P h o n e I n B e d
I’d rather not talk
about it. It was an attempt
at intimacy. When offered clay
to mold the universe,
God chose instead
whatever the fuck we are made of,
all misconnection and dimension
we cannot see. Today,
there were two shootings.
Tomorrow, it will be seventy-five degrees.
He texts me, “What is your
animal? A dolphin?” If he believes
I am a dolphin then we got it
all wrong. I am a starfish,
the kind that buries itself in sand.
Looked it up: Asteroidea.
Two shootings. He left
me early, but not “with the sun.”
The top ten beaches to visit this summer.
I text back, “What’s yours?”
No reply.
Doesn’t he know
I’m an anglerfish,
Lophiiformes,
little light by my head?
Madeline Gilmore won a Brooklyn Poets Fellowship and has poems in Bluestem Magazine and The New Guard. Madeline lives in Cambridge, MA, where she is pursuing her MFA at Boston University.