monarch raze i miss your orange laced with black. your body a moving wreath above my head. now i dream of open-heart surgery — the messy aftermath of love's misguided intervention. the cold has taken you away, and my body shits blood in defiance of all the rest that's been wrested from me. 221126 ... tender_square he pedaled past on two wheels and called out, "how many monarchs have you seen today?" our visit had been unremarkably flightless. "not anymore," he thrust a laminated card into my hand of a stained glass wings, a papilionoidea perched on the tip of a twig's torn tissue, halos of white light blurred beyond. he said he was eighty years young, pointed to the tshirt from his alma matter and bragged of being a college basketball star in the hall of fame. i joked he was talking to the wrong ladies, as we were true blue and he waved and went on his way. we saw him everywhere we went in the park, acting as an unofficial park guide for butterflies, wandering the trails alone, reliving his glory days in front of strangers: "the older i get, the stronger i am," we overheard him claim to a group of polite strangers at the marsh. "i can beat all the younger guys that are out there on the court." 230724 ... ovenbird you find one small clump of milkweed sequestered in a backyard garden in the center of a city gagging on its own thick fumes have you tasted other flowers in desperation only to find them bitter? this life has dished up much that I’ve choked down to be polite sometimes i spit the words I’m fed into a napkin and bury them in the bathroom garbage sometimes courage is pushing your plate away and going to bed hungry 250730 what's it to you? who go blather from