Grazing

after Matt Rasmussen

I know you didn’t choose this place to die / you chose another / but I still imagine the shoulder of your favorite chair / spattered with red. / I cannot help / each time I curl my neck onto the cushion / like a bird preening its feathers / but to think about the absence / at the meeting of your skull and neck / or at least that is where I imagine it / the bullet’s nest / though I suppose I don’t know where the cavern laid / but my scar runs across my first vertebrae / a pink line across the grassy landscape of my scalp / and I’d like to think your ghost shares the same. / But I digress / this chair is where I mourned you / where I still mourn you / silently and with a smile / stretched across sharpened teeth / as I chat with family / as they see me laugh so hard I cry / and rehydrate the leather once more / differently now that I’m observed / but I sit here and / “I wish the god of this place / would put me in its mouth / until I dissolve, until / the field doesn’t end / and I am broken down / like a rifle, / swabbed clean.”