Tommy Archuleta

Bone Loitering Outside the Chapel Doors  

These cuts this side of icedover no god will touch. 

Cuts immune to time, oxygen, macrophage. 

Love wrote the laws of grief and loss, he thought. 

Outside, the mums recited the hour’s closing 

canticle and antiphon as the eldest elms refused 

the pleas for more sugar from those ill and fast dying. 

As if living alone long enough might somehow speed 

the arrival of someday. As if the act of falling itself

weren’t a facet of wound and wounding both. 

Bone Burying More Found Photos 

You dusting the bay window in sling backs and nothing else.

You setting down a fingerbowl of dead flies on the porch “for Jehovahs.” 

You leading the choir in Be Not Afraid, pantyless.  

You sauntering down the main aisle, stilettos in hand, post-holy communion.  

You on the bench by the pond, parked-out and pissy.  

You posing on the hood of a cop car off Central, traffic backed up to The Apolo. 

You holding a born-curious child up to squeeze the nose of a street clown. 

You shooting up in the stairwell of the Imperial Hotel. 

You staring into the silverware drawer for half an hour, maybe more. 

You, a coiled blue wire on the bed you swore shook when alone. 

You up, finally, and staring out the bedroom window for the first time in months. 

A plank of moonlight I swear wasn’t there before dissecting the floor.  

Bone Canto 

Nothing but the purling of White Throats. 

How worn their stolen breviaries.   

How bloodied and 

tattered my own, wherever it is. 

φ

Why not pick mint leaves later tonight

by the moon’s gaze. 

Burn them on the chapel steps. 

Forget the river’s edge—we’re not that sick. 

Anyway, what business 

have I singing this far into winter. 

φ

Involving Saint Anthony is never pretty. 

Hopelessly tone-deaf,

he, too, was born out in the open.

Clicking his tongue. Eyes

darting yet patient as a double bitted axe.  

φ

More white crows! 

With my luck, I’ll come back as the one 

locked on whatever’s laying 

on its side out there, half 

alive, half a smokey, semisilent spell.