Falling Action

Tonight my name is the pearl onion
I place in your mouth,
the sound a pelvis makes
when it opens like a window.
Tonight the fly beating its head
against the ceiling light is drunk
from the wine
we opened and forgot about.
You turn me over
like a poker card,
you turn me over
like the list of side effects
I explained this morning
to the woman
dying of colon cancer.
I’m touching all twenty-seven
bones in your hand,
trying to hang a sock
over the door
of what I can’t stop thinking—
that it’s cold inside the body,
even inside a burning body,
and all that we love
becomes the atoms
of something else.
Tonight I’m looking at a man
but seeing a handprint on a window.
Something inside me
scattering like deer.