Aubade, Mouth Closed

for Neal

The stomach of this place doesn’t growl
like the old one’s did.

In my dream, it is battened, tendered
for winter, but the red-breasted ones still bicker

in the oddly exposed hip valley cripple jacks.
When I wake, I tell him about

the jacks and trusses,
I tell him I’ve converted

my inescapable Jesus into the lightness
of improbable robins, and I tell him

how the payday loans offices used to suck
air, but closed their mouths to sucker punch.

I tell him it’s good to wake up
to a morning breathing calmly through its nose,

good to wake up to the feel of him.
Nothing breaks our skin.

---

Asymptote

A young woman I know writes about the distant
men who want to touch her.
The asymptotic, she says, is a good way to describe

one’s relationship to the divine.
I think maybe I really touched God once, a place
on his thigh where the hair grew backward, like a misgiving,

a fine cowlick l tongued about-face. But maybe
that too was only asymptote.
I am a line that straightened. He drew his knees up,

curved down holy to zero.

---

Laura Page is a poet and artist from the Pacific Northwest. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rust + Moth, Crab Creek Review, The Rumpus,  Tinderbox Poetry Journal, The Fanzine, Cellar Door, and The Indianapolis Review, among others. Her chapbook, epithalamium, was selected the winner of Sundress Publications’ 2017 chapbook contest by Darren C. Demaree. Laura is editor-in-chief of Virga Magazine.