3am

I love your lunar mouth—

curling in a smirk

as thin as the lemon peel

between my dad’s lips

when he’s feeling funny

or breaking into full yawn,

inviting my soul to wail

with the boney-haunched strays

who case the doors to canneries,

ears weighed down by a day’s rain

with the dribbling derelicts,

perched on their veteran signs,

launching empty kamikazes

of kiwi Maddog

down into the spine of our city           

with the nineteen

and the seventy-seven,

crosshatching tire tracks

like mechanical cartographers,

brushing leaf into leaf to build

gutter-levees for Laurelhurst

with Willamette like an ink spill

and the trains that scoot against its belly

in one rusted chain of boxcars

            that have seen it all—

the weary travelers, the pained workers

with knobby bitten hands,

the grain, the milk, the rocks of soot,

the conductors in bibs

who shoveled black fodder

against the flames so the iron beast

would keep slamming through Southeast.

            But I love you most

for how you touch her skin—

a hushed breath

of moonlight and gentle shadow

draped across her back,

so that even in her sleep

she commands my world.