Kate Sweeney

Apollo builds a shrine for Daphne, apologizes, tries to fuck a tree, and attempts to make sense of his dreams.

I’ve spent years torturing this hill, making an altar,
tilling, revising the heap of death pooled at my shins.
They say the white long-tailed tropicbirds are an omen.

A thousand years of omens and yet, the holy children still come.
They wear little bells roped to their wrists, and worship
at your roots. They gather your leaves and weave complicated

wreaths. I watch the tiny hands work in the sanctity of shade.
I teach them to tie knots in apple stems with their tongues, 
we exchange a sacred sap of your ooze to avoid sunburn.

I apologize.       We don’t share language.
They are always confused. Their nails grow
straight and without ridges. They remind me
of yours. If there’s a history of violence,
they don’t seem to be in pain.

Rain runs from your branches in the afternoons.
I rub your drought stricken boughs in slow circles.

You drink the wetness from my hands, creaking in
pleasure. Blow softly into my lungs. Accept my hollow

chest pressed against you           stiff and unforgiving.
Your naked body, slipped from my arms once before.

I was so close. Bent over you from behind, clavicle beaming,
your chest punctured. I've tried to wash the blood from my hands,

it saturates everything I see. Would you have allowed me
to wash you in this stream, would you have

let me teach you to float, let me clean your hair?
Let me coax your nipples to the surface break.

in my most
recent dream,
i try to fit your cold
body into a tub over-
filled with water. If
loss is what is spilled,
what then is the
displacement of water.
it may be wind.
but you are wind.
the perfect sum
of all language

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Kate Sweeney has poems in Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, SWWIMM Everyday, and Adanna Literary Journal, with poems forthcoming from Ethel Zine. She is Marketing Director for The Adroit Journal and currently resides in Los Angeles where she is a political marketing executive.