Crab Orchard Review, Vol. 15, No. 1

Bruce BondMilkAsk any star, flame to flame, any infantmouth that tugs the long and twisted ropeof light, that pulls a tether to the world.We drink and so ignite the word for whatwe drink, what consumes us in its music.The mere mention is its own erasure.And soon it arrives, this breakfast table,these words we lay against our tongues like forks.The pitcher tilts. The fire flashes as it braids.We think of and about, and so the bridgeand the barrier of how we think,the want that sets our thinking into motion.When our mother tongue was just a child,desire too fell from the night sky,from the stars, says the book of tongues.And since the brain was one enormous cloudthat came between us and the universewe would conceive, one was never here there.Stars looked down their rifles in the fog.All we want would kill us, surely, our eyesawash in the blood of the human heart.And yet to want to be wanted, to fleeour skin like music from a radio,it speaks of certain liberties, yours, mine.30 u Crab Orchard Review