On a Porch at 6 p.m. Outside Laramie, WY

It’s quiet where the moon is forming.
Sit, and the pressure-treated boards catch
your jeans. Under the shed
a whistlepig chirrs again. Wind
steps forward. I walk my hand out, then,
where your shirt could be—bluish with
a split sleeve—. It’s quiet enough. You can hear
when a hummingbird swings near, diamond-
blur, cuts over your left shoulder.
If we were still playing, I missed it.

Two Step

Can You see in this
light? Sorry,
I can’t check the mirror. I’ve made a pact with my eyes
not to look at any girls.
You, however
could buff clean my heart, You could use
Your omnipotent subwoofer, it
works, I can buy the dyed
redhead six stools down a vodka
cranberry & walk out. You Hit
the fluorescent. You Take
off Your glasses. Now You are a dappled
light on the dancefloor. See? You
suffer, I jump. Make muffled commentary on religion
in America, the girls remaining,
blinking twice. & if it’s time to seize
my arm, first
seize my shoulder. Quick-
quick-slow-slow, the inside turn
starts with a promenade & everyone’s jeans look
slapped—our thighs
prominent, tipped
up—we wear our work-boots stacked
formally—like a jacked hand slapped the hams of our thighs
covered in flour
or spray-bleach & surely
wants to slap them again & also they don’t say promenade
in the two-step bars. I say
what I’m told.
You’re leading. Okay I know, we’ve talked like this
too long, & that’s not the same as touching, but isn’t it
good for us to be
here? We whose thighs
You wither, whose loins
You command, You command
why, then You go,
it’s true, You pull salvation out
from between Isaiah’s teeth, Isaiah who told me
all flesh,
I heard him, he said
all,
what kind of move is that, can I be Your favorite
if You favor everyone? Who are You
to greet all of us spinning the floor
with our split-hem mini-skorts, our fitted blotchy mesh—tie-dyed
& bruise-pink & yellow & looking
like something died on it
in ooze, also
brown, mockneck—& our fringed crop tops? Fringed
modestly, not outdoing anyone’s best country hair. Jewel-dipped
hip pockets. My point is, that’s a lot of slaughter.

Rhododendrons

Frost glitz the whole way up Route 10 crinkling
the grabbed beige grass
until that grass is zinc-white
& plated,
I’m driving
for once, it’s early,
the sun behind us
is the same sun in front, am I speaking
out of turn? Sun,
rhododendrons
in a furnace fire. You look like me
but bigger.
I’m the one who wants
a winner, & every winter this river valley works me
over, Connecticut, you take off
your scrunched clothes, you leave
your rings on,
all your dips rinsed
in 7 a.m. Say
You weren’t there,
I believe You, say Connecticut
made the first move. If You’re a speaker
You could call me
tourist
in Your town, show me,
do You update
Your dead? We’re almost at the State Line
Station, which is a bar
with a yard, & election signs
keeled over on the Massachusetts side. Ice-blue siding
lapping its vinyl around the stoop, one stripped pin oak
getting snow-molded. Look—
now all our rinds crack half-open in rows of frozen mud,
doused guts, fibrous, our outsides cold-shrunk
& bleaching. That’s what,
the future? Your
saints? Who walks around like that
in February? You
winner, now
You catch me. You pull over, You’re driving
a rental. I have You
in my eye, & that’s
Connecticut speaking. That’s no friend
You’d lie to.

Larissa the Real Girl

We can leave the poem now.

It’s night.

And the perfect insects speak when asked.

Don’t you like those little new-zip drawls, the way they simmer in?

Mix up the crickets?

Two sounds that slide under the paper shade together, like they’re parallel, and

also physical.

I got married three years ago.

I told you.

This morning, I did my hair how you asked, in the bus terminal bathroom, and O!

The things your students tell me!

Father Reilly’s hair in the breeze like a burst cattail, floating.

Then the bus past a company called SkyBitz, or past the empty glazed wall of

that company’s building with all the people in it poured loose, bus-facing, sun

heading down its windows.

We can leave the poem now!

O I am a curved stalk I am a live curve.

No Lamb, Larissa

Lorene dips my chin in her left hand, tugs the fingers of the other on either side of my nose.

Lorene looks like she’s wearing a lab coat.

Here I am, I get my swivel-stool.

So what I see is vantaged like that.

Minus swivel, I see beautiful Larissa, who is apprenticed to Lorene, and has painted-on freckles.

The Ulta parking lot—it’s early—huffs out a touch of fog.

And Lorene’s hair is so truly orange-red.

It is like red sheep, spilling through the unshaven slopes of an Alp.

Bells clap lightly in their fat reddish wool.

Fat is the word, wool.

All fat is for the Lord.

Larissa’s hair is like just one sheep, strapped to a wooden rack, and that rack cranks the shoulders of a strong, youngish Swiss or Swiss-Italian man who is perpetually sunburned in an appealing way.

He gets his face.

Minus my swivel I don’t see it.

Without seeing it, his face has a wisdom-and-salvation type glow.

Don’t you think that’s a very bridal look?

Lorene asks Larissa.

Pretty, says Larissa, who is sincere, whose sincerity of spirit holds a great yoke of exfoliants, nude lips, and reddish brow fiber, near-real love for any shepherd who admits to never washing his or her forehead.

Blink, Larissa.

Were you the lamb?

Generous Larissa, make all our foreheads feel like cool wet peonies now, growing from a fogged-on parking lot divider.

Happily it has just rained.

You’re no lamb just rained on.

A feeling, rained on, a feeling like having a choice.

Pink chins cinched all the way down into the plush mulch.

Emma De Lisle lives in Western Massachusetts, studies religion at Harvard, and co-edits Mark.