Sensus Communis

Sensus Communis

The scent of danger coiled around my ankles.
You followed with a wheelbarrow filled with dirt.
My sister ran ahead,
she was lighter for some reason,
she was not yet tired and gray.
I woke up thinking I forgot how to breathe,
I thought my room was the dream,
I thought my life was the room,
I could not comprehend furniture
and my hands upon it.
As touch seeped in,
everything became unfamiliar,
the body an unknown integer,
the old math of division
fused with the intolerable influence
of heat’s new physics.
When I wanted your arm, I said sleeve,
for your waist, I said belt,
microwave meant rejection,
pit-bull meant intimacy.
This was our secret code of ruin.
And then a single drop of rain settled
in the green areole of a lily’s parchment,
and my brokenness was not jagged but uniform—
a precise rising and falling.
In the valley between each perforation,
neither side was empty.