with song and a swirl of orgasmic

honey—for your body, for mine.

Cartographers would draw sirens

and griffins in spaces the world did not

yet recognize—the soon-to-be-colonized waters

watched by benevolent monsters of tide and wind.

What legends lie beneath our constricted symbols—

beyond smiling winks and hands pressed to a screen—

as we compose in modern sentences

braiding sorrow with seduction? What happens

between us as we listen in portals

that widen after midnight to

Zimmer’s, Interstellar, leading us

into another dimension? We find our bearings

in the ether, measure this in the opening

of our glowing forms, in the green orbs

of an ellipses…in untested longitude, in latitude,

in the transitive studio of night.

We summon new wavelengths of pleasure,

startled forms that cajole our bodies

into the taste on the edge of the tongue

like the first lick of island rum.

We stumble over non-attachment, no safety net—

no promise of a post pandemic map

imprinting us along one corner of a continent

or another—only this handheld device that rockets

from shoreline to doorframe to nightstand.

Which music shall we cue up next my wanderer—

which thrum of internal rhyme?