Cento from Diode Volume 2, Number 1, Fall 2008: 8/30/08

Every night the clouds argue in the sky for the right to be
& you attempt to rise--then a glistening fills the channel.

On my inner forearm, at my elbow: a pothole
& a paling puncture scar -- the visible

whole? Or a faint
drunk from the sun. Apples'

color colored in the blankness. Smokey Robinson
I was, where I lived. I chanted with the others,

someone not blond, blue-eyed. Someone shaking
this, which forms in the throat.

You are lost.
You must differ yourself in the taste, ask light from breath-light.

Let them say you remember the ribcage was partially open,
with its stomach pumped. With its sputtering interface.

You don't know what's underneath
that summer night. I was an unturned field

where the wind is a wingless insect muscling a serenade.
Until the world was clean,

what the sky spat down into the woods was
invisible.