Form becomes meat:

Your back is overwhelmingly imperfect,
Freckled, bracing

A neck, an annihilated coral necklace,
Throwing fingers

With insect purpose above
A frond-littered towel floating

Once poured concrete
From which all things – discreteness,

Courage – become swamped. I am diving in,
Forevering around now like

The incarnation of your Dad’s
Marble antlers,

Initiating us in the chlorination
Of the hour’s details like

The extinction of some colorful species
Of dragonfly. You are diving in.

A woodchipper farts pine. Still, the pool
Contains us,

Promising us, even now, like a flash in the sky
Getting larger, larger, all.