TOUCH ME NOT
I promise to the order of things that I will not be touched fucked or filled before I fill
fuck or touch. Your gaze disrupts. Marina breeze licks then bites. Venus and half lune
moon moan against copper aubergine //
In your room book spines rise from the ground up & you’ve hung blank canvases.
I allow [read: beg] you to strip me for painting. The well flows over. You spiral me
into arabesque – my limbs twisted lunar beams. I rise to your motion //
Chest cracks heaves when you retreat from me. I weep winds / pull you back inside / feel
my order of things decompose in these miniature deaths you petal.
Michal ‘MJ’ Jones is a poet and parent in Oakland, California. Their work is featured or forthcoming at Anomaly, Kissing Dynamite, and Borderlands Texas Poetry Review. They are an assistant poetry editor at Foglifter Press, and have fellowships from the Hurston/Wright Foundation, VONA/Voices, and Kearny Street Workshop. They are an MFA graduate fellow at Mills College.